U.S. History

The Abandonment of the Jews received enormous critical and commercial attention when it was first released in 1984, appearing on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks as well as on its Best Books of the Year list. A selection of the History Book Club and the Jewish Book Club, it has sold over 100,000 copies in its various editions.

In this landmark work, David S. Wyman argues that a substantial commitment to rescue European Jews on the part of the United States almost certainly could have saved several hundred thousand of the Nazis’ victims. Widely considered to be the definitive book on the subject, The Abandonment of the Jews won the National Jewish Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Present Tense Literary Award, the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This edition includes a new preface by the author discussing the ongoing controversy aroused by the book since its original publication.

In the shadow of America’s recent military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, distinguished historians of empires and noted international relations specialists consider the dirty word “empire” in the face of contemporary political reality. Is “empire” a useful way to talk about America’s economic, cultural, political, and military power?

This final volume in the Social Science Research Council “After September 11” series examines what the experience of past empires tells us about the nature and consequences of global power. How do the goals and circumstances of the United States today compare to classical imperialist projects of rule over others, whether for economic exploitation or in pursuit of a “civilizing mission”?

Reviewing the much contested history of domination by Western colonizing powers, Lessons of Empire asks what lessons the history of these empires can teach us about the world today.

The recent discovery of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan reminded Americans that slavery in the United States was not merely a phenomenon of the antebellum South. In fact, for most of its history, New York was a slave city.

Edited by Ira Berlin, the Bancroft Prize–winning author of Many Thousands Gone, and Leslie Harris, Slavery in New York brings together twelve new contributions by leading historians of slavery and African American life in New York. Published to accompany a major exhibit at the New York Historical Society, the book demonstrates how slavery shaped the day-to-day experience of New Yorkers, black and white, and how, as a way of doing business, it propelled New York to become the commercial and financial power it is today.

Powerfully illustrated with images from the New York Historical Society exhibit, Slavery and the Making of New York will be the definitive account of New York’s slave past.

This latest addition to The New Press’s People’s History series offers an incisive account of the war America lost, from the perspective of those who opposed it on both sides of the battlefront as well as on the homefront.

The protagonists in Neale’s history of the “American War” (as the Vietnamese refer to it) are common people struggling to shape the outcome of events unfolding on an international stage—American foot soldiers who increasingly opposed American military policy on the ground in Vietnam, local Vietnamese activists and guerrillas fighting to build a just society, and the American civilians who mobilized to bring the war to a halt.

His narrative includes vivid, first-person commentary from the ordinary men and women whose collective actions resulted in the defeat of the world’s most powerful military machine.