British journalist and renowned games expert Tristan Donovan opens the box on the incredible and often surprising history and psychology of board games. He traces the evolution of the game across cultures, time periods, and continents, from the paranoid Chicago toy genius behind classics like Operation and Mouse Trap, to the role of Monopoly in helping prisoners of war escape the Nazis, and even the scientific use of board games today to teach artificial...

Could a few fleas really change the world? In the early 1300s, the world was on the brink of change. New trade routes in Europe and Asia brought people in contact with different cultures and ideas, while war and rebellions threatened to disrupt the lives of millions. Most people lived in crowded cities or as serfs tied to the lands of their overlords. Conditions were filthy, as most people drank water from the same sources they used for washing and...

“Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s Alaska is beautiful and wholly unfamiliar…. A thrilling, arresting debut.” —Gayle Forman, New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay and I Was Here

“[A] singular debut. . . .  [Hitchcock] weav[es] the alternating voices of four young people into a seamless and continually surprising story of risk, love, redemption, catastrophe, and

...

Traces the rise and fall of alcoholic beverages and the temperance movement in the United States, Prohibition as a social experiment and its effects, both positive and negative, and Repeal.

"The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. Racist ideas are woven into the fabric of this country, and the first step to building an antiracist America is acknowledging America's racist past and present. This book takes you on that journey, showing how racist ideas started and were spread, and how they can be discredited" --Dust jacket flap.

Based on the life of Jack Gruener, this book relates his story of survival from the Nazi occupation of Krakow, when he was eleven, through a succession of concentration camps, to the final liberation of Dachau.

This is the little-known story of how a newly independent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America's third president decided to stand up to intimidation. When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa's Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors...

"Grace Lafferty, an eighteen-year-old wing-walker, thrills crowds with barrel rolls and loop-the-loops in hopes of making enough money to get to the 1922 World Aviation Expo" --

"A recounting of protests throughout American history that have shaped our nation"--

"A Shot in the Arm!, book 3 in the Big Ideas that Changed the World series, is the history of vaccinations and the struggle to protect people from infectious disease. Beginning with smallpox-perhaps humankind's greatest affliction to date-and concluding with an overview of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown traces the evolution of vaccines and examines deadly diseases such as measles, polio, anthrax, rabies, cholera, and influenza. The book is narrated...