American Histories

Brad Meltzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist, The Inner Circle, and many other bestselling thrillers, as well as the "Ordinary People Change the World" series. He is also the host of the History Channel TV shows Brad Meltzer’s Decoded and Brad Meltzer’s Lost History, which he used to help find the missing 9/11 flag that the firefighters raised at Ground Zero. His latest book, The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington (Flatiron Books) tells a remarkable and previously untold piece of American history that not only reveals George Washington’s character, but also illuminates the origins of America’s counterintelligence movement that led to the modern day CIA. This is the story of the secret plot and how it was revealed. It is a story of leaders, liars, counterfeiters, and jailhouse confessors. It also shows just how hard the battle was for George Washington and how close America was to losing the Revolutionary War. In this historical page-turner, New York Times bestselling author Brad Meltzer teams up with American history writer and documentary television producer, Josh Mensch to unravel the shocking true story behind what has previously been a footnote in the pages of history. Drawing on extensive research, Meltzer and Mensch capture in riveting detail how George Washington not only defeated the most powerful military force in the world, but also uncovered the secret plot against him in the tumultuous days leading up to July 4, 1776.

Dr. Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, a CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has received seven honorary doctorates in American Studies. He works in many capacities in the world of public history, including for boards, museums, colleges and historical societies. Six of his books were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” and seven became New York Times bestsellers. He received a Grammy Award in 2017 as co-producer of Presidential Suite: Eight Variations on Freedom. His latest book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race (Harper) takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon. In this engrossing, fast-paced epic, Douglas Brinkley returns to the 1960s to recreate one of the most exciting and ambitious achievements in the history of humankind. American Moonshot brings together the extraordinary political, cultural, and scientific factors that fueled the birth and development of NASA and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects, which shot the United States to victory in the space race against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. The Washington Post writes, “Compelling and comprehensive…., American Moonshot transcends mere narrative to help the rest of us understand how America geared up for the astonishing feat of landing a man on the moon.”

Les Standiford is the author of the bestselling Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean, Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles, other works of fiction and nonfiction. It’s hard to see Palm Beach today and visualize the dense tangle of Palmetto brush and mangroves that it was when entrepreneur and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler first arrived there in April 1893. Within less than a year he had built the Royal Poinciana Hotel, and two years later what was to become the legendary Breakers― instantly establishing the island as the preferred destination for those who could afford it. Over the next 125 years, Palm Beach became synonymous with exclusivity. In Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America’s Xanadu (Atlantic Monthly Press), Standiford tells the history of this landscape and  the lives of its famous (and infamous) protagonists – from Flagler and Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband E. F. Hutton (for whom Mar-a-Lago was built) to Donald J. Trump. In its review of Standiford’s Water to the Angels, The New York Times Book Review noted the author’s talent to capture certain themes and characters and it applies to Palm Beach ...: “Hubris and gilded dreams are good subjects for Standiford, who has previously written about Henry Frick and Andrew Carnegie, among others; he artfully captures small moments while maintaining the historian’s broader view. “