The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of triumph. As part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage, they are as scientifically supported an enterprise as has ever set forth. As they enter a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, though, they are stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, with diminishing rations,...

"In The Ledger and the Chain, prize-winning historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation. Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin,...

The line between good and evil in the Wild West was often blurred, and perhaps no Hollywood Western captured the realities of the dangerous frontier better than True Grit.

"This is the story of the Memphis Daily Appeal's great Civil War run before the armies of Yankee generals Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and James Wilson. It is also a biography of the newspaper's owner John Reid McClanahan and staff members America Carolina Dill and Benjamin Franklin Dill, the three who made the paper's survival and success possible. Gypsying around four towns in three Deep South states-Grenada and Jackson, Mississippi, Atlanta,...