- Apocalypses
- Eugen Weber
- Apocalyptic visions and prophecies from Zarathustra to yesterday form the panorama in Eugen Weber's profound and elegant book. Beginning with the ancients of the West and the Orient, Weber finds that an absolute belief in the end of time, when good would do final battle with evil, was omnipresent. From this more than two millennia history, Weber redresses the historical and religious amnesia that has consigned the study of apocalypses and millennial thought to the ash heap of thought and belief.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000
- Atlas of the Year 1000
- John Man
- Atlas of the Year 1000 takes readers on a voyage of discovery around the world at the turn of the last millennium, when for the first time the world was in essence a unity, when peoples reached out to create links and put isolated cultures unwittingly in touch. John Man vividly captures the epochal events, and depicts the colorful peoples that defined the world's mix of stability and change, of isolation and contact. In an immensely learned portrayal, he traces enduring cultural strands that became part of the world as we know it today.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- Benjamin Franklin's Science
- I. Bernard Cohen
- I. Bernard Cohen, the eminent historian of science and the principal elucidator of Franklin's scientific work, examines Franklin's scientific activities in fields ranging from heat to astronomy. He provides masterly accounts of the theoretical background of Franklin's science (especially his study of Newton), the experiments he performed, and their influence throughout Europe and the United States.
- Hardcover 1990 / Paperback 1996
- The Black Book of Communism
- Stéphane Courtois
- Nicolas Werth
- Jean-Louis Panné
- Andrzej Paczkowski
- Karel Bartosek
- Jean-Louis Margolin
- Mark Kramer, Editor
- Jonathan Murphy, Translator
- This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. The authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.
- Hardcover 1999
- China
- John King Fairbank
- Merle Goldman
- John King Fairbank was the West's doyen on China, and this book is the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast ancient civilization. The distinguished historian Merle Goldman brings the book up to date and provides an epilogue discussing the changes in contemporary China that will shape the nation in the years to come.
- Paperback 2006
- Comrades!
- Robert Service
- 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 2007
- Contested Lands
- Sumantra Bose
- The search for durable peace in lands torn by ethno-national conflict is among the most urgent issues shaping our global future. Looking at the recent and current peace processes in Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus, and Sri Lanka Bose addresses the question of how peace can be made, and kept, between warring groups with seemingly incompatible claims.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Declaration of Independence
- David Armitage
- Not only did the Declaration announce the entry of the United States onto the world stage, it became the model for other countries to follow. This unique global perspective demonstrates the singular role of the United States document as a founding statement of our modern world.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
- Eve's Herbs
- John M. Riddle
- In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve's Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times?
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999
- Fatal Misconception
- Matthew Connelly
- Fatal Misconception is the disturbing story of our quest to remake ourselves by policing national borders and breeding better people. Supported by affluent countries, foundations, and non-governmental organizations, the population control movement experimented with ways to limit population growth. With its transnational scope and exhaustive research into such archives as Planned Parenthood and the newly opened Vatican Secret Archives, Connelly’s critique uncovers the cost inflicted by a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry and urges renewed commitment to the reproductive rights of all people.
- Hardcover 2008
- Fires of Hatred
- Norman M. Naimark
- Of all the horrors of the last century--perhaps the bloodiest century of the past millennium--ethnic cleansing ranks among the worst. The term burst forth in public discourse in the spring of 1992 as a way to describe Serbian attacks on the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but as this landmark book attests, ethnic cleansing is neither new nor likely to cease in our time.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- Forces of Habit
- David T. Courtwright
- A global history of the acquisition of progressively more potent means of altering ordinary waking consciousness, this book is the first to provide the big picture of the discovery, interchange, and exploitation of the planet's psychoactive resources, from tea and kola to opiates and amphetamines.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- From the Other Shore
- Andre Liebich
- This book is an inquiry into the possibilities of politics in exile. Russian Mensheviks, driven out of Soviet Russia and their party stripped of legal existence, functioned abroad in the West for an entire generation. For several years they also continued to operate underground in Soviet Russia. Bereft of the usual advantages of political actors, the Mensheviks succeeded in impressing their views upon social democratic parties and Western thinking about the Soviet Union.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999
- Historical Atlas of Islam
- Malise Ruthven
- Azim Nanji, With
- From the birth of the prophet Muhammed to the independence of post-Soviet Muslim states in Central Asia, this accessible and informative atlas explains the historical evolution of Islamic societies. Rich in narrative and visual detail that illuminates the story of Islamic civilization, this is an indispensable resource to anyone interested in world history and religion.
