History

History (from Greek ἱστορία - historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of research which uses a narrative to examine and analyse the sequence of events, and it sometimes attempts to investigate objectively the patterns of cause and effect that determine events. Historians debate the nature of history and its usefulness. This includes discu ...more

New Releases Tagged "History"

Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age

Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women

Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks

A Woman's Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering

The Dangerous Shore: How a Motley Crew of Scientists, Mobsters, Double Agents, Retirees, Volunteer Pilots (and a Boy Scout) Stopped the Invasion of America

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color—from Azure to Zinc Pink

No One’s Coming: The Rogue Heroes Our Government Turns to When There’s Nowhere Else to Turn

You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson's Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode with Her

Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe

Indigenous Citizens: Native Americans' Fight for Sovereignty, 1776-2025

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya (Unearthing the Past)

A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow

More new releases tagged "history"...

Giveaways

All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump

Anthony Scaramucci

Release date: Sep 22, 2026

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Availability: 75 copies available, 1887 people requesting

Giveaway dates: Mar 26 - Apr 22, 2026

Countries available: U.S.

A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow

Simon Morrison

Release date: Mar 31, 2026

A deeply learned yet highly readable and entertaining history of Moscow, a city defined by its survival and reinvention, and whose rich history offers A deeply learned yet highly readable and entertaining history of Moscow, a city defined by its survival and reinvention, and whose rich history offers crucial insight into contemporary global politics

The city of Moscow stands at the center of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe's landmass, 11 time zones and nearly 150 million people, some 13 million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia's heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a "big village"--the demeaning nickname the St. Peterburg nobility gave to its provincial neighbor--into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import.

That arc is the stuff of dramatic, violent, stranger-than-fiction historical narrative: the last century alone has featured invasions and costly battles, the destruction (and reconstruction) of sacred cultural and religious landmarks, and the collapse of the Soviet republic--not to mention the rise of an authoritarian leader who is a keen student of Russian history. Morrison reaches back further still, to the founding of the place we now know as Moscow as a fortress on a river nearly a millennium ago. In the centuries that followed, any number of external forces--from Tatar Mongols and Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler--set their sights on Moscow, reinforcing its self-conception as both a glittering prize and a site of perpetual defense and resurrection.

Drawing on a rich array of archival materials, from the birchbark scrawls that record the oldest layer of Russian civilization to the articles in European newspapers heralding the opening of the magnificent Bolshoi theater, Morrison brings to life the bloody power struggles, cultural marvels, excruciating famines, droughts, storms, and fires that have shaped and re-shaped the city and reinforced its essential character. Having first visited Moscow in 1990 and made some thirty trips since, he excavates the city's truths from its fictions--while celebrating both--in a style that's at once deeply learned and deeply personal.

With A Kingdom and a Village, Morrison makes a persuasive, even impassioned case that to understand Moscow is not only to unlock the spellbinding mysteries of Russia's past but also, critically, to grasp the grim logic of its present. It is a magisterial biography of a place--and an essential guide to a people and a country that, for many readers, might have remained impenetrable. ...more
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Giveaway dates: Apr 02 - Apr 22, 2026

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The Hero Next Door: Stories of Patriotism and Purpose

Martha Raddatz

Release date: May 26, 2026

We're giving away 10 advance reader copies of THE HERO NEXT DOOR by Martha Raddatz. Enter today! ...more
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Availability: 10 copies available, 1597 people requesting

Giveaway dates: Apr 10 - Apr 22, 2026

Countries available: U.S.

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Quotes Tagged “History”

“ For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness. ...more ”
― Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

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