As California swelters in unprecedented heat and lack of rain, it finds itself in the middle of yet another historic drought. Mark Arax’s assessments of the state’s perennial issues with water resources in his critically acclaimed The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California are more urgent and relevant than ever. The Dreamt Land is a

Contributed by Neal Gabler, author of Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 What happened to America?  What happened to bring us to this moment of deep and perhaps unbridgeable polarization, of disorder and chaos, of skepticism about science, institutions, even the very idea of fact itself, of rising white supremacy, of

By Martin J. Sherwin The Cuban Missile Crisis ended peacefully because neither President John Kennedy nor Premier Nikita Khrushchev wanted a war. It ended peacefully because Fidel Castro frightened Khrushchev into believing that the United States was about to start a war. It ended without a war because America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai

Contributed by Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us Let me start with what my book is not about. It is not a history of war, although it contains many historical examples. Nor is it, unlike the many books that line the shelves of libraries or bookshops, devoted to a particular campaign or

Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead.    Beaten Down, Worked Up Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential

Robert K. Massie, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and biographer who is best known for chronicling the history of Russia through his insightful books on its most fascinating and consequential figures, passed away on Monday, December 2, 2019, at age 90. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Massie studied American history at Yale and European history at

UPDATE: Julia Lovell, author of Maoism: A Global History, has been declared the winner of the 2019 Cundill Prize. Alan Taylor, Chair of the Jury, praised Lovell: “Her book will dazzle readers with lucid and vivid insights into the power of a protean, and often deadly, ideology – and its enduring impact on our world

David Brion Davis, distinguished author and historian, passed away on Sunday, April 14th 2019, at the age of 92. Davis was Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Throughout his career, he wrote and edited sixteen

Penguin Random House is proud to present these new titles and perennial favorites selected for college-level History and Literature courses!      

In 2014, investigative journalist Shane Bauer took an entry-level, $9/hour job as a guard at Winn Correctional Facility, a private prison in rural Louisiana. For the next four months, he reported for work outfitted with a hidden recording device, ready to capture the reality of life in private prisons for guards and inmates alike. For

The following letter was contributed by Christian Coleman, Digital Marketing Associate at Beacon Press.  We live in a time where a president makes barefaced remarks in speeches that African Americans and Latinx people are prone to violence and corruption. His statements, obviously, pay no respect to the centuries-long history of African Americans and Latinx people organizing together

Heather Ann Thompson, an historian at the University of Michigan has won the 2017 Bancroft Prize in History for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.