In "The Merchant of Syria", Diana Darke uses the true story of Abu Chaker, a cloth merchant who began his career in Syria before expanding into Lebanon and later the United Kingdom, as an entry point to discuss Syria and how it developed... Read More

Mark Twain famously spent his later years writing his autobiography, which per his instructions was published a full century after his death, but he always spun stories about his life with varying degrees of accuracy. In the lengthy and... Read More

On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers and delivered a powerful address that proved to be his last. In the excellent Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last 31 Hours,... Read More

Edna Lewis earned a reputation as a groundbreaking chef, both for excelling as an African American woman in the New York restaurant scene and for her work popularizing Southern cooking through cookbooks like The Taste of Country Cooking.... Read More

Agnes Martin got a late start in her art career, struggled with relationships at a time when she couldn’t live openly, dealt with mental illness, and still became an important figure in the art world where her work was a bridge between... Read More

Within the Ottoman Empire during World War I, Sarah Aaronsohn, her siblings, and their friends formed a Jewish spy ring—Nili—that collected information for the United Kingdom. Spurred into action after she personally witnessed... Read More

Jan Yoors achieved international fame as a tapestry artist in the bohemian New York scene of the 1960s, but that barely qualifies among the most interesting parts of his life. In "Hidden Tapestry", Debra Dean dives into the artist’s... Read More

Johnson has created an important work of sports—and American—history. In the 1930s, UCLA added five prominent black athletes to its football team, and they helped to turn the Bruins into a powerhouse. In "The Black Bruins", James W.... Read More