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A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire
Amy Butler Greenfield · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorUncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
Mark Pendergrast · 452 pages
From the Publisher: Uncommon Grounds is the definitive history of coffee-from its discovery on an Ethiopian mountainside to the age of Starbucks and the coffee crisis of the twenty-first century. A sweeping epic, Uncommon Grounds uses coffee production, trade, and consumption as a window through which to view broad historical themes: the clash and blending of cultures, slavery, the rise of brand m
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
Mark Kurlansky · 304 pages
Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been spurred by it, national diets have been founded on it, economies and livelihoods have depended on it, the settlement of North America was based on it. To those it has sustained, it is a treasure more precious than gold. It is the codfish, whose story – concisely and eloquently told by Mark Kurlansky – casts a fascinating and revealing fight on
Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History
Giles Milton · 400 pages
American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900
H.W. Brands · 686 pages
The years between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century saw the wholesale transformation of America from a land of small farmers and small businessmen into an industrial giant. Driven by unfathomably wealthy and powerful businessmen like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, armies of workers, both male and female, were harnessed to a new vision of massive industry.
DETROIT: A Biography
Scott Martelle · 288 pages
"Detroit: A Biography takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America's great cities, and one of the nation's greatest urban failures. It tells how the city grew to become the heart of American industry and how its utter collapse--from 1.8 million residents in 1950 to 714,000 only six decades later--resulted from a confluence of public policies, private industry decisions, and de
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Charles Mackay · 410 pages
The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
Adam Tooze · 672 pages
"A century after the outbreak of the First World War, a powerful explanation of why the war's legacy continues to shape our world. The war would make a celebrity out of Woodrow Wilson and would ratify the emergence of the US as the dominant force in the world economy"--
A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn · 702 pages
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, *A People's History of the United States* is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.
The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War
William Manchester · 1,022 pages
The Rothschilds
Virginia Cowles · 304 pages
A comprehensive history of three generations of the Rothschilds, and their influence across two generations of European history.
Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America
Eric Jay Dolin · 442 pages
In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was "get the furs while they last." Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
William Cronon · 530 pages
Argues that the American frontier and city developed together by focusing on Chicago and tracing its roots from Native American habitation to its transformation by white settlement and development.
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
Greg Grandin · 432 pages
The stunning, never-before-told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon, "Fordlandia" depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch.
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Silvia Federici · 285 pages
The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865
Mark Peterson · 784 pages
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
Studs Terkel · 462 pages
Des centaines d'entretiens font revivre les souvenirs de ceux qui ont traversé la grande dépression de 1929 aux États-Unis, du krach aux luttes syndicales, de la difficulté de la vie paysanne aux conséquences du New Deal.
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
Charles C. Mann · 631 pages
From the author of 1491 -- the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas -- a deeply engaging new history of the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher C
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-69
Stephen E. Ambrose · 432 pages
"Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad - the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dang
Civilization: The West and the Rest
Niall Ferguson · 402 pages
What was it about the civilization of Western Europe that allowed it to trump the outwardly superior empires of the Orient? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, was that the West developed six "killer applications"?that the Rest lacked: competition, science, democracy, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. The key question today is whether or not the West has lost its monopoly on these six thing
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Peter Frankopan · 382 pages
"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations b
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991
Eric Hobsbawm · 627 pages
In this masterful and highly accessible study of our times, one of the world's leading historians sheds exciting new light on our understanding of the twentieth century, with incisive assessments of events that have marked this turbulent period. Eric Hobsbawm, whose own life spans this century, deftly examines from both personal and scholarly perspectives such events as the great economic depre
The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope
Jonathan Alter · 432 pages
This is the story of a political miracle--the perfect match of man and moment. FDR took office in 1933 as America touched bottom. Banks were closing, millions of people lost everything--the Great Depression had caused a national breakdown. Journalist Alter brings us closer than ever before to the Roosevelt magic. Facing the gravest crisis since the Civil War, instead of circumventing Congress and
The Making of the English Working Class
E.P. Thompson · 848 pages
Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom historians had treated as anonymous masses.