- Hardcover 2004
- A History of Women in the West, Volume V, Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century
- Georges Duby, Series Editor
- Series edited by Michelle Perrot
- Françoise Thébaud, Editor
- Arthur Goldhammer, Translator
- This fifth volume in the world-acclaimed series brings the history of women up to the present, placing it in the context of momentous events and profound social changes that have marked our time.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- A History of Young People in the West, Volume I, Ancient and Medieval Rites of Passage
- Giovanni Levi, Editor
- Jean-Claude Schmitt, Editor
- Translated by Camille Naish
- However swiftly it passes, youth is always with us, a perpetual passing phase, an apprenticeship to the myriad ways of the world, subject of panegyrics and diatribes, romances and cautionary tales from antiquity to our day. This two-volume history is the first to present a comprehensive account of what youth has been in the West and what it has meant through the ages. Brought together by Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, a company of gifted historians and social scientists traces the changing character and status of young people from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to the lycèes of modern France, from the sweatshops of the industrial revolution to the crucibles of Nazi youth.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999
- A History of Young People in the West, Volume II, Stormy Evolution to Modern Times
- Giovanni Levi, Editor
- Jean-Claude Schmitt, Editor
- However swiftly it passes, youth is always with us, a perpetual passing phase, an apprenticeship to the myriad ways of the world, subject of panegyrics and diatribes, romances and cautionary tales from antiquity to our day. This two-volume history is the first to present a comprehensive account of what youth has been in the West and what it has meant through the ages. Brought together by Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, a company of gifted historians and social scientists traces the changing character and status of young people from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to the lycèes of modern France, from the sweatshops of the industrial revolution to the crucibles of Nazi youth.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999
- Homosexuality and Civilization
- Louis Crompton
- How have major civilizations of the last two millennia treated people who were attracted to their own sex? In a narrative tour de force, Louis Crompton chronicles the lives and achievements of homosexual men and women alongside a darker history of persecution, as he compares the Christian West with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006
- A Hundred Horizons
- Sugata Bose
- A Hundred Horizons takes us to the shores of the Indian Ocean, in a brilliant reinterpretation of how culture developed and history was made at the height of the British raj. Sugata Bose explores the intricate social and economic webs of these shores from 1850 to 1950, finding evidence of the interdependence of the peoples of the lands beyond the horizon, from the Middle East to East Africa to Southeast Asia. This book reconstructs how a region's culture, economy, politics, and imagination are woven together in time and place.
- Hardcover 2006
- Hunger
- James Vernon
- Rigorously researched, Hunger: A Modern History draws together social, cultural, and political history, to show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements of the welfare state in Britain, as well as with the development of international institutions committed to the conquest of world hunger.
- Hardcover 2007
- Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War
- Vladislav Zubok
- Constantine Pleshakov
- Covering the volatile period from 1945 to 1962, Zubok and Pleshakov explore the personalities and motivations of the key people who directed Soviet political life and shaped Soviet foreign policy. They begin with the fearsome figure of Joseph Stalin, who was driven by the dual dream of a Communist revolution and a global empire. They reveal the scope and limits of Stalin's ambitions by taking us into the world of his closest subordinates, the ruthless and unimaginative foreign minister Molotov and the Party's chief propagandist, Zhdanov, a man brimming with hubris and missionary zeal. The authors expose the machinations of the much-feared secret police chief Beria and the party cadre manager Malenkov, who tried but failed to set Soviet policies on a different course after Stalin's death. Finally, they document the motives and actions of the self-made and self-confident Nikita Khrushchev, full of Russian pride and party dogma, who overturned many of Stalin's policies with bold strategizing on a global scale. The authors show how, despite such attempts to change Soviet diplomacy, Stalin's legacy continued to divide Germany and Europe, and led the Soviets to the split with Maoist China and to the Cuban missile crisis.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1997
- Interpreting Late Antiquity
- G. W. Bowersock, Editor
- Peter Brown, Editor
- Oleg Grabar, Editor
- In these eleven in-depth essays, drawn from the award-winning reference work Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, an international cast of experts provides essential information and fresh perspectives on this period's culture and history.
