History

Tony Horwitz grew up in northern Virginia, close enough to Antietam and Bull Run to absorb the Civil War through his pores. As a kid, he staged battles with plastic soldiers on his bedroom floor and devoured histories of the conflict. When he returned to the American South in the mid-1990s as a Pulitzer Prize-winning…

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder landed in bookstores in November 2017 and promptly won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The following spring it took the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Those awards are not decoration; they tell you what kind of book this is. Not a fan appreciation, not a gentle…

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam gave way after days of heavy rain, releasing twenty million tons of water in a single catastrophic surge down the Little Conemaugh River valley toward Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The wall of water, somewhere between forty and seventy-five feet high at its peak and moving at roughly forty miles…

Stephen Ambrose did not set out to write Band of Brothers. He was gathering oral histories for the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans in the late 1980s when he stumbled onto a reunion of Easy Company veterans, the men of E Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. What he heard over the…

In 1925, British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett walked into the Amazon rainforest with his son Jack and his son’s friend Raleigh Rimell and never came back. He had told almost no one his route. He left behind a wife who would spend the next three decades refusing to believe he was dead, a son who…