From childhood dreams of joining the British Royal Navy to a dotage spent riding on a seesaw to improve his health, the true story of Napoleon Bonaparte is every bit as bizarre and fascinating as it is controversial. Napoleon rose up out of the chaos and horror of the French Revolution to offer a shattered nation dreams of future glory, honor ......
Is this a novel? Or a biography? Graeme Cohen is so close to his true life subject, that imagined events and conversations seem exactly real. Martin Gardiner, colonial Australia’s most published mathematician, was better at attracting supporters and women than at caring for them, or protecting himself. Cohen’s warts and all story is true to ......
Hailed as the definitive portrait of the sixteenth president, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame's impressive two-volume biography has been masterfully abridged and revised. Sixteenth president of the United States, the Great Emancipator, and a surpassingly eloquent champion of national unity, freedom, and democracy, Abraham Lincoln is arguably ......
The Story of Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie's Treatment of the Convicts as a History Tale for Today
This is the story of two Scots, Lachlan Macquarie, governor of the British colony of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and of his wife, Elizabeth Macquarie, both of whom pioneered a policy of rehabilitation and renewal as part of their treatment of the convicts.
The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law
In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving "special damage." Smith ......
A Day-By-Day Account of the First 60 Days of Abraham Lincoln's Presidency
Follow Lincoln's day-by-day path from peacemaker to war leader as the Union edges toward Civil War. The months after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, between March 4 and May 3, 1861, mark one of the most significant periods in American history. Antagonism between the North and South, which had been intensifying since Lincoln's election as ......
In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, ......
The American Civil War began with a laying down of arms by Union troops at Fort Sumter, and it ended with a series of surrenders, most famously at Appomattox Courthouse. But in the intervening four years, both Union and Confederate forces surrendered en masse on scores of other occasions. Indeed, roughly one out of every four soldiers surrendered ......
