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In this bold new narrative history Steve Pincus argues that England’s Glorious Revolution was a fundamental turning point in the making of the modern world.

A controversial reassessment of Mary Tudor’s efforts to eradicate Protestantism and restore Catholicism in mid-sixteenth-century England, written by a leading authority on the history of Christianity.

In this masterful work of historical scholarship, Zeev Sternhell, an internationally renowned authority on the subject, presents a controversial new view of the origins of Fascism.

The Italian Inquisition, or Holy Office, was established in 1542, stimulated partly by the earlier Spanish operation. While Spain’s “black legend” affected opinions of the Inquisition in Italy, this pioneering book shows that there were significant differences between their operations, targets, and casualties.

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This groundbreaking book is the first to investigate the idea of religious tolerance in Spain, Portugal, and their New World colonies during the era of the Inquisition. Surprisingly, a variety of common people believed in freedom of conscience and rejected the exclusive validity of the Catholic Church. The author explores why this was so and how the New World influen...

This book is the most acute, informed, and up-to-date account of Ukraine and its people available today. Andrew Wilson focuses on the complex relations between Ukraine and Russia and explains the different versions of the past propagated by Ukrainians and Russians. He also examines the continuing debates over identity, culture, and religion in Ukraine since its independence in 1991.

This book, the most thoroughly researched and accurate history of Czechoslovakia to appear in English, dispels many conventional views, particularly concerning the Munich Crisis, Nazi occupation, Prague Spring and Velvet Revolution.

Journalist Timothy Judah witnessed firsthand many of the most horrifying episodes of the war in former Yugoslavia while on assignment from 1990-1995. Judah offers here a history of the Serbs from medieval times to the present, combining a gripping personal description of the war with a skillful analysis of the historical and cultural context out of which it emerged. For this paperback edition Juda...

This groundbreaking history connects Nazi Germany’s Arabic language propaganda during World War II to anti-Semitism in the Middle East in the decades since.

This fascinating and original book focuses on the Italian Renaissance marketplace and the activity of shopping. With new information on nearly every page, the book investigates consumption by people of different classes, the provision of foodstuffs, acquiring antiquities and holy relics, who shopped, and where they went to buy goods that were needed or simply wanted.

In this important book an internationally acclaimed Holocaust historian weaves historical narrative with individual testimonies to recount the destruction of the shtetls, small Jewish towns in Poland and Russia, at the hands of the Nazis in 1941-1942.

In the most comprehensive examination to date of Heidegger’s Nazism, Emmanuel Faye draws on previously unavailable materials to paint a damning picture of Nazism’s influence on the philosopher’s thought and politics.

This breath-taking record of Sartre’s spirited conversations with his godson are an essential companion to the works of one of the 20th-century’s most important thinkers.

The entire history of Scotland has been colored by myth, says one of Britain’s greatest historians in this lively and controversial book. Hugh Trevor-Roper looks at the role of myth in history and memory, and analyzes the impact of three important myths on Scottish history and identity.

This innovative and ambitious work is a systematic examination of the many instances of genocide that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century centuries that were precursors to the Holocaust.

This book, by an internationally acclaimed biblical scholar, examines the many and varied ways that the biblical story of Joseph, which ranks alongside The Odyssey and other ancient legends as a canonical test, has been interpreted in early modern Europe.

This extraordinary work is the first biography in a generation of one of the world's most important scientists, Robert Boyle—a pioneer of the modern experimental method, the champion of a novel mechanical view of nature, and a penetrating thinker regarding philosophical and theological issues related to sc...

Full of extraordinary stories and insights, this book tells the captivating history of human preoccupation with longevity and immortality. From the beginnings of the scientific revolution to the medical and genetic research of today, scientists and philosophers have engaged with zeal in the quest to prolong human life.

Seizing the Hungarian throne at fifteen, the effervescent Matthias Corvinus reigned long (1459-1490) and extraordinarily well. This book is the first in English to tell the gripping story of the Raven King and of the fate of his fabled 2000-volume library. Dispersed across Europe after his death, the king’s exquisite volumes have been pursued with fervor for ce...

This book is the first comprehensive investigation to determine why twelve cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper in 2005 enraged many in the Muslim world.

This biography of Joan of Arc paints a vivid portrait of the teenaged French peasant girl whose charisma and sheer force of will electrified those around her and struck terror into the hearts of the English soldiers and leaders.

James Livesey traces the origins of the modern conception of civil society to the provincial societies of Ireland and Scotland in the eighteenth century and shows how this conception remains central to the current political debate.

This accessible and informative history brings the classical Islamic world alive, illuminating its importance to the cultural history of Europe and America as the inheritor and interpreter of Graeco-Roman traditions.

This fresh examination of the works of Montesquieu seeks to understand the shortcomings of the modern democratic state in light of the great political thinker’s insightful critique of liberal democracy.

This innovative book examines the Portuguese-American Madeira wine trade from 1640 to 1815, demonstrating how the trade helped shape the Atlantic world and American society.

TRIPLEX is the first book to uncover the actual intelligence revealed to the Soviets by the “Cambridge Five” spy-ring and to show the extent of the damage done to the British and Allied interests in World War II by those revelations.

From the prize-winning author of Wartime Lies, an anatomy of the infamous prosecution of a Jewish officer attached to the French army’s General Staff, with profound implications for our own time.

Andrew Lambert accesses to new materials to depict the shocking fate of Captain Sir John Franklin’s doomed arctic expedition and how, despite his failure, Franklin inspired future arctic heroes such as Robert Falcon Scott.

This readable and engaging book by an acclaimed historian is the only wide-ranging synthesis devoted to the French experience of religious change during the period after the wars of religion up to the early Enlightenment.

This pioneering study is the first to show how Jews have been seen through modern Ukrainian literature and challenges the established view that the relationship of the Jewish and Ukrainian communities was dominated by antagonism.

Filled with a remarkable cast of characters and set against the backdrop of imperial Russia, this tale of forbidden romance could be the stuff of a great historical novel. But in fact The Pearl tells a true tale, reconstructed in part from archival documents that have lain untouched for centuries. Douglas Smith presents the most complete and accurate account ever written of the illicit love...

This book tells for the first time the tragic story of Thomas Jeremiah, a black man caught up in the turmoil of revolution in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1775.

