A riveting account of the Wars of the Roses, from the beloved and bestselling historian Alison Weir The war between the houses of Lancaster and York was characterised by treachery, deceit and bloody battles. Alison Weir's lucid and gripping account focuses on the human side of history. At the centre of the book stands Henry VI, the pious king whose...

An Audiobook Original There is no dearth of writings about the founding of America, but in this under-reported and under-taught story of the American Revolution, light is shed on the role Benjamin Franklin played in bringing the northern and southern colonies together against corrupt British rule. Along with an "Inner Circle" of British Abolitioni...

"This true-crime gem—Green's first full-length work, sensitively and incisively narrated by Pittu—is an illuminating and deeply humanizing testament to victims overlooked by the media and forgotten in cultural memory...An insightful and essential conversation among author, narrator, and producer concludes this highly recommended recordi...

"The Negro worked as farm hand and peasant proprietor, as laborer, artisan, and inventor and as servant in the house, and without him, America as we know it, would have been impossible."—W. E. B. Du Bois Although the Civil War marked an end to slavery in the United States, it would take another fifty years to establish the country's civil ri...

Brought to you by Penguin. Four Hundred Souls is an epoch-defining history of African America, the first to appear in a generation, told by ninety leading Black voices.The story begins with the arrival of twenty Ndongo people on the shores of the first British colony in mainland America in 1619, the year before the arrival of the Mayflower. In eigh...

James Baldwin was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western society, most notably in regard to the mid-twentieth-century United States.This is a collection of his speeches and lectures.

In this Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I. This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of kings and kaisers and czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed—and ho...

"A great read."—Whoopi Goldberg, The ViewPrentice Onayemi narrates the story of how the clash between the civil rights firebrand and the father of modern conservatism continues to illuminate America's racial divideThis audiobook includes as a bonus feature the original audio recording of the Cambridge Union debateOn February 18, 1965, an over...

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives. Their erasure from trans history masks the ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both...

Joseph Bruchac focuses on key events from Crazy Horse's childhood in this drastic tale of the legendary Lakota warrior. When Curly (his boyhood name) witnesses a fierce battle between white settlers and the Lakota Indians, he flees to the hills on a vision quest. An author's note following the story completes this fascination summary of the life an...

This is the story of Dido Belle, whose adoption by an aristocratic family challenged the conventions of 18th century England Dido Belle was the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy captain and a slave woman, adopted by the Earl of Mansfield. As Lord Chief Justice of England he would preside over the drowning of 142 slaves by a shipping...

This classic memoir of the First World War is now a major motion picture starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington. In 1914 Vera Brittain was 20, and as war was declared she was preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life - and the lives of her whole generation - had changed in a way that would have been unimaginable in the tranquil p...

Though he couldn't have known it, the various scholars and scientists that Napoleon Bonaparte brought to Egypt during his military campaigning there kicked off modern Egyptology, and a general fascination across the West. Until about 200 years ago, the writing of the ancient Egyptians was an enigma to the world, but that changed when an ancient Egy...

The Peaky Blinders as we know them, thanks to the hit TV series, are infused with drama and dread. Fashionably dressed, the charismatic but deeply flawed Shelby family have become cult anti-heroes.Well-known social historian, broadcaster and author, Carl Chinn, revealed the true story of the notorious gang in his bestselling Peaky Blinders: Th...

A unique account of the millions of colonial troops who fought in the First World War. Every major battle fought on the Western Front, from the First Battle of Ypres to the Second Battle of the Marne, was fought by Allied armies that were multi-racial and multi-ethnic. Yet from the moment the guns fell silent the role of non-white soldiers was forg...

Celebrity, with its neon glow and selfie pout, strikes us as hypermodern. But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating and outraging us for much longer than we might realise. Whether it was the scandalous Lord Byron, whose poetry sent female fans into an erotic frenzy; or the cheetah-owning, coffin-sleeping, one-legged French actres...

The Plantagenet queens of England played a role in some of the most dramatic events in our history. Crusading queens, queens in rebellion against their king, queen seductresses, learned queens, queens in battle, queens who enlivened England with the romantic culture of southern Europe – these determined women often broke through medieval cons...

It should have been a beautiful moment between a man and his dog. Philip Womack made a quip about Cerberus, the three-headed hell-hound, but for Una, the beloved lurcher, it was all Greek. Then she ran off after a squirrel. And Womack was left to wonder what else she didn't know about the great civilisations of the past. The Greeks and the Romans l...

In a brilliantly entertaining, living history of the modern United Kingdom, Andrew Marr traces how radically we have transformed through the course of Queen Elizabeth II's reign. When the Queen stepped into her crown in 1953 at the age of twenty-five, a British expedition was summiting Mount Everest for the first time. Ian Fleming was publishing th...

This is the astonishing story of persistence, comradeship and fighting spirit showed by everyday people in bringing the Nazis down. Patricia and Jean Owtram are possibly the only living sisters to have signed the wartime Official Secrets Act. Raised in a Lancashire country house in the 1920s, the family takes in two Austrian Jewish refugees, and th...

Spitfire Stories, published in association with Imperial War Museums, is a fascinating anthology of first-hand stories from Spitfire heroes and heroines of the Second World War.The Spitfire is the world's most iconic aeroplane. Coming into its own during the Battle of Britain, it became famous during the Second World War as the only plane that coul...