History & Archaeology Books

Bonzer. Arvo. Tucker. Sickie. Pash. Illywhacker.There are plenty of words to choose from to tell the story of Australia from iconic Australianisms like mateship, fair dinkum, and bogan to drop bears, budgie smugglers, and bin chickens.And while you...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Embark on a captivating journey with Love & Whiskey. New York Times bestselling author Fawn Weaver unveils the hidden narrative behind one of America's most iconic whiskey brands. This book is a vibrant exploration...

Alistair Moffat tells the extraordinary story of the Highlands in the most detailed book ever written about this remarkable part of Scotland. This is the story of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland as it has never been told before. From the formation...

A beautifully illustrated book on the Kennicott Bible, a remarkable example of Medieval Jewish book art.The Kennicott Bible is among the most celebrated Hebrew Bibles that survive from the Middle Ages. Originating from La Corua in northern Spain, it...

The best-known songs in the world are violent, sexist, and religious - so why do we celebrate national anthems when we should be rewriting them?The story begins in a London theatre in 1745, where the modern idea of anthems started out as triumphant...

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, millions of lives changed in an instant.Millions of people were suddenly on the move. In this great flow of people was a reporter from the north of Scotland. Jen Stout left Moscow abruptly, ending up on a border...

Japan's Showa era began in 1926 when Emperor Hirohito took the throne and ending on his death in 1989 was the formative age of modern Japan. No doubt the most momentous, calamitous, successful and glamorous period in Japan's...

A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk.A century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing convention to the wind, they headed across...

The first book to present the amazing swords and armour belonging to the most famous Samurai in Japanese history!In Japanese Swords and Armor, Samurai sword expert Paul Martin presents scores of magnificent blades, fittings and armor from the 12th to the...

How colour is used in the most famous works of Japanese art from the 16th century to the present.From the vibrant reds of traditional kimonos to the serene blues of tarashikomi riverscapes and woodblock prints, this book shows that colour itself is a...

Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Evita and Juan Peron, Augusto Pinochet, and Pablo EscobarSoccer has been the world's most popular sport for the last century and an irresistible game for political and social leaders seeking shortcuts to the hearts of...

One of the most glamorous and successful politicians in Canadian historyIn this masterful and engaging biography, acclaimed journalist Steve Paikin brings to life John Turner (1929-2020), one of the most glamorous and successful politicians in Canadian...

Was justice served?For three years during the Second World War, 12,000 Nazis were held in a prisoner-of-war camp at the edge of Medicine Hat, an isolated city of 12,000 people on the bald Canadian prairie. The camp and the townsfolk lived cheerfully...

From the author of Unsuitable for Females, shortlisted for The Sunday Times Football Book of the Year 2023.With the triumph of England's Lionesses at Euro 2022, the women's game has been in the spotlight like never before, enjoying...

Excerpts from her personal correspondence and passages from her published autobiography combine to produce a vivid first-person account revealing her interests, opinions and experiences, along with all the pleasures and frustrations of prolonged overseas...

The Chinese picture-scroll, a long painting or calligraphic work held within a horizontal scrolling mount, has been China's pre-eminent aesthetic format for the last two millennia. This first extended history of the picture-scroll explores its...

The never-before-told story of the extraordinary women behind a trailblazing British magazine. During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent...

An accessible biography of the venerable Bede, regarded as the father of English history.This book investigates the life and world of Bede (c. 673735), the foremost scholar of the early Middle Ages and the 'father of English history.'...

This is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth century's capital of modern culture. Across the 1910s and '20s, through provocative creative acts, shocking...

A fresh reading of Aldus Manutius, preeminent in the history of the printed book.Aldus Manutius is perhaps the greatest gure in the history of the printed book: in Venice, Europe's capital of printing, he invented the italic type and issued more rst...

The Globe tells the story of humanity's quest to discover the form of the world. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, and from there it spread to...

Blood, Sweat and Earth is a hard-hitting historical expos of the diamond industry, focusing on the exploitation of workers and the environment, and the monopolisation of uncut diamonds, and how little this has changed over time. It describes the use of...

Eighty years after the fall of Benito Mussolini, controversy remains about what his dictatorship represented. This reflects the different sides to the Duce's leadership: while adept at nurturing and enforcing his personal political power, Mussolini's...

The Middle East is experiencing the world's most prominent youth bulge. Yet many MENA economies' institutional designs, both formal and informal, favour the power of business elites, systematically discriminating against young people...

In this fascinating biography of the Indian revolutionary M. P. T. Acharya (18871954), Ole Birk Laursen uncovers the remarkable transnational networks, movements and activities of India's most important anticolonial anarchist in the twentieth century...