This book, the first comprehensive treatment in English of the ideology and practice of the Inquisitional censors of Mexico, shatters long-held beliefs about the Inquisition. Martin Nesvig challenges the idea that the Inquisition was a monolithic institution and demonstrates how the persecution of heresy also grew into the persecution of books.

This important work of revisionist history tells the story of the Bourgeois Frontier—the French merchants and families from Mid-America who shaped the course of western expansion.

What began as the obscure local case of two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of robbery and murder soon flared into an unprecedented cause célèbre. This book is the first to reveal the full international scope of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, tracing its enduring implications for America at home and abroad.

This examination of the greatest unexecuted work of art of the twentieth century sheds light not only on its designer, a key figure of Russian modernism, but also on allegory, abstraction, and architecture in the early decades of the century.

Based on the extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer presents a new interpretation of repression in Stalin’s Soviet Union, which emphasizes the importance of social repression—as opposed to political repression—as a precursor to the “Great Terror” of 1937-1938.

This timely work is the definitive account of Russia’s land reform from the late 1980s to today, initiatives that will have a profound effect on Russia’s ability to compete in an era of globalization.

This original study analyzes Frederic Leighton’s portrait of May Sartoris and places the work within the tradition of British child portraiture.

This masterly biography uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Michael Slater explores the personal and emotional life, the high-profile public activities, the relentless travel, the charitable works, the amateur theatricals and the astonishing productivity. But his core focus is Dickens’ career as a writer and professional author...

This incisive examination of the origins of the modern economy during the Industrial Revolution also explains why this phenomenon came to fruition in Britain.

This wide-ranging book investigates the emergence of modern ideas about the natural world in Britain from 1680–1860 through an examination of the cultural values common to the sciences, art, literature, and natural theology.

This timely and groundbreaking study of the history and reception of Horace Walpole’s extraordinary collections coincides with a planned restoration of his home, Strawberry Hill. An international team of distinguished scholars explores the ways in which the house and its collections engaged with the creation of various and interconnected political, national, dy...

In this brilliant new work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lo...

Integrating the history of science, environmental history, and science studies, Notes from the Ground examines the cultural conditions that brought agriculture and science together in early America.

With expert scholarship and a keen eye for detail, Bockstoce provides the first analysis of the historic competition among the Russians, British, and Americans for control of Alaska.

In the mid-1700s, an outbreak of religious revivals shook American colonial society. This book provides a definitive history of these revivals, called the First Great Awakening, and shows how the evangelical movement’s radical notions of the spiritual equality of all people encouraged the democratic style that later came to characterize the American republic.

This innovative microhistory gives voice to the people of two backcountry colonial towns in Southern New England and shows how, following the Revolution, these rural settlers pushed the urban elites to put a strongly democratic stamp on the new nation.

Stepping away from conventional analyses of materials or style and into the previously unexplored world of the house owner, this book takes a fresh look at both the social, as well as the architectural, importance of  the 18th-century London town house.

Gigante shows how Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats engaged with scientific ideas about vital power and its generation and how they broke with poetic convention in imagining new forms of “life.”

This groundbreaking book uncovers the lost story of the Comanche Indians and the vast and powerful empire they built in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The volume challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new perspective on the history of the colonization of North America.

This charming book recounts the remarkable journey of the bagel from the tables of seventeenth-century Poland to the freezers of middle America today. The story is one of surprising connections between an unassuming ring-shaped roll and centuries of Polish, Jewish, and American history.

The discovery of native peoples in the Atlantic world came as a shock to Columbus and other European explorers. This fascinating book uses the vivid eyewitness accounts of diaries and letters to uncover what these first encounters were like and why the initial sense of wonder gave way to vicious exploitation.

This authoritative anthology is the first to gather in one volume a selection of the best essays published in eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century British periodicals. Thirteen consummate essayists from the era in which the genre was invented address the such contested topics as taste, war, natural history, manners, and gender relations.

How was Great Britain made? And what does it mean to be British? This brilliant and seminal book examines how a more cohesive British nation was invented after 1707 and how this new national identity was nurtured through war, religion, trade, and empire. This edition contains an extensive new preface by the author. Lavishly illustrated and powerful, Britons re...

This volume, first in the Yale Research Series of Boswell’s journals, presents the complete and fully annotated text of Boswell’s diaries and notes as he travelled through the German and Swiss territories from mid-June, 1764 to New Year’s Day, 1765.

In 1764-65 the irrepressible playwright Beaumarchais traveled to Madrid where he immersed himself in the culture and society of the day. Inspired by his visit, Beaumarchais returned home to create The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. This entertaining book offers a lively account of the playwright’s trip and of the society that fired his imagination.

Long before Darwin published his On the Origin of Species, scientific discoveries and developments threatened religious beliefs based on the literal truth of the Bible. This book looks at these conflicts through the writings of Enlightenment thinkers, casting interesting light on the history of ideas and on such contemporary controversies as creationism and in...

This groundbreaking book takes a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, blending archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis. The author focuses on the early modern Jewish diasporic community of Livorno, Tuscany, and its extensive business ties with Jews and non-Jews across the Mediterranean and Europe.

The most wide-ranging book in seventy years on Britain’s leading Enlightenment entrepreneur and industrialist, published on the 200th anniversary of his death.

Hubbub takes us on a not-for-the-squeamish tour of pre-Industrial Revolution England, where city streets are crowded, noisy, filthy, and reeking of smoke and decay. Focusing on offenses to the eyes, ears, nose, taste buds, and skin, the book explores the daily experience of the rich and the poor and paints a nuanced and highly detailed portrait of English city life.

This engaging book presents a full account of the tragic collapse of the friendship between Rousseau and Hume, the two most important thinkers of the eighteenth century. The authors explore the relation between the men’s quarrel and their philosophical thought and discuss how their incompatible ideas reverberate in thinking today.

This authoritative account of the secret Hell-Fire Clubs that scandalized eighteenth-century England reveals who joined them (wealthy industrialists, landed gentry, government elites, at least two royal figures), why the clubs became popular, and which of the many notorious legends about orgies, erotic libraries, and blasphemous rituals are true.

The first new assessment of King George III in many years, this biography harnesses rich unpublished sources in Britain, Germany, and the United States, as well as the king’s prolific correspondence, to reveal much about the monarch himself and how he influenced the conflict with the thirteen colonies and other critical events in modern world history.

