"On January 24, 1791, President George Washington chose the site for the young nation's capital: ten miles square, it stretched from the highest point of navigation on the Potomac River, and encompassed the ports of Georgetown and Alexandria. From the moment the federal government moved to the District of Columbia in December 1800, Washington has been central to American identity and life. Shaped by politics and intrigue, poverty and largess, contradictions...

Lays out a paradigm-busting new theory about the complex way innovative ideas, movements, and behaviors spread from the edges of society to impact everyone, and how to use these ideas to effect change in the world.

Western civilisation is on a path to destruction. In coming decades, economies will shrink, democracy will retreat and nations crumble. The long-term result will be grinding poverty, superstition and disease. This isn't scaremongering - it is science. In 'Biohistory: the decline and fall of the West', Dr Jim Penman, details a revolutionary new theory about why civilizations collapse. For the first time, Penman directly links human biology with the...

A panoramic history of liberal politics in America analyzes the impact of major movements throughout the past two centuries, from abolitionism and industrial-age labor disputes to the civil-rights movement and the emergence of alternative political groups.

Take an epic adventure with intimate insight into the big, bold, and tenacious country of Australia. In the vast interior, a man transforms the struggle to survive into a game of pathos and humor; on the coast, a naval cadet dreams of a place in the sophisticated navy of the world's largest island; in the tropical North, a couple preserves a storehouse of culture over 40,000 years old; along the Gold Coast, a woman competes to win against nature's...

What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture of Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally to the modern world,...

Provides a gripping exploration into the hidden history of America at war from the Revolution to the conflict in Iraq through six significant battles and reveals untold tales that span the nation's history.