In 1940s India, revolutionary and nationalistic feeling surged against colonial subjecthood and imperial war. Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War, while 3 million civilians were killed by the...

A common view is that the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945. But fighting continued for over a decade in the Baltic states. Stuck between two totalitarian regimesStalin's USSR and Hitler's Reichthe populations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania...

Field marshal and statesman Gustaf Mannerheim (1867-1951) was the most acclaimed and the most hated Finn of the twentieth century. After three decades of loyal and distinguished service in the Russian Tsarist army, he returned to his homeland in 1917 to...

Over several centuries, England imposed itself by force and by treaty on the other three nations of the Hiberno-British Isles to form its own English Empire. For much of its life, the United Kingdom has only endured out of shared interest in overseas...

A landmark new history of the great English county of Lancashire, exploring its people's impact on Britain and beyond.This popular history explores the cultural heritage and identity of Lancashire, stretching from the Mersey to the Lake District. Paul...

Rohingya men, women and children have been fleeing their homes for forty years. The tipping point came in August 2017, when almost 700,000 were wrung from Myanmar in a single military operation. Today, very few members of this Muslim minority remain in...

Another India tells the story of the world's biggest religious minority. Weaving together vivid biographical portraits of a wide range of Indian Muslims - elite and subaltern, secular and clerical, activist and apolitical - it brings the experience of...

Ever since the humble potato arrived from Peru around 1730 it has been a key component of the Scottish diet. In this book Liz Ashworth introduces the heritage and history of the potato and the numerous varieties available, including information on...

In 2014, marine biologist Dr Natalie Sanders joined the crew of the research vessel Silurian to seek out Britain's West Coast Community of orca and study them before we lose them forever. Though this orca pod has delighted scientists and whale watchers...

This notebook features a beautiful cover illustration by acclaimed nature artist Jane Smith. It contains 176 pages of lightly lined paper, head-and-tail bans, a ribbon marker and band to keep it securely fastened. Four different cover designs feature...

"Every day, I have lived through the massacre. While our country may forget this history, I cannot." Viola Ford FletcherViola Ford Fletcher's memoirDon't Let Them Bury My Storyvividly recounts the lasting impact of the Tulsa Massacre on her life. As the...

Black politics are key to recognizing the most important social dynamics of the United States. Over the past forty years, no commentator has been as deeply insightful about the paradoxes and personalities of Black American public life as the journalist...

In this expanded edition of a widely praised book, now available for the first time in North America, the renowned journalist Patrick Cockburn looks at his experience of contracting polio as a child in the context of a new pandemic, that of COVID-19. The...

The Battle of Eniwetok began on February 17th, 1944, on a tropical atoll caught in between the United States and the Japanese Empire during World War II. "Sandspit Assault" follows the soldiers' planning, battlefield experiences, and post-war journeys...

Openings & Outings brings together over forty pieces from the long and distinguished career of the writer and commentator David Pryce-Jones. Taking us from a meeting with Rudolf Hess's widow, to the slums of Tangier, to the front lines of the...

In the summer of 2012 the Kurdish people of northern Syria set out to create a multiethnic society in the Middle East. Persecuted for much of the 20th century, they dared to try to overcome social fragmentation by affirming social solidarity among all...

For decades, most anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements identified radical change with capturing state power. The collapse of statist projects from the 1970s fostered both neo-liberalism and a global crisis of left and working-class politics...

Told with great intimacy and compassion, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion uncovers a long-buried history of resistance and resilience among depression-era miners in Pennsylvania, who sunk their own mines on company grounds and fought police, bankers, coal...

This is the late 1970s and '80s as explained through the urgent and still-relevant songs of the Clash, the Specials, the Au Pairs, the Style Council, the Pet Shop Boys, and nearly four hundred other bands and solo artists.Each chapter presents a mixtape...

"Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit."-Washington Post"Terrifying and fearlessly inventive."-New York TimesThe first complete collection of Wanda Coleman's original...

"Insightful...empathetic...a thoughtful consideration of a topic that will have a substantial impact on our future."-BooklistReadable Feast, Book Award Winner for Socially Conscious Writing * Civil Eats' Food and Farming Book PickEver wonder if there's a...

"Beautifullyalive."-Wall Street Journal Winner of the 2022 Distinguished Book Award from The Society of Colonial WarsA tour through the original thirteen colonies in search of historical sites and their stories in America's founding. Obscure, well-known,...

Over the last three decades the historian Gabriel Kolko has redefined the way we look at modern warfare and its social and political effects. Century of War gives us a masterly synthesis of the effects of war on civilian populations and the political...