This fascinating book reinterprets Benjamin Franklin’s social and political thought, examining for the first time his participation in eighteenth-century debates over the rise of the modern commercial republic. The author shows how Franklin offered practical and inventive proposals and urged Americans to improve themselves and their society through cooperation.

This highly entertaining biography draws a full portrait of one of the most colorful figures in English political history, John Wilkes. Remembered as the father of the British free press, a champion of liberty, and a hero to American colonists, Wilkes enjoyed a rancorous political career (involving duels, imprisonments, and a famous massacre) as well as a notorious private life.

This engaging book offers a rollicking account of the life of American adventurer John Ledyard as well as important insights into early modern empire in the Revolutionary era. Whether living with the Iroquois, sailing with Captain Cook, conferring with Thomas Jefferson, or trekking through Siberia, Ledyard was both a product of empire and an agent in its growth.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a radical change occurred in notions of self and personal identity, says the author of this pathbreaking book. Dror Wahrman explores the phenomenon and its causes and offers a fundamentally new interpretation of this turning point in Western history and its consequences.

Here Steven B. Smith offers a new reading of Spinoza’s Ethics. He asserts that it is a celebration of human freedom and its attendant joys and responsibilities and that it belongs among the great founding documents of the Enlightenment.

This volume presents the correspondence between Gottfried Leibniz, one of Europe’s most influential Enlightenment scholars, and Batholomew Des Bosses, a Jesuit philosopher keenly interested in Leibniz’s philosophy. With new translations of the letters and an authoritative introduction, the book makes a unique contribution to Leibniz scholarship.

The Enlightenment, considered an age of rationalism, is not normally associated with miracles. In this intriguing book, however, Jane Shaw presents accounts of miracles among ordinary worshippers and reactions to them in early modern England. She arrives at new conclusions about the role of ordinary people in the development of Enlightenment thought.

The 121 letters in this volume were exchanged between James Boswell and twenty-six correspondents between 1760 and 1763. The letters, all but one written after Boswell’s first brief escapade in London, concern the period up to and including his second momentous visit there in 1763. During this period Boswell savors the delights of London’s high life and low, first meets Samuel Johnson,...

In 1762 James Boswell, then twenty-two years old, left Edinburgh for London. The famous Journal he kept during the next nine months is an intimate account of his encounters with the high-life and the low-life in London. Frank and confessional as a personal portrait of the young Boswell, the Journal is also revealing as a vivid portrayal of life in eighteenth-century London. This new ...

Although the prestige of the Enlightenment has declined in recent years, this book argues that it was a more complex phenomenon than either its detractors or advocates assume. The Enlightenment includes rationalist as well as antirationalist tendencies, a critique of traditional morality and religion, and even the beginning of a moral renewal and spiritual revival.

Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City...

Though less storied than the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the uprising of 1715 was in fact a more serious threat to the still-young British Union. This dazzling book is the first full account of the events of 1715. It examines the causes of the unrest, why some became rebels and others stayed home, and the significance of the widely supported but doomed uprising.

This extraordinarily wide-ranging volume gathers together historian J. H. Elliott’s recent writings on politics, art, culture, and ideas in Europe and the colonial worlds from 1500 to 1800. Elliott’s many admirers will welcome this accessible collection of his influential and thought-provoking articles, lectures, and essays.

In this enthralling account of the entwined histories of Britain, Spain, and their empires in the Americas, distinguished historian J. H. Elliott offers us history on a grand scale. He interweaves the histories of the two great Atlantic civilizations, providing rich insights into both while revealing aspects of their dual history that influence the Americas to this day.

This book uncovers the stories of hundreds of English pilgrims who came to the New World in the 1630s but decided not to stay. Why did they come, and what prompted their return? The extensive original research for the book provides illuminating information on the colonial experiment in the New World as well as the religious and political tumults in the Old.

This book offers a new perspective on the fraught processes through which Spain has attempted to construct a national identity from the Enlightenment to the present day. Cultural critic Susan Martin-Márquez focuses on the nation’s ambivalence toward its Islamic/African legacy to illuminate the complexities and disorientations of modern Spanish identity.

This compact synthesis of David J. Weber’s prize-winning history of colonial Spanish North America vividly tells the story of Spain’s 300-year tenure on the continent. From the first Spanish-Indian contact through Spain’s gradual retreat, Weber offers a balanced assessment of the impact of each civilization upon the other.

This landmark book explores how Spain attempted to come to terms with the native peoples of the Americas in the late eighteenth century. Long after Spanish conquistadors had landed, Indians retained control of most of Spain’s American lands. Spaniards attempted a variety of solutions to their problems with “savages”—from gentle concessions to bloody wars.

Drawing on an enormous amount of recent research, the contributors to this volume explore fundamental questions about the history of the transatlantic trade in slaves. Their groundbreaking findings fill in previous gaps, particularly concerning slave trade activity in Central and South America, and suggest new perspectives on the largest coerced migration in history....

This book takes a fresh look at the acquisition of Spanish borderland territories from Florida toTexas. The author reassesses President James Madison’s diplomatic and expansionist policies as well as the roles played by a fascinating cast of local leaders, officials, and other small players in the boundary disputes.

This multi-disciplinary volume offers a unique portrait of Jamaican culture from the beginning of British rule in 1655 to the aftermath of emancipation in the 1840s. It offers new perspectives on art, music, and performance in Afro-Jamaican society and on the Jewish diaspora in the Caribbean.

This book presents the most comprehensive portrait yet of Richard Hakluyt, a contemporary of Shakespeare and the indefatigable promoter of English colonies in the New World. Studded with nearly fifty illustrations, the book offers a fresh view of Hakluyt’s milieu, his place in the international debates of his time, and his role in establishing an English America.

This towering volume presents the definitive account of the life and influence of South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar. Eminent historian John Lynch tells Bolívar’s story, sets his life in the context of his society and times, discusses the unique dynamics of his leadership, and explores the remarkable and enduring legacy of “The Liberator.”

This pathbreaking  volume explores  the intertwining histories of abolitionism and feminism from 1770-1870. By comparing and integrating the histories of these movements in England, Europe, and the United States, the authors offer a new perspective on the search for social justice in that fateful century.

This absorbing book is the first ever to focus on the traffic in Indian slaves in the American South, a practice that for decades linked southern lives and created a whirlwind of violence and profit-making. Alan Gallay documents in vivid detail how the trade operated, the processes by which Europeans and Native Americans became participants, and the profound consequences for the South and its peop...