- Paperback 2001
- Keeping Together in Time
- William H. McNeill
- One of the most widely read and respected historians in America pursues the possibility that coordinated rhythmic movement--and the shared feelings it evokes--has been a powerful force in holding human groups together. As he has done for historical phenomena as diverse as warfare, plague, and the pursuit of power, William H. McNeill brings a dazzling breadth and depth of knowledge to his study.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1997
- Late Antiquity
- G. W. Bowersock, Editor
- Peter Brown, Editor
- Oleg Grabar, Editor
- In eleven comprehensive essays and more than 500 encyclopedic entries, an international cast of experts provides the latest scholarship and fresh perspectives on the history and culture of late antiquity, an era marked by the rise of two world religions, unprecedented political upheavals that remade the map of the known world, and the creation of art of enduring glory. This intriguing era emerges completely and clearly, viewed from new vantage points, in a guide that will be enjoyed by scholars and general readers alike.
- Hardcover 1999
- Maize and Grace
- James C. McCann
- Sometime around 1500 A.D., an African farmer planted a maize seed imported from the New World. That act set in motion the remarkable saga of one of the world's most influential crops--one that would transform the future of Africa and of the Atlantic world. The recent spread of maize has been alarmingly fast, with implications largely overlooked by the media and policymakers. McCann's compelling history offers insight into the profound influence of a single crop on African culture, health, technological innovation, and the future of the world's food supply.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- Modern Peoplehood
- John Lie
- Far from being transhistorical and transcultural phenomena, race, ethnicity, and nation, Lie argues, are modern notions--modernity here associated with the rise of the modern state, the industrial economy, and Enlightenment ideas. Not only is the state responsible for the development and nurturing of feelings of belonging associated with ethnic, racial, and national identity, it is also responsible for racial and ethnic conflict, even genocide.
- Hardcover 2004
- The Palestinian People
- Baruch Kimmerling
- Joel S. Migdal
- In a timely reminder of how the past informs the present, Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal offer an authoritative account of the history of the Palestinian people from their modern origins to the Oslo peace process and beyond. They unravel what went right--and what went wrong--in the Oslo peace process, and what lessons we can draw about the forces that help to shape a people. The authors present a balanced, insightful, and sobering look at the realities of creating peace in the Middle East.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2003
- Pattern and Repertoire in History
- Bertrand M. Roehner
- Tony Syme
- The aim of this book is to analyze clusters of similar "elementary" occurrences that serve as the building blocks of more global events. Making connections between seemingly unrelated case studies, Roehner and Syme apply scientific methodology to the analysis of history. Their book identifies the recurring patterns of behavior that shape the histories of different countries separated by vast stretches of time and space. Taking advantage of a broad wealth of historical evidence, the authors decipher what may be seen as a kind of genetic code of history.
- Hardcover 2002
- Power and Protest
- Jeremi Suri
- In a brilliantly conceived book, Suri puts the tumultuous 1960s into a truly international perspective in the first study to examine the connections between great power diplomacy and global social protest. He examines the decade through leaders and protesters on three continents, including Mao Zedong, Charles de Gaulle, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- Reliving Golgotha
- Richard C. Trexler
- In Reliving Golgotha, Richard Trexler brings an important new perspective to religious spectacle in an engrossing exploration of the annual passion play at Iztapalapa, the largest and poorest borough of Mexico City. After tracing the history of European passion theater, Trexler examines the process by which representations of the passion were established in the Americas, especially in New Spain.
- Hardcover 2003
- The Ruin of Kasch
- Roberto Calasso
- William Weaver, Translator
- Stephen Sartorelli, Translator
- In this brilliant work, Roberto Calasso cracks the code of what Baudelaire named the Modern--the increasingly murderous period from the French Revolution to the end of World War II. From Talleyrand's France and the legendary African city of Kasch, to Lenin's Russia and the killing fields of Cambodia, Calasso leads us along an enticing maze of mythology, literature, art, and science to the pulsing heart of civilization, where he deciphers the deepest secrets of history.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- The Sixties Unplugged
- Gerard J. DeGroot
- This book revisits the Sixties we forgot or somehow failed to witness. In a kaleidoscopic global tour of the decade, DeGroot reminds us that the “Ballad of the Green Beret” outsold “Give Peace a Chance,” that the Students for a Democratic Society were outnumbered by Young Americans for Freedom, that revolution was always a pipe dream, and that the Sixties belong to Reagan and de Gaulle more than to Kennedy and Dubcek.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Spirit of Capitalism
- Liah Greenfeld
- The Spