- Constructing the Monolith
- Hardcover February 2009
- Mazarin's Quest
- Hardcover January 2009
- Democracy Denied, 1905-1915
- Hardcover November 2008
- The Jamestown Project
- Despite the original settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a colony that survived where others had failed. Reconfiguring the myth of Jamestown's failure, Kupperman shows how the settlement's messy first decade actually represented a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work.
- Paperback October 2008
- Rulers and Victims
- In this illuminating book, Geoffrey Hosking explores what the Soviet experience meant for Russians. Hosking analyzes how the Soviet state molded Russian identity, beginning with the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war. At the heart of this penetrating work is the fundamental question of what happens to a people who place their nationhood at the service of empire. There is no surer guide than Geoffrey Hosking to reveal the historical forces forging Russian identity in the post-communist world.
- Paperback October 2008
- Children of the Revolution
- Hardcover September 2008
- The Declaration of Independence
- In a stunningly original look at the American Declaration of Independence, David Armitage reveals the document in a new light: through the eyes of the rest of the world. Armitage uses over one hundred declarations of independence written since 1776 to show the role that the U.S. Declaration has played in creating a world of states out of a world of empires.
- Paperback September 2008
- Journey to the East
- One of the great encounters of world history took place in 1579 when highly educated European priests confronted Chinese culture for the first time. This "journey to the East" is explored by Brockey as he retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries from Portugal to China. Moving beyond the image of these Jesuits as cultural emissaries, his book shows how they translated Roman Catholicism into the Chinese cultural frame and eventually claimed two hundred thousand converts.
- Paperback September 2008
- The Two Princes of Calabar
- In 1767, two "princes" of a ruling family in the port of Old Calabar, on the slave coast of Africa, were ambushed and captured by English slavers. The princes were themselves slave traders who were betrayed by African competitors--and so began their own extraordinary odyssey of enslavement. Their story, written in their own hand, survives as a rare firsthand account of the Atlantic slave experience. Sparks made the remarkable discovery of the princes' correspondence and has managed to reconstruct their adventures from it.
- Paperback September 2008
- Emigrant Nation
- Between 1880 and 1915, thirteen million Italians left their homeland, launching the largest emigration from any country in recorded world history. In its discussion of immigrant culture, transnational identities, and international politics, this book not only narrates the grand story of Italian emigration but also provides important background to immigration debates that continue to this day.
- Hardcover June 2008
- Mao's Last Revolution
- The Cultural Revolution was a watershed event in the history of the People's Republic of China, the defining decade of half a century of communist rule. In a masterly book, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals explain why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and show his Machiavellian role in masterminding it (which Chinese publications conceal). In its invaluable critical analysis of Chairman Mao and its brilliant portrait of a culture in turmoil, Mao's Last Revolution offers the most authoritative and compelling account to date of this seminal event in Chinese history.
- Paperback March 2008
- Popular Bohemia
- This book revises dominant historical narratives about modernism from the perspective of a theoretically informed cultural history that spans the period between 1830 and 1914. In doing so, it reconnects the intellectual history of avant-garde art with the cultural history of bohemia and the social history of the urban experience to reveal the circumstances in which a truly modernist culture emerged.
- Paperback March 2008
- Dilemmas of Victory
- This illuminating work examines the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of the Communist takeover of China. Instead of dwelling on elite politics and policy-making processes, Dilemmas of Victory seeks to understand how the 1949-1953 period was experienced by various groups, including industrialists, filmmakers, ethnic minorities, educators, rural midwives, philanthropists, standup comics, and scientists.
- Hardcover January 2008
- Galileo's Glassworks
- Galileo and the Dutch telescope have long enjoyed a durable connection in the popular mind, transforming a rather modest middle-aged scholar into the icon of the Copernican Revolution. And yet the speed with which the telescope changed the course of Galileo's life and early modern astronomy obscures his actual delayed encounter with the instrument. This book considers the lapse between the telescope's 1608 creation in The Hague and Galileo's acquaintance with such news ten months later. Along the way, Reeves offers a revised chronology of Galileo's life in this critical period.