Featuring work by artists including Dürer, Goya, and Géricault, this comprehensive volume is the first graphic print survey of the theme of war in the early modern period.

Distinguished scholars of history, literature, music, theater, and art explore the political and cultural implications of the Restoration court’s transgressive character. With particular reference to the perception and representation of women, it offers a varied examination of topics including popular prints and broadsheets; court masque; poetry and painted portraits; and the operation ...

This elegantly written book—a major reinterpretation of Spain’s theater of kings in the Golden Age—examines Spanish drama’s complex relations with the culture of absolutism and the rise of the modern state.

This book provides a lively account of Charles II’s Long Parliament, drawing on unofficial contemporary accounts—letters, memoirs, diaries, scofflaw pamphlets and more—to uncover an accurate historical picture for the first time.

This intriguing book—the first to study honor and interpersonal violence in early modern Spain—challenges the notion that Spain was a culture obsessed with honor and marked by violence in its defense. Examining criminal records of the era, the book uncovers how non-elite men and women actually settled honor-related disputes.

This provocative biography of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, sheds new light not only on the man who served as closest adviser to Queen Elizabeth I for forty years but also on the entire Elizabethan period. More interesting—and more subversive—than has been thought, Cecil was supremely self-assured, cunning, obsessive, powerful, and fascinating.

This book tells the extraordinary story of a sixteenth-century family afflicted with a rare genetic condition that made them unusually hairy. Neither mocked nor shunned, the three Gonzales sisters were welcomed in the courts of Europe, and their lives offer fascinating insights into their times and attitudes toward beastliness, monstrosity, and gender.

While “spin” may seem a political tool of modern times, British monarchs were practicing the art of image management even in the sixteenth century. This book is the first to examine in detail how Tudor kings and queens, notably Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, sought to sustain and enhance authority by carefully crafting their public imag...

This brilliant new portrait of Protestant reformer John Calvin reveals his human complexity, the sources of his convictions, and how he inspired and transformed the sixteenth-century world. The book captures a man at once arrogant, charismatic, unforgiving, generous, and shrewd.

One of our most influential theater figures takes a provocative look at how Shakespeare’s plays were influenced by misogyny, racism, elitism, and other social and sexual prejudices of his age, and how he managed to transcend them and write universal works of art.

Eminent historian Henry Kamen analyzes the myths that Spaniards have held, and continue to hold, about themselves and their nation’s history. Holding up this imagined Spain to historical light, he shows its influence on Spanish thinking over the last two centuries and its enduring importance in attitudes and politics today.

This wide-ranging book examines the development of intellectual culture across the breadth of Europe between about 1350 and 1550, providing fresh perspectives on the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the nature of each. Anthony Levi analyzes intellectual developments in the works of Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Marsilio Ficino, Thomas More, and many others, and he considers the full sweep of religious...

This fascinating book examines the symbiotic relationship that developed between the great Spanish Empire and Papal Rome during the period of the Spanish Golden Age and the Italian Renaissance. On the one hand, the large Spanish community in Rome played a decisive role in shaping Roman politics, economics, culture, society, and religion. On the other, the papacy influenced Spanish imperial politic...

Generations of scholars have tried to account for the Reformation's striking success. Employing the methods of intellectual and social history, Steven Ozment demonstrates that Protestantism was seen at the beginning of the Reformation to be a far-reaching simplification of religion and enhancement of secular life. According to Mr. Ozment, the initial and compelling attraction of Protestantism to w...

The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that turned great numbers of Europeans into Protestants in the early 1500s had been sown far back in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dispersal of dissenting ideologies through three centuries to their explosive burgeoning in the 1500s. He elucidates with great clarity the complex philosoph...

From the mid-fifteenth to the early seventeenth century, German Jews were persecuted and tried for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book R. Po-chia Hsia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during that period. Using sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to ju...

This delightful book offers a rare glimpse of life in a remote sixteenth-century English village during the dramatic changes of the Reformation. Through vividly detailed parish records kept from 1520 to 1574 by the Sir Christopher Trychay, the garrulous priest of Morebath, we see how a tiny Catholic community rebelled, was punished, and reluctantly accepted Protestantism under the demands of the E...

This prizewinning biography provides the definitive account of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, King Henry VIII's guide through three divorces, and ultimately a martyr for his Protestant faith. English Reformation scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch draws on new manuscript sources in Britain and elsewhere to create this vivid new study—the fi...

In this radical reinterpretation of the English Civil War, Mark Stoyle reveals an ethnic dimension to the struggle that contributed powerfully to the forging of English national identity. His book explores English xenophobia and fear of foreign invasion as the context for the creation of the New Model Army, opening up the Civil War to fresh historical and social insights.

 

Casting an entirely new light on England’s break with Rome, this masterful book reveals Henry VIII as a prime mover of religious policy during twenty critical years in English history. G. W. Bernard focuses on how and why the king was thinking as he was and shows that Henry was no mere pawn or bewildered believer, but a deliberate, ruthless, and brilliant strategist.

This is the story of a battle for a unified faith that plunged Spain into 350 years of terror. Joseph Pérez explores the frightening history of the Spanish Inquisition—its interrogations, torture, and executions; the inner workings of its councils and courts; its methods of policing information and enforcing behavior—as well as its long-term impact on the nation.

Written by one of the world's greatest authorities on Martin Luther, this is the definitive biography of the central figure of the Protestant Reformation.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thousands of women confessed to being witches and were put to death. Why were older women the most frequent victims? Why did they confess? This book is a gripping account of the pursuit, interrogation, torture, and burning of witches, particularly in Germany, as well as a deeper exploration of the psychology of witch-hunting in modern culture.

This engaging book considers how insects and those who studied them shaped the course of intellectual and scientific inquiry in the Victorian era. Filled with stories of famous and eccentric entomologists, the book reveals the surprisingly important role bugs played in the making of modern Britain.

This intriguing book examines literature on domestic interior decoration in Victorian England and shows how it was influenced by social and political issues of the day.

This wide-ranging collection of Victorian essays reflects a varied and vigorous intellectual life quite unlike the narrow-minded, inhibited, and moralistic era that stereotypes suggest. With an introduction and notes by a leading expert in Victorian thought, the volume presents writings by Mill, Dickens, Eliot, Wilde, and many others of this spirited age.

A gorgeously illustrated book that is the first to explore the impact of Darwin’s ideas about nature and human history on nineteenth-century artists from Frederic Church to Claude Monet

This accessible and vividly written book presents a new interpretation of India’s history, focusing particular attention on the impact of British imperialism on Independent India. Maria Misra begins with the rebellion against the British in 1857 and tracks the country’s advance to the present day. India’s extremes persist, the author arg...

With growing economic might, new political influence, and changing social dynamics, India has emerged as a major world power. This up-to-date book assesses the forces that have contributed to and those that have impeded the nation’s growth since independence, offering a new perspective on India today and on its prospects for the future.

Translated into seventeen languages since its first publication in 1936, E. H. Gombrich’s bestselling history of the world is at last available in English. Gombrich tells the story of mankind from the Stone Age to the atomic bomb, focusing not on small detail but on the sweep of human experience, the extent of human achievement, and the depth of its frailty.

This delightful book tells the history of the potato, from its origins in Incan gardens thousands of years ago to its place on a NASA manned rocket destined for Mars. Less humble than it may seem, the potato has played a crucial role in human history wherever people have embraced it as a staple food.

In the most powerful defense of economic liberalism in decades, two international finance experts present a history of monetary nationalism and show why it threatens globalization today. They argue persuasively for a unified global currency that will facilitate trade, promote stability, and raise poorer nations’ standard of living.

While globalization may seem a modern phenomenon, it is actually a process that began when humans first migrated from Africa, explains Nayan Chanda in this fascinating book. He traces how traders, preachers, warriors, and adventurers have reshaped the world and reconnected us throughout history, and he offers a provocative discussion of what globalization means for t...

For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new ...

This book is the first to focus closely on the gripping story of Soviet Russia’s expulsion of one hundred prominent intellectuals in 1922-1923. The book sets the purge in context, showing that it was part of a process by which Lenin and others hoped to establish a Bolshevik public sphere undisturbed by dissenters or independent thinkers.

In this groundbreaking book, prominent scholars examine previously unknown transcripts of Soviet Politburo meetings that took place during Stalin’s rise to power. Analysis of these first-hand records reveals important information about early Soviet history and the participants who made decisions at the highest levels.

This original analysis synthesizes history and economics to understand the workings of Soviet state security agencies under Lenin and Stalin. The book offers important insights not only into political repression in the U.S.S.R. but also into dictatorships of other places and times.

Based on research in previously secret Soviet archives, this compelling book illuminates how Stalin established his personal dictatorship in the 1930s. The author analyzes Stalin’s mechanisms of generating and retaining power and uncovers new information on Politburo alliances, small terrors that preceded the Great Terror, and more.

This book explores formerly secret Soviet archives to discover how Stalin used rubles to make guns. While examining various aspects of the Soviet defense industry, the authors uncover the inner workings of Stalin’s dictatorship and how he used the defense sector to maintain his grip on power.

This book provides a complete history of the 1940 Soviet massacre of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war, long considered a Nazi crime. Presenting 122 documents from extensive Soviet archives, the book graphically depicts the evolution in unequivocal detail of this terrible—and still unpunished—crime, as well as the elaborate propaganda efforts that convincingly shifted blame for fifty year...

In this dramatic memoir, Soviet Communist Party leader Dmitrii Shepilov provides an unparalleled insider account of Soviet politics under Stalin and Khrushchev. Along with first-hand recollections of the most prominent figures of the era, Shepilov sheds light on Soviet foreign relations, the unsuccessful coup against Khrushchev in 1957, and more.

This stunning exposé of Soviet espionage in the U.S. during the 1930s and 40s is based on extensive KGB archives never revealed before. With new information on Alger Hiss, Robert Oppenheimer, the Rosenbergs, and many others, the book for the first time documents the secret world of Stalin’s spies and the Americans who worked with them.

This groundbreaking history shatters many assumptions about the Six-Day War of 1967. New research in Soviet archives and testimonies from participants in the Israeli/Egyptian conflict reveal the extent of the Kremlin’s involvement, plans for the use of nuclear weapons in the Mid-East, and willingness to precipitate a global crisis.

This book tells the story of a generation of leading Polish literary intellectuals who came of age after the First World War. Using newly available archival material, Marci Shore explores why these writers came to embrace Marxism and what the implications of that choice were: a tragic, half-century-long journey of intellectual idealism and disillusionment.

As intriguing as any rapid-paced spy novel, this book breaks open the mysterious case of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko’s defection to the United States in 1963. Was Nosenko a bona fide defector with first-hand knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald, or was he a master of deceit, still loyal to the KGB? The CIA officer who handled the case at last uncovers the truth.

 

This new translation for the first time offers a complete and accurate English rendition of Mikhail Bulgakov’s first novel. Recounting the saga of a Russian family plunged into the chaos of civil war, Bulgakov contrasts the cruelty and violence of the era with individual acts of humanity, addressing important themes that concerned him throughout his writing lif...

Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers’s shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948—that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage. In this highly origina...

How did the Bolsheviks manage to stay in power through five long years of civil war? Sean McMeekin searches archival materials across Russia and Europe to expose the astonishing scope of Bolshevik thievery between 1917 and 1922 and reveal the names of the Western bankers, lawyers, and middlemen who, for a price, helped launder the loot.

In this masterful political treatise, a passionate anti-Communist discusses the nature of Communism as it developed in the Soviet Union and in Poland. Published in English for the first time, the book provides a unique interpretation of twentieth-century Polish history, explores the differences between Communism and Nazism, and enriches current debates about the nece...

This groundbreaking book examines how five writers and poets of Jewish descent contributed to the development of a Ukrainian-Jewish literary tradition from the 1880s through the 1990s. The author challenges assumptions about modern Jewish acculturation, Ukrainian-Jewish relations, post-colonial culture, and more.

For decades Stalinist literature, film, and art were almost exclusively deemed political propaganda, devoid of any aesthetic significance. In this original book, Evgeny Dobrenko offers an entirely different view. He examines a wide variety of Stalin-era art and concludes that without Socialist Realism, socialism itself could not have materialized.

Why have Russians chosen unlimited autocracy since the Middle Ages? Why is democracy unable to flourish in Russia? In this brilliant analysis of Russia’s immemorial commitment to the theory and practice of autocracy, Richard Pipes demonstrates why the belief in autocracy remains the most formative and powerful idea in Russia’s political history.

This groundbreaking book is the first comprehensive, historically accurate account of the Soviet labor camp system from the late 1920s to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Based on recently released documents, it uncovers the secrets of the Gulag and how it became a central component of Soviet ideology and social and economic policy. 

Leaders of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era well understood the power of art, and their response was to attempt to control artists and writers in every way possible. This book presents a history of repression of cultural and artistic life in the Soviet Union, drawing on remarkable archival documents translated into English for the first time.

In this book a distinguished historian offers a penetrating survey of the evolution of the Soviet system and its ideology. Robert V. Daniels analyses the Soviet Union and the challenges it ultimately failed to meet, and he dispels American misunderstandings of Soviet history and communism.

This unprecedented reference work systematically represents the history and culture of Eastern European Jews from their first settlement in the region to the present day. More than 1,800 alphabetical entries encompass a vast range of topics, including religion, folklore, politics, art, music, theater, language and literature, places, organizations, intellectual movem...

This wide-ranging book is the first to explore the visual culture of Russia  over the entire span of Russian history, from ancient Kiev to contemporary, post-Soviet society. Illustrated with more than one hundred diverse and fascinating images, the book examines the ways that Russians have represented themselves visually, understood their visual environment, and used visual images in social a...

Russian historian Richard Stites offers in this masterful book a rich history of the role of the arts—music, theater, and visual art—in shaping Russian society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He integrates the life of the peasantry, the gentry, and the city elites to arrive at new insights into the origins of Russia’s artistic prowess in the 1800s.

Lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs, this unique book studies the revolution in dress in Imperial Russia and its impact on daily life.

In this meticulously researched book, Gordon Hahn analyzes why contemporary Russia is a dangerous seedbed for radicalized Islam and then proposes what we should be doing about it. Hahn draws an alarming picture of an increasingly sophisticated and effective Chechen jihadist network with grand ambitions and dangerous global connections.

This beautiful and groundbreaking book offers an unprecedented account of one thousand years of Russian architecture and its previously unrecognized links to the Western tradition.

This is a close-up account of Ukraine’s cooked election of November, 2004 and the decisive popular protest it incited. It is a dramatic story of corruption and murder, political cheating, Russian covert manipulations, Yushchenko’s poisoning, and then his victory. Andrew Wilson investigates what really happened and what it will mean for the future of Ukraine and the region.

This book tells for the first time the extraordinary story of Sergei Degaev, a political terrorist in tsarist Russia who disappeared after participating in the assassination of the chief of Russia’s security organization in 1883. Those who knew and admired Alexander Pell at the University of South Dakota never guessed that he was actually Degaev, a revolutionary who had reinvented himself as...

This compelling biography is the first to encompass the entire life of Ivan the Terrible and to view him in the context of his own time. Notorious for a policy of unrestrained terror—and for killing his own son—Ivan is credited with establishing autocracy in Russia. The book illuminates his tragic reign and foreign policies, as well as his marriages and disordered personality.

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This book analyzes for the first time the powerful impact of Russia’s theater on society and politics during the Imperial era. Murray Frame explores the contributions of Russian civil society and theater culture to one another, and along the way draws lively portraits of the important actors, patrons, writers, critics, and theaters of the period.

An entrancing portrait of turn-of-the-century Florence and the artistic tourists—Aby Warburg, Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud, Rainer Maria Rilke, and others—who traveled there to experience the city’s unsurpassed cultural riches.

Marking the tenth anniversary of the Euro, this book takes a look at its tumultuous history, its status in global economics and politics, and the pressures that present enormous challenges for the Euro’s future. The author offers unique insights into the multi-national intrigues that gave birth to the Euro and underscores its vital role in world monetary affair...

In his 1902 will, Cecil John Rhodes, founder of the De Beers diamond company, bequeathed the now world-renowned Rhodes scholarship program. This fascinating book traces the entire history of the program from its imperialist origin to its twenty-first-century South African manifestation, endorsed by Nelson Mandela.

Using newly declassified documents from Soviet archives, this provocative book shows how the development of the atomic bomb and the ensuing atomic espionage propelled the U.S. and the Soviet Union into the Cold War.

This is the first biography in English of the extraordinary Spanish industrialist and entrepreneur Eduardo Barreiros, a small-town auto mechanic who rose to become a motor industry giant. The book details his entire career, including his failed alliance with Chrysler Corporation, his involvement in Castro’s Cuba, and his crucial contributions to Spain’s p...

This book is the first to explore fully the role that Zionism played in the political thought of Winston Churchill. Tracing the development of Churchill’s positions toward Zionism and the Jewish people throughout his long career, Michael Makovsky offers a fresh and balanced insight into one of the twentieth century’s greatest figures.

While Westerners were aghast at the thought of life behind the Berlin Wall, restricted by a corrupt and repressive government, East Germans themselves remember life before 1989 as interesting, full of opportunity, and in many ways “normal.” This fascinating book explores these conflicting views and offers the first full social history of Cold War East Germany.

This book focuses on the crucial period that led to the collapse of the Spanish Republic and set the stage for civil war. Using the memoirs, speeches, and declarations of the major players in Spanish politics of the mid-1930s, Stanley Payne explores their political maneuverings and challenges previous perceptions of President Alcalá Zamora and other key figures.

Is today's American "empire" like the British Empire of yore? What can be learned from comparing the two? In this groundbreaking book, Bernard Porter reveals the uncanny similarities between the imperial histories of Britain and the United States but contends that America's new "super-imperialism" in the post-2001 era is quite a different thing.

This groundbreaking book argues that the political collapse of East Germany in the 1980s could have been predicted by analyzing the country’s natural landscape. Arvid Nelson records the history of the East German government’s disregard for its landscape and shows how forest and ecosystem change can serve as a reliable barometer to the health of a political system.

In this masterful volume, eminent historian Jay Winter focuses on twentieth-century “minor utopias” whose stories have been overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag. Focusing on six moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe, the author fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action.

This masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century traces the origins of the current fascination with memory back to the Great War. Historian Jay Winter discusses how images, languages, and practices that developed in the wake of WWI shaped the way later conflicts and victims are remembered both publicly and privately.

