Historical Biographies

"Firsthand account of a Holocaust survivor who knew Anne Frank."--Kirkusreviews.com. In 1933, Hannah Pick-Goslar and her family fled Nazi Germany to live in Amsterdam, where she struck up a close friendship with her next-door neighbor, an outspoken and fun-loving young girl named Anne Frank. For several years, the inseparable pair enjoyed a carefree childhood of games, sleepovers, and treats with the other children in their neighborhood of Rivierenbuurt....

"For decades now, America's national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it. Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for...

"Sarah and Angelina Grimke -- the Grimke sisters -- are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents...

"The true story of socialite spy Marguerite Harrison, who slipped behind enemy lines in Russia and Germany in the fraught period between the world wars Foreign correspondent. Author. Filmmaker. Spy. Marguerite Harrison was born into Gilded Age American privilege and launched a successful career as a culture writer for the Baltimore Sun as a young widow. But when America entered World War I, Harrison secretly applied for a position in intelligence....

A NPR Best Book of the Year

The number one New York Times bestselling authors of Vanderbilt return with another riveting history of a legendary American family, the Astors, and how they built and lavished their fortune.

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

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"In 1955, Emmett Till was lynched when he was 14 years old. That remains an undisputed fact of the case that ignited a flame within the civil rights movement that has yet to be extinguished. Yet the rest of the details surrounding the case remain distorted by time and too many tellings. What does justice mean in the resolution of a 66 year-old cold case? In A Few Days Full of Trouble, this question drives a new telling of the story of Emmett Till,...

"Like spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen before her, Ana Montes blindsided her colleagues with brazen acts of treason. For nearly 17 years, Montes succeeded in two high-stress jobs. By day, she was one of the government's top Cuba experts, a buttoned-down GS-14 with shockingly easy access to classified documents. By night, she was on the clock for Fidel Castro, listening to coded messages over shortwave radio, passing US secrets to handlers in...

"The ten Booms, who had recently celebrated the one-hundred-year anniversary of their Haarlem watch shop, lived a quiet life. That change in 1940 when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands and Jewish citizens began to disappear. Corrie and her family, devout Christians, joined the Dutch Resistance and built a secret room in their house to hide Jews and refugees. The Gestapo applied unrelenting pressure on Haarlem, continually raiding homes to snatch...

"This portrait of the first acting woman president, written by a leading historian on women's suffrage and power, tracks the ascent of Edith Boling Galt Wilson, one of American history's most influential and complicated women"--