History

Summary For centuries, Genghis Khan has been the shorthand for conquest and destruction: the warlord who devastated Central Asia, killed millions, and left nothing behind but rubble and terror. Jack Weatherford spent years living among the Mongolian nomads and studying the recently declassified Mongolian national epic, the Secret History of the Mongols, and arrived at…

Summary For forty years in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Comanche Indians of the southern plains were the most powerful military force in North America. They stopped Spanish expansion cold, devastated Apache and Navajo populations, and held the Texas frontier at bay long after the United States Army had defeated every other major…

Summary In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the least credentialed man seeking the Republican presidential nomination. William H. Seward was the party’s intellectual leader and presumptive nominee. Salmon P. Chase had been a senator and governor of Ohio. Edward Bates was a former congressman and respected elder statesman. All three considered Lincoln a provincial lawyer whose…

In the late summer of 1937, a sharecropper’s wife named Ida Mae Brandon Gladney packed up her family’s belongings in rural Mississippi and boarded a northbound train. She had no job waiting in Chicago, no savings worth mentioning, and no plan beyond getting out. What she was running from was the rigid, violent architecture of…