In the first terrifying hours of the London Blitz, the British people were galvanized and the nation’s future was changed, says historian Peter Stansky in this compelling account of the horrific German bombings of September 7, 1940. Stansky examines what this crucial day meant to Britons and how their responses to it transformed their sense of national identity...

This compelling book investigates the impact of the occupation on the people of France and dispels any lingering notion that somehow, under the collaborating government of Marshal Pétain, life was quite tolerable for most French citizens. Richard Vinen describes the inescapable fear and the moral quandaries that permeated life in German-controlled France. The Unfree French makes i...

Was Franco sympathetic to Nazi Germany? Why didn't Spain enter World War II? In what ways did Spain collaborate with the Third Reich? How much did Spain assist Jewish refugees? This is the first book in any language to answer these intriguing questions. Stanley Payne, a leading historian of modern Spain, explores the full range of Franco’s relationship with Hit...

A fresh investigation of the fate of Picasso, Cocteau, Messiaen, and dozens of other French artists and intellectuals who lived and worked under Nazi occupation.

This new and absorbing account of the 1914-1915 campaign at Gallipoli is the first to assess Allied submarine and related German U-boat activities and their impact on the battles in the Dardanelles. The book makes clear for the first time the crucial naval contributions of the Allies in this major conflict of the First World War.

A full account of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of WWI, this book sets aside the many myths about the Allied operation and arrives at the devastating conclusion that nearly 390,000 troops died in vain.

What really happened at the Battle of Midway, one of the greatest naval victories of the Second World War? This wrenching book, told by a survivor of the battle, provides the first accurate account and explanation of the devastating losses to America’s torpedo squadrons: only 7 of 51 planes returned, only 29 of 127 crewmen survived, and not a single torpedo hit its target.

In this memoir of life aboard aircraft carriers during World War Two, Alvin Kernan combines vivid recollections of his experience as a young enlisted sailor with a rich historical account of the Pacific war. Kernan served in many battles and was aboard the Hornet when it was sunk by torpedoes in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.

In the midst of the most heated crises of the Second World War, Roosevelt and Stalin secretly exchanged three hundred letters. This book publishes the entire collection of their messages for the first time in any language. With a lively introduction and full annotations, the book illuminates how a unique relationship developed between two of the world’s most powerful men.

Why did Stalin refuse to believe that Hitler would strike the Soviet Union when all the evidence—including intelligence from his own agencies—said otherwise? This extensively researched book illuminates many of the enigmas that have surrounded the Nazi invasion, offering keen insights into Stalin’s thinking and the reasons for his catastrophic blunder.

This important book draws on vital new archival material to unravel the mystery of Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 and Stalin’s enigmatic behavior on the eve of the attack. Challenging the currently popular view that Stalin was about to invade Germany when Hitler made a preemptive strike, Gorodetsky argues that Stalin was actually negotiating for peace in order to redress t...

This breakthrough book provides a provocative reassessment of Stalin’s leadership during the most important years of his career. Geoffrey Roberts challenges standard perceptions of Stalin and shows that he was both a ruthless dictator and a remarkable politician who sought to avoid the Cold War and establish a long-term detente with the capitalist world.

This is a masterpiece of historical writing, a book that compels its readers to reflect anew on the shaping forces of history. Beginning with the siege of Berlin, 1945 provides rich insight into the conflicts, motives, and counter-motives that marked the end of WWII and that established the lasting patterns of deceit, uncertainty, and distrust that defined the Cold War.

This definitive history of one of the fiercest battles of World War II describes the siege of Budapest in unprecedented detail. Both Stalin and Hitler demanded victory at all costs, and the cost was extreme: 80,000 Soviet troops, 38,000 German and Hungarian soldiers, and 38,000 Hungarian civilians perished. The book provides the first full account of this shocking battle.

From the renowned bestselling author of Five Days in London, this masterful history describes the unparalleled drama of the fateful days leading to Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. John Lukacs offers penetrating insights into the strange relationship between Stalin and Hitler and the miscalculations that changed the course of the war and world history.

The days from May 24 to May 28, 1940 altered the course of the history of this century, as the members of the British War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler or to continue the war. The decisive importance of these five days is the focus of John Lukacs’s magisterial new book.

This absorbing study of the first—and decisive—phase of World War II tells not only how events happened but why they happened as they did. Eminent historian John Lukacs presents an extraordinary narrative of these two years, followed by a detailed sequential analysis of the lives of the peoples and then of the political, military, and intellectual relations and events.

This powerful book presents a clear-eyed view of Winston Churchill, the workings of his historical imagination, and his successes and failures as a statesman. Written by the best-selling author of Five Days in London, May 1940, the book sets forth the essence of one of the towering figures of twentieth-century history. 

This profoundly moving book recounts the poignant, sometimes ribald histories of the rank-and-file British servicemen who were psychiatric casualties in World War I. Focusing on the experiences of these men during the war and at home—rather than those of their officers—it gives a new perspective on the impact of the Great War.

Despite superior air and artillery power, British soldiers died in catastrophic numbers at the Battle of Somme in 1916. What went wrong, and who was responsible? This book meticulously reconstructs the battle, assigns responsibility to military and political leaders, and changes forever the way we understand this encounter and the history of the Western Front.

The carnage on the Western Front at Passchendaele, where 275,000 Allied and 200,000 German soldiers fell, was neither inevitable nor inescapable, the authors of this gripping book insist. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson here offer the most complete account of the campaign ever published, establishing what actually occurred, what options were available, and who was responsible for the devastation.

In this close study of Nuremberg, a city heavily burdened by its association with Nazism, Neil Gregor explores how Germans have struggled since the Second World War to remember and acknowledge the Holocaust, make sense of their own suffering, and find ways of living with the painful past.

This book reconstructs the lost world of the Warsaw Ghetto and describes the everyday experiences of its victims in unprecedented detail. With new research on the community, cultural, and political life of Jews confined there, the book breaks stereotypes of the Holocaust experience and provides the definitive account of the ghetto’s tragic history.

This book is the first to analyze in detail the activities of German liberal democrats from 1933 to the end of the Nazi regime, exploring why so few resisted and so many embraced aspects of the Third Reich. The answers that come to light have crucial implications for understanding the genesis of authoritarian regimes everywhere.

This book is the culmination of more than three decades of meticulous historiographic research on Nazi Germany by one of the period’s most distinguished historians. The volume brings together the most important and influential aspects of Ian Kershaw’s research on the Holocaust for the first time. The writings are arranged in three sections—Hitler an...

