A beautifully illustrated guide to more than 75 of the world's most celebrated, rare, and seminal books and handwritten manuscripts ever produced, with discussions of their purpose, features, and creators. From ancient masterpieces such as The Art of War, written on the leaves of bamboo, to the stunningly illustrated Birds of America, to Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, Remarkable Books delves into the stories behind the most incredible tomes ever produced, offering an insight into their wider social and cultural context, and is chronologically ordered to demonstrate the synergies between the growth in human knowledge and the bookmaking process. Alongside breathtaking images of the books and manuscripts themselves, close-up views draw out interesting features, which are discussed in greater detail, while biographies tell the lives of the people who produced them. This coffee table–worthy book is wrapped in a textured jacket with gold foil, making it a great gift for those with an interest in literature and art and design.

Traces the invention of the idea of a white race, showing how the origins of the American identity in the 18th century were tied to the elevation of white skin as the embodiment of beauty, power and intelligence and how even intellectuals insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American. Reprint. A best-selling book and BOMC2 selection. 13,000 first printing.

A collective history of feral children who were brought up in the wilderness, raised by animals, or locked up in solitary confinement examines the stories of Peter the Wild Boy, Victor of Aveyron, and a boy raised by monkeys in Uganda.

Howard Zinn was perhaps the best-known and most widely celebrated popular interpreter of American history in the twentieth century, renowned as a bestselling author, a political activist, a lecturer, and one of America's most recognizable and admired progressive voices. His rich, complicated, and fascinating life placed Zinn at the heart of the signal events of modern American history?from the battlefields of World War II to the McCarthy era, the civil rights and the antiwar movements, and beyond. A bombardier who later renounced war, a son of working-class parents who earned a doctorate at Columbia, a white professor who taught at the historically black Spelman College in Atlanta, a committed scholar who will be forever remembered as a devoted ?people's historian

An expert analyzes the major debates between historians and social scientists on the nature and development of ethnic communities, nations, and nationalism.

The award-winning author of Bloodlands presents a history of the Holocaust that offers insights into Hitler's genocidal views and the partisan groups who supported Jewish targets, arguing that wrong conclusions about the Holocaust are compromising the world's future.

"Splendid: the global history of capitalism in all its creative—and destructive—glory.”—The New York Times Book Review

On a hot summer day in 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry to the most famous defeat in U.S. military history. Outnumbered and exhausted, the Seventh Cavalry lost more than half of its 400 men, and every soldier under Custer’s direct command was killed. It’s easy to understand why this tremendous defeat shocked the American public at the time. But with Custerology, Michael A. Elliott tackles the far more complicated question of why the battle still haunts the American imagination today. Weaving vivid historical accounts of Custer at Little Bighorn with contemporary commemorations that range from battle reenactments to the unfinished Crazy Horse memorial, Elliott reveals a Custer and a West whose legacies are still vigorously contested. He takes readers to each of the important places of Custer’s life, from his Civil War home in Michigan to the site of his famous demise, and introduces us to Native American activists, Park Service rangers, and devoted history buffs along the way. Elliott shows how Custer and the Indian Wars continue to be both a powerful symbol of America’s bloody past and a crucial key to understanding the nation’s multicultural present. “[Elliott] is an approachable guide as he takes readers to battlefields where Custer fought American Indians . . . to the Michigan town of Monroe that Custer called home after he moved there at age 10 . . . to the Black Hills of South Dakota where Custer led an expedition that gave birth to a gold rush."—Steve Weinberg, Atlanta Journal-Constitution “By ‘Custerology,’ Elliott means the historical interpretation and commemoration of Custer and the Indian Wars in which he fought not only by those who honor Custer but by those who celebrate the Native American resistance that defeated him. The purpose of this book is to show how Custer and the Little Bighorn can be and have been commemorated for such contradictory purposes.”—Library Journal “Michael Elliott’s Custerology is vivid, trenchant, engrossing, and important. The American soldier George Armstrong Custer has been the subject of very nearly incessant debate for almost a century and a half, and the debate is multicultural, multinational, and multimedia. Mr. Elliott's book provides by far the best overview, and no one interested in the long-haired soldier whom the Indians called Son of the Morning Star can afford to miss it.”—Larry McMurtry

In this highly provocative text, now considered by many a classic, Ian Buruma examines and compares how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their violent pasts, investigating the painful realities of living with guilt—and with its denial. The Wages of Guilt follows Buruma’s encounters, as he travels through both countries, with people whose honesty in confronting their past is strikingly brave, and with others who astonish by their ingenuous evasions of responsibility. In Auschwitz, Berlin, Hiroshima, and Tokyo, Buruma explores the contradictory attitudes of scholars, politicians, and survivors toward World War II and visits the contrasting monuments that commemorate the atrocities of this conflict. These opposing voices reveal how an obsession with the past, especially distorted versions of it, continually raises questions about who should indeed pay the wages of guilt.