History

"A bold and soaring work of history . . . whip-smart, deeply researched, and beautifully written." -Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life

"A soaring narrative."-Keith O'Brien, New York Times bestselling author of Fly Girls

The heart-pounding true story of the daring American women who piloted the most dangerous aircraft of World War II through the treacherous skies of Britain.

They were crop dusters and debutantes, college girls and performers in flying circuses-all of them trained as pilots. Because they were women, they were denied the opportunity to fly for their country when the United States entered the Second World War. But Great Britain, desperately fighting for survival, would let anyone-even Americans, even women-transport warplanes. Thus, twenty-five daring young aviators bolted for England in 1942, becoming the first American women to command military aircraft.

In a faraway land, these "spitfires" lived like women decades ahead of their time. Risking their lives in one of the deadliest jobs of the war, they ferried new, barely tested fighters and bombers to air bases and returned shot-up wrecks for repair, never knowing what might go wrong until they were high in the sky. Many ferry pilots died in crashes or made spectacular saves. It was exciting, often terrifying work. The pilots broke new ground off duty as well, shocking their hosts with thoroughly modern behavior.

With cinematic sweep, Becky Aikman follows the stories of nine of the women who served, drawing on unpublished diaries, letters, and records, along with her own interviews, to bring these forgotten heroines fully to life. Spitfires is a vivid, richly detailed account of war, ambition, and a group of remarkable women whose lives were as unconventional as their dreams.

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power, political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career's worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis--and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.

Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.

In 1951, a monumental book by a relatively unknown German-Jewish émigré addressed the terrifying new mode of political organization underlying the twin horrors of Stalinism and Nazism. Herself a refugee from Nazi persecution, Hannah Arendt sought, from her exile in New York City, to answer the unfathomable questions raised by the Soviet gulag and the Holocaust: How could there be such barbarism in the midst of civilization? How had governments exerted such absolute control over citizens, terrorizing them and enlisting them to commit atrocities on their behalf?

Arendt's historical and cultural analyses extend to a thorough examination of nineteenth-century antisemitism in Europe, including a trenchant account of the Dreyfus Affair in France and brilliant insights into imperialism, racism, and their role in totalitarianism's rise in the 1920s and 1930s. Arendt contends that totalitarianism, as a political system, is now embedded in contemporary life and is, as she would later remark, "the central event of our world."

Her clear-eyed warning that totalitarianism is not merely a historical episode but is rather a permanent feature of modernity and beyond--a danger never to be fully eradicated, and a continual temptation for anti-democratic demagogues--makes Arendt, a half-century after her death, a preeminent thinker and political philosopher for the twenty-first century.

The Library of America edition of this indispensable and influential work, based on the final version she revised in her lifetime, also restores to print Arendt's "Concluding Remarks" to the 1951 first American edition and a chapter on the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, both of which were cut from later editions. The first annotated edition of Origins, the volume contains concise and thorough glosses on Arendt's many historical and cultural references, and its Chronology provides a detailed portrait of her remarkable life.

"This is great history . . . compulsively readable . . . There is no better writer of narrative history than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson."--The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

The first twenty-one months of the American Revolution--which began at Lexington and ended at Princeton--was the story of a ragged group of militiamen and soldiers fighting to forge a new nation. By the winter of 1777, the exhausted Continental Army could claim only that it had barely escaped annihilation by the world's most formidable fighting force.

Two years into the war, George III is as determined as ever to bring his rebellious colonies to heel. But the king's task is now far more complicated: fighting a determined enemy on the other side of the Atlantic has become ruinously expensive, and spies tell him that the French and Spanish are threatening to join forces with the Americans.

Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson provides a riveting narrative covering the middle years of the Revolution. Stationed in Paris, Benjamin Franklin woos the French; in Pennsylvania, George Washington pleads with Congress to deliver the money, men, and materiel he needs to continue the fight. In New York, General William Howe, the commander of the greatest army the British have ever sent overseas, plans a new campaign against the Americans--even as he is no longer certain that he can win this searing, bloody war. The months and years that follow bring epic battles at Brandywine, Saratoga, Monmouth, and Charleston, a winter of misery at Valley Forge, and yet more appeals for sacrifice by every American committed to the struggle for freedom.

Timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the Revolution, Atkinson's brilliant account of the lethal conflict between the Americans and the British offers not only deeply researched and spectacularly dramatic history, but also a new perspective on the demands that a democracy makes on its citizens.