This groundbreaking book tells the story of Joseph Hurley, the American priest who became a Vatican diplomat, a witness to Pope Pius XII’s behind-the-scenes debates on Nazism and the Holocaust, and a participant in secret dealings between the U.S. and the Vatican from the 1930s through the early years of the Cold War.

This book, the first ever based on unrestricted access to General Motors’ internal records, documents the giant American corporation’s dealings with the Third Reich. Henry Ashby Turner first tells the fascinating story of how GM conducted business in Germany under the Nazi regime and then assesses the legality and morality of the company’s policies. 

The escape of ultra-orthodox Jewish leader Rebbe Schneersohn from Hitler’s Warsaw in 1939 has always been a subject of speculation. This book uncovers the true story of the rescue and the heroic role of the part-Jewish German soldier who led the operation. A harrowing story about identity and moral responsibility, it is also a riveting narrative of an extraordinary rescue mission.

This disturbing book consists of a series of interviews with Jewish survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau who had been forced by the Germans to facilitate the mass extermination of other prisoners. These Sonderkommando not only describe the unimaginable horror of their own experiences but also provide direct testimony of the boundless cruelty and deceit of the Nazis.

Examining data on Christian rescuers and nonrescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, Pearl Oliner illuminates questions of religion and altruism. She investigates, for example, whether religion encourages altruism on behalf of those who do not belong, and whether the very religious are more likely to be altruistic toward outsiders than those who are less religious.

Over a period of several years, Polish journalist Kazimerz Sakowicz was an eyewitness to the Nazis’systematic murder of the Jews of Wilno (Vilnius), near Ponary. He chronicled events in a diary kept at great risk, and though he did not survive the War, much of Sakowicz’s hidden diary did. His chilling record is here published in English and extensively annotated for the first time.

Janusz Korczak (1879–1942) is one of the legendary figures to emerge from the Holocaust. Like so many other Jews, Korczak was sent into the Warsaw Ghetto after the Nazi occupation of Poland. He immediately set up an orphanage for more than two hundred children.When the Nazis ordered the children to board a train that was to carry them to the Treblinka death camp, Korczak went with them,...

This gripping account of wartime Greece explores the impact of the Nazi Occupation upon the lives and values of ordinary people. It is the first fully account of the experience of occupation, from the perspective of those that endured it, and from those that imposed it. Mark Mazower offers a vividly human picture of the experiences of resistance fighters and black marketeers, teenage German conscr...

In this chilling book, Susan Zuccotti recounts the stories of nine Jewish families facing ever-escalating persecution in France and Italy during the Holocaust years. The odyssey of these unwanted refugees took them from hostile Vichy France to St. Martin Vésubie in the Alps to Italy, where families were split apart and nightmarish choices had to be made.

What did Pope Pius XII, his advisers, and his assistants at the Vatican do to help the Jews of Italy during World War II? This meticulously researched and balanced book finds that, despite the persistent myth that the pope worked behind the scenes to help the Jews, he and those around him actually did very little. Susan Zuccotti uncovers no evidence of a papal directive to church institutions to s...

In this deeply moving book, Alexandra Garbarini studies an array of diaries written by ordinary Jewish men and women witnessing the Holocaust. Garbarini analyzes the variety of Jewish experiences throughout German-occupied Europe, offering insights into the role of diary writing for victims and the unexpected range of their perspectives.

This is a stirring collection of diaries written by young people, ages 12 to 22, during the Holocaust. Some of the writers were refugees, others were hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation. Through these accounts of their daily lives and their frequently unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings, these young victims bequeath to us a...

This sweeping, global history explores how the Virgin Mary, scarcely mentioned in the Gospels, rose to become our most prominent female figure. The book is groundbreaking in scope, encompassing sixteen centuries and a wealth of historical sources and visual materials from Christian cultures around the world.

Crushed by the Romans in the first century A.D., the ancient Druids of Britain left almost no reliable evidence behind. This captivating book by a world expert examines what is known of the Druids, then explores how and why they have been repeatedly reinvented to play varying roles in English, Scottish, and Welsh history.

Casting an entirely new light on England’s break with Rome, this masterful book reveals Henry VIII as a prime mover of religious policy during twenty critical years in English history. G. W. Bernard focuses on how and why the king was thinking as he was and shows that Henry was no mere pawn or bewildered believer, but a deliberate, ruthless, and brilliant strategist.

This new edition of John Henry Newman’s celebrated Apológia includes a powerfully revisionist introduction in which historian Frank M. Turner challenges previous interpretations of Newman’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and of the Apológia itself. The book also features six of Newman’s important and illuminating Anglican se...

This engrossing book encompasses the extraordinary history of the papacy, from its beginnings nearly two thousand years ago to the present day. In this new edition, the final chapter has been expanded to cover the last years of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI.

 

This lively history of the rise of Methodism charts the development of the movement from its unpromising origins in England in the 1730s to its major international importance by the 1880s. The book explores Methodism’s phenomenal growth in the British Isles, America, and around the globe, and the complex reasons for its wide-ranging appeal.

Drawing on the work of fourteen distinguished historians, this wide-ranging book explores political thinking in Europe from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment. It is the first survey in English to pay due regard to Hungary, Poland-Lithuania, Scandinavia, the realm of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the political thought of Islam. 

In this monumental survey, eminent historian Martin Malia examines how the European revolutionary tradition has evolved and escalated over the centuries. Uniquely wide-ranging, the book offers a fascinating interpretation of the phenomenon of revolution through its culminating expression in twentieth-century Russia.

This sweeping exploration of the origins of citizenship in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States is the first such history to encompass several nations. From this broader, international perspective the author discusses the concept of state citizenship and whether it remains relevant in the globalized world of the twenty-first century.

Hannah Arendt’s prize-winning biographer presents a concise guide to the great political philosopher’s major works and thought. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl shows how the ideas Arendt developed in the post-World War II years are just as relevant today, illuminating such vitally important topics as totalitarianism, terrorism, globalization, war, and “radical evil.”

This provocative book draws on the thinking of three great political philosophers to diagnose the malady of today’s liberal democracies: soft despotism. A condition that occurs as paternalistic state power expands, soft despotism may be nonviolent, but it seriously undermines the spirit of self-government, says historian Paul Rahe.