Good Writing. Serious e-Reading.

Henry Ford tells how, through innovative techniques, he mass produced the Model T for the common man.

In his famous Autobiography, Franklin displays the iconic American virtues of thrift, ambition, hard work, self-improvement, and common sense. In these selections he reflects upon his rise and the self-taught lessons that brought his success.

The most mysterious and riveting crime of the 20th century was the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the infant son of Charles A. Lindbergh, the American aviator hero. The case involved a cast of characters to delight any author of detective novels. In the end, as a captivated nation followed the details, a sensational trial and the conviction of a single defendant settled the affair—but to almost no one’s satisfaction. Lloyd Gardner tells the story of the Lindbergh kidnapping and why it remains the Crime of the Century, as much a mystery as it ever was.

Ulysses S. Grant takes the reader onto the battlefield and behind the lines in his account of the final actions of the Civil War.  

In the debate over the proposed American Constitution, the Federalist papers stood out as a brilliant analysis of the fundamental principles of the new government. They remain a major work in the history of political philosophy and the theory of representative government. 

Lee’s surrender at Appomattox signaled an end to the Civil War and brought joy and relief to the North and its soldiers, and to the slaves in Confederate states. But the sudden shock of Lincoln’s assassination just five days later, on Good Friday, sullied the victory. As gloom and anger descended across the North, how was Lincoln’s death viewed in the war-ravaged South? Southerners might have been expected to cheer the death of their archenemy, but their reaction was more complex and far from predictable, as David Hardin shows.

In 1896 Theodor Herzl proposed an answer to the so-called Jewish Question for the ghettoized Jews of Europe. He argued that anti-Semitism could be curbed if Jews might found an independent state of their own in the twentieth century, and he laid out the principles and programs for its success.

 Hexter's subject—the nature of the historical enterprise—raises the perennially vexing question of  past- and present-mindedness in the writing of  history.  It addresses that issue in a notably down-to-earth, commonsensible, personal manner.