In this sweeping social history that covers the past seventy thousand years, Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani look at the endlessly varied role of the bed through time. This was a place for sex, death, childbirth, storytelling, and sociability as well as sleeping. But who did what with whom, why, and how could vary incredibly depending on the time and place. It is only in the modern era that the bed has transformed into a private, hidden zone, and its...

"In a world where rational, scientific explanations are more available than ever, belief in the unprovable and irrational--in fringe--is on the rise: from Atlantis to aliens, from Flat Earth to the Loch Ness monster, the list goes on. It seems the more our maps of the known world get filled in, the more we crave mysterious locations full of strange creatures. Enter Colin Dickey, Cultural Historian and Tour Guide of the Weird. With the same curiosity...

"In this ambitious, panoramic social history, Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories-Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool-about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways. She takes us from the opulent court of Louis Quatorze to the labor camps in modern-day Chinese-occupied Xinjiang. We see how textiles were once dyed from lichen, shells, bark, saffron, and beetles, displaying distinctive regional...

"Journalists Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley explore the history and future of quarantine, from the Black Death to Big Data"--

"Extraordinary. . . . It is a tribute to Starkey's narrative drive, his puckish wit, and sharp discrimination that it doesn't seem a page too long. . . . With each queen, Starkey offers a vivid character study but also has fresh discoveries that subtly alter the picture he started out with." - Sunday Times (London) The dramatic, legendary story of Henry VIII, his six wives, and the England they ruled-told by one of the world's preeminent historians...

Published one hundred years after the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot (more commonly referred today as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre), this book distinguishes the Tulsa of today from the Tulsa of a century ago. It reflects on Tulsa's historic Greenwood District, known as the Black Wall Street, from the prodigious entrepreneurial spirit that pervaded it to the carnage that characterized the 1921 massacre, to the post-massacre rebound and rebuilding that raised...