- Hardcover January 2008
- The Notables and the Nation
- The ending of absolute, centralized monarchy and the beginning of political combat between nobles and commoners make the years 1787 to 1788 the first stage of the French Revolution. In a detailed examination of this critical transition, Gruder examines how the French people became engaged in a movement of opposition that culminated in demands for the public's role in government.
- Hardcover January 2008
- The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany
- In the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, "culture."
- Hardcover January 2008
- Flag Wars and Stone Saints
- In a new perspective on the formation of national identity in Central Europe, Wingfield analyzes what many historians have treated separately--the construction of the Czech and German nations--as a larger single phenomenon. Numerous illustrations show how people absorbed, on many levels, visual clues that shaped how they identified themselves and their groups.
- Hardcover October 2007
- Provincial Patriots
- From the Taiping Rebellion to the Chinese Communist movement, no province in China gave rise to as many reformers, military officers, and revolutionaries as did Hunan. Platt offers the first comprehensive study of why this province wielded such disproportionate influence. By putting provincial Hunan at the center of this narrative, Platt uncovers an unexpected and surprising story of modern China that sheds light on the current resurgence of regionalism in the country.
- Hardcover October 2007
- Witchfinders
- In 1645, two obscure gentlemen, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, exploited the anxiety and lawlessness of the time and initiated a brutal campaign to drive out the presumed evil in their midst. Malcolm Gaskill retells the chilling story of the most savage witch-hunt in English history. By the autumn of 1647 at least 250 people--mostly women--had been captured, interrogated, and hauled before the courts, with more than a hundred hanged.
- Paperback October 2007
- Laws of Men and Laws of Nature
- Are scientific expert witnesses partisans, or spokesmen for objective science? This ambiguity has troubled the relations between scientists and the legal system for more than 200 years. With deep learning and wry humor, Tal Golan tells stories of courtroom drama and confusion and media jeering on both sides of the Atlantic, until the start of the twenty-first century, as the courts still search for ways that will allow them to distinguish between good and bad science.
- Paperback September 2007
- That Neutral Island
- When the world descended into war in 1939, few European countries remained neutral; but of those that did, none provoked more controversy than Ireland. Where previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics, That Neutral Island mines deeper layers of experience. Stories, letters, and diaries illuminate this small country as it suffered rationing, censorship, the threat of invasion, and a strange detachment from the war.
- Hardcover September 2007
- Oil Empire
- At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian Empire ranked third among the world's oil-producing states, and accounted for five percent of global oil production. By 1918, the Central Powers did not have enough oil to maintain a modern military. How and why did the promise of oil fail Galicia (the province producing the oil) and the Empire? In a brilliantly conceived work, Alison Frank traces the interaction of technology, nationalist rhetoric, social tensions, provincial politics, and entrepreneurial vision in shaping the Galician oil industry.
- Paperback September 2007
- Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?
- When American reporter Henry Morton Stanley met Scottish missionary-explorer Dr. David Livingstone in 1871, his greeting was to take on mythological proportions. Drawing on films, children's books, games, songs, cartoons, and TV shows, this book reveals the many ways our culture has remembered Stanley's phrase, while tracking the birth of an Anglo-American Christian imperialism that still sets the world agenda today.
- Hardcover July 2007
- Guernica and Total War
- One of the most horrific innovations of the twentieth century was the deliberate strategy of total warfare. The first and most striking use of this measure came when the Basque hilltop town of Guernica was destroyed by the bombs of the German Condor. Patterson gives a graphic account of what happened on April 26, 1937, tracks the course of the Spanish Civil War, and explores how modern men and women respond to the threat of new warfare with new capacities for imagining aggression and death.
- Hardcover June 2007
- Comrades!
- Comrades! moves from Marx and Lenin to Mao and Castro and beyond to trace communism from its beginnings to the present day, offering vivid portraits of its protagonists and decisive events. Service looks not only at the high politics of communist regimes but also at the social conditions that led millions to support communism in so many countries, reaching the uncomfortable conclusion that although communism in its original form is now dying or dead, the poverty and injustice that enabled its rise are still alive.
- Hardcover May 2007
- Prague in Black
- Six months after the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany, Hitler's troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the first non-German territory to be occupied under Nazi rule. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its eventual consequences for the region.
- Hardcover May 2007
See also: All Books in HISTORY.