General and world history

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 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...

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...

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...

"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...

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 a fascinating and radical critique of identity and class, Your Place or Mine? examines the modern invention of homosexuality as a social construct that emerged in the 19th century. Examining "fairies" in Victorian England, transmen in early 20th...

American Power and the New Mandarins is Noam Chomsky's first political book, widely considered to be among the most cogent and powerful statements against the American war in Vietnam. Long out of print, this collection of early, seminal essays helped to...

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...

Republican passions demonstrates the crucial role of family and friendship networks in the creation of the French Third Republic. Based on the family archives of Lon Laurent-Pichat, journalist, Deputy and Life Senator, this study paints a rich picture of...

This book uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing...

A new biography of Carl Linnaeus, offering a vivid portrait of Linnaeus's life and work.Carl Linnaeus (17071778), known as the father of modern biological taxonomy, formalised and popularised the system of binomial nomenclature used to classify plants...

In this gripping sequel to his bestselling 1177 B.C., Eric Cline tells the story of what happened after the Bronze Age collapsed why some civilisations endured, why some gave way to new ones, and why some disappeared forever.At the end of the acclaimed...

After the turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna's attempt to guarantee peace and stability across Europe, a new revolutionary movement emerged in the southern peripheries of the continent. In this groundbreaking study,...

A panoramic history of the Muslim world from the age of the Prophet Muammad to the birth of the modern era.This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The...

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself.In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where...

In 1963, a human skull was discovered in a pub in south-east England. The handwritten note found inside revealed it to be that of Alum Bheg, an Indian soldier in British service who had been blown from a cannon for his role in the 1857 Uprising, his head...

This book illuminates the glittering history of fireworks, from their mysterious beginnings to the dazzling big-budget displays of today. It describes how they enthralled the world's royal courts and became a sensation across the British Empire. There...

In this personal journey, ultra-light backpacker and sought-after speaker Glen Van Peski shares the life lessons he has learned through years of lightening his pack and helping others.Adventures provide the richness and texture to a life well lived. So...

Brimming with the honesty and passionate conviction for which he has become famous, Victor Serge's account of the first year of the Russian Revolution-through all of its achievements and challenges-captures both the heroism of the mass upsurge that gave...

What's it like to be the son or daughter of a dictator? A monster on the Stalin level? What's it like to bear a name synonymous with oppression, terror, and evil? Jay Nordlinger sets out to answer that question. He surveys 20 dictators in all. They are...

In 1901, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, sent an expedition to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, with the purpose of transforming the region into a cotton economy similar to that of the post-Reconstruction American South...

Europeans are in denial. Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, they are increasingly distancing themselves from their cultural debt to the Muslim world. But while the legacy of Islam and the Middle East is in danger of being airbrushed out of Western...

The surprising origin story of Britain's love affair with suburban gardening. It is said that Britain is a nation of gardeners and its suburban gardens with roses and privet hedges are widely admired and copied across the world. But how and why did...

A visual history of the artists, fans, and fanzines of widely influential British punk. Zerox Machine is an immersive journey through the vibrant history of British punk and its associated fanzines from 1976 to 1988. Drawing on an extensive range of...

A spirited chronicle of New York's economic and cultural boom during the outstanding decade of the Roaring Twenties.This is the story of the zest for life that gripped New York in the postwar years of the 1920s. The decade ushered in an era of...

A new account of urban Victorian life told through the dubious day-to-day of London's police courts.Nether World presents a rich, often humorous glimpse into everyday life in Victorian London through a revealing account of nineteenth-century...

On 3 January 1911, in the heart of London's mainly Jewish East End, police discovered Latvian revolutionaries wanted for the murder of three officers. A six-hour gunfight ensued, with a fire consuming the besieged building. Winston Churchill,...

A groundbreaking reassessment of existing research and new data on traditional botanical medicine.Traditional medical systems continue to impact the lives of people around the globe. These systems vary greatly in their underlying beliefs, but all...

A bold new account of European imperialism told through the history of water.In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires...

A beautifully illustrated exploration of how Latif Al Ani's photographs and contemporary Iraqi artists continue to challenge the colonial appropriation of Iraq's ancient pastBeginning in the early nineteenth century, Mesopotamian and early Islamic ruins...

This book sheds light on a neglected aspect of India's Cold War diplomacy, starting with the role of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his Congress government in organising the first Asian-African Conference in Bandung in April 1955. Andrea...

A sweeping history of how Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements in Europe and the AmericasThe Age of Reconstruction looks beyond postCivil War America to tell the story of how Union...

This book is conceivably the first time that a halachically-informed Jew offers a full picture of his life with the trials, tribulations, and difficulties that he encountered. It also describes the difficulties that rabbis and other Jewish religious...

Before It Went Rotten takes a trip back to the world before punk. When Anarchy in the UK appeared, London enjoyed one of the most vibrant music scenes in the world. A network of mainly Irish owned pubs and clubs provided music every night, much of it...

Beautifully produced and a perfect gift for travellers newly wedded or not - by turn funny, tender, acerbic and charming.Includes extracts from: Paul Bowles, Dorothy Sayers, D. H. Lawrence, Byron, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dorothy Parker, A. N. Wilson,...

"Gretchen Starr-LeBeau's Seven Myths of the Spanish Inquisition provides an excellent introduction to Habsburg Spain's most reviled and misunderstood institution. Drawn from archival sources and modern scholarship, this concise study presents the long...

Renowned Marxist scholar Michael Lwy offers an indispensable assessment of an enduringly fascinating revolutionary.Vibrant, insightful, and wide-ranging, Lwy's essays illuminate the heroic, tough-minded idealist and martyr, Rosa Luxemburg. Active in the...

Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Marc-William Palen shows that free trade and globalisation in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea,...

Imperial conquest and colonisation depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these...

That the idea of world revolution was crucial for the Bolshevik leaders in the years following the 1917 revolution is a well-known fact. But what did the party's rank and file make of it? How did it resonate with the general population? And what can a...

A comprehensive, readable history of the Republic of Turkeythat gives equal weight to all periods in the first century of the Republic of Turkey. The republican order of Turkey seems not to have changed much since its foundation in 1923, but there were...

I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Readeris a timely and essential collection of the many works of Professor Gerald Horne-a historian who has made an indelible impact on the study of US and international history.Horne approaches his study of history as a deeply...

An essential record from the Second International, assembled by Under the Socialist Banner. At its height, the Second (Socialist) International (1889-1914) represented the majority of organized workers in the world, with the revolutionary goal of...

An original study of empire creation and its consequences, from ancient through early modern times.The world's first great empires established by the ancient Persians, Chinese, and Romans are well known, but not the empires that emerged on their margins...

Why is the scientific community so unified?In the last 350-odd years, the international 'scientific community' has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global crises: disastrous climate...

Surprisingly, the remarkable story of the Scottish role in the discovery of the Northwest Passage a long desired trade route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific has not received a great deal of attention. This book charts the extensive contribution to...

What if a book, based on science fact, showed that Atlantis was a real place, a lush island that once existed in the Atlantic? A book that provides overwhelming evidence that Atlantis once likely existed. That would be a game-changer. "Solving the...