Philip II ruled France with an iron fist for over 40 years, expanding its borders and increasing its power. For his entire reign his counterpart on the English throne was a member of the Plantagenet dynasty, and Philip took on them all: Henry II, Richard the Lionheart, John and Henry III. And yet we know so little about medieval England’s greatest enemy.

The most highly decorated German regimental commander of World War II, Hyazinth Graf Strachwitz first won the Iron Cross in the Great War. He was serving with the 1st Panzer Division when the Polish campaign inaugurated World War II. Strachwitz's exploits as commander of a panzer battalion during the French campaign earned him further decorations before he transferred to the newly formed 16th Panzer Division. There, he participated in the invasion of Yugoslavia and then Operation Barbarossa, where he earned the Knight's Cross.

During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology.

Tim Queeney is a sailor who knows more about rope and its importance to humankind than most. In Rope, Queeney takes listeners on a ride through the history of rope and the way it weaves itself through the story of civilization. From Magellan's world-circling ships, to the fifteenth-century fleet of Admiral Zheng He, to Polynesian multihulls with crab claw sails, he shows how without rope, none of their adventurous voyages and discoveries would have been possible.

Founded on Christmas Day 1119 in Jerusalem, the Knights Templar was a religious order dedicated to defending the Holy Land and its Christian pilgrims in the decades after the First Crusade. Legendary for their bravery and dedication, the Templars became one of the wealthiest and most powerful bodies of the medieval world—and the chief defenders of Christian society against growing Muslim forces.

Prize-winning historian Helen Castor delivers a compelling, eye-opening examination of women and power in England, witnessed through the lives of six women who exercised power against all odds—and one who never got the chance.

For almost five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, standing as the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. With the risk of nuclear annihilation too high for physical combat, conflict was reserved for the psychological sphere. No one understood this battle of hearts, minds, and intellects more clearly than Bucharest-born George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA books program.” This initiative aimed to win the Cold War with literature.

The only Latin art of war to survive, Vegetius’ Epitome was for long a part of the medieval prince’s military education. The core of his proposals, the maintenance of a professional standing army, was revolutionary for medieval Europe, while his theory of deterrence through strength remains the foundation of modern Western defence policy.

In 1878, Wyatt Earp, town marshall of Dodge City, was attempting to arrest some drunken, armed men who’d cornered him in a saloon. John Henry “Doc” Holliday, who'd been gambling nearby, stepped in with a revolver and quieted the drunks, allowing Earp to make his arrests. This was the start to the most legendary friendship and partnership of the American West. Through action-packed adventures, Gardner shows us how, over the years, Holliday became like a brother to Wyatt, riding from town to town, throughout the west.

On February 3, 1889, just two days shy of her forty-first birthday, Myra Maybelle Shirley—better known at that point by her outlaw sobriquet “Belle Starr”—was blown from her horse saddle and killed by a pair of shotgun blasts, delivered by an unseen assailant, only a few miles away from her home in the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. Thus ended the life of one of the most colorful, authentic, and dangerous women in the history of the American West.

An in-depth, authoritative account of the fall of 1914 on the Western Front and the First Battle of Ypres, a true turning point in World War I and in modern warfare—by the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

The Mission has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

The Breath of the Gods is an urgently-needed portrait across time of that unseen force—unseen but not unfelt—that respects no national borders and no vessel or structure in its path. Wind, the movement of the air, is seen by so many as a heavenly creation and generally a thing of essential goodness. But when it flexes its invisible muscles, all should take care and be very afraid.

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt, reeling city back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets—and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness.

Stepping back to look at our precariously interdependent global society of today—with the threat of nuclear war ever present, the world getting hotter and hotter, and the rapid creation of dangerous algorithms—one couldn’t be blamed for asking: Will we make it? Addressing this question with the seriousness it demands, Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp conducts a historical autopsy that stretches over 300,000 years, from our beginnings as a species to early attempts at cities to Egypt, Rome, and on into our cloudy future.