Born at the end of the 18th century, the son of a Staten Island ferryman, Cornelius Vanderbilt world go on to become the richest man in America with a fortune built in shipping and railroads. That fortune, fought over by his heirs, helped to create an American dynasty that redefined the meaning of excess in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now , Cornelius Vanderbilt's great-great-great grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore...

"Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency" --WorldCat....

"Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis. Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part...

The best-selling author offers a new collection of satirical and humorous essays that chronicle his own life and ordinary moments that turn beautifully absurd, including how he coped with the pandemic, his thoughts on becoming an orphan in his seventh decade, and the battle-scarred America he discovered when he resumed touring.

Told through the eyes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Great Britain's King George III, Killing England chronicles the path to independence in gripping detail, taking the reader from the battlefields of America to the royal courts of Europe. What started as protest and unrest in the colonies soon escalated to a world war with devastating casualties. O'Reilly and Dugard recreate the war's landmark battles, including Bunker...

An iconoclastic look at America's past: overlooked episodes that shaped the nation's destiny and character. Spanning a period from the Spanish arrival in America to George Washington's inauguration in 1789, these narratives bring to light little-known but fascinating, myth-busting facts. Read the story of the first real Pilgrims in America, who were wine-making French Huguenots, not dour English Separatists; the coming-of-age story of Queen Isabella,...

"In Saving Freedom, Joe Scarborough recounts the historic forces that moved Truman toward his country's long twilight struggle against Soviet communism, and how this untested president acted decisively to build a lasting coalition that would influence America's foreign policy for generations to come. On March 12, 1947, Truman delivered an address before a joint session of Congress announcing a policy of containment that would soon become known as...

"The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story--of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire,...

For more than two centuries, E pluribus unum -- Out of many, one -- has been featured on America's official government seals and stamped on its currency. But how did America become "one nation, indivisible"? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? In this monumental history, Simon Winchester addresses these questions, bringing together the breathtaking achievements that helped forge and unify America...

By turns confessional, nostalgic, heartwarming and harrowing, the award-winning filmmaker and his brother, an audience-favorite actor, share their unusual family story of navigating and surviving life as sibling child actors. "With the perspective of time and success--Ron as a filmmaker, producer, and Hollywood A-lister, Clint as a busy character actor--the Howard brothers delve deep into an upbringing that seemed normal to them yet was anything...