When Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, a bill that allowed slavery to extend into the western territories by popular sovereignty, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts seethed in outrage, fearful that Kansas would enter... Read More

Thurgood Marshall is well-known for his successful work as an NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) lawyer who won landmark court rulings such as the often celebrated, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka,... Read More

Celebrated American poet W.S. Merwin is notable not only for his accomplishments and prodigious output (publishing twenty-some poetry collections, twenty-some translations, and several books of prose since 1952), but for the shifts in... Read More

No two men captured the zeitgeist of Gilded Age America more than Mark Twain, the cultural icon, and Theodore Roosevelt, the political one, claims the author in this dual biography and narrative history of 1890-1910. Although this was... Read More

Howard Bloom delves into the origins of the universe, the history of science and ideas, and the workings of creative consciousness with the depth and detail of a scholar, and he advances his thesis with the wiles and persistence of a... Read More

“You write in your time. You are of that time,” said Tess Gallagher in a 1999 interview. She was speaking of her 1976 award-winning Instructions to the Double, often lauded as showcasing a woman’s voice published when women were... Read More

From the Nobel-winning pen of the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer, dramatist, and historian, come eight short stories newly translated into English, which portray social, political, and military conditions during the height... Read More

At the end of August 2011, Tropical Storm Irene left nearly 700,000 Massachusetts residents without power. Trees were downed. Subways sat idle. And the flooding of low-lying areas of the state meant a scattering of localized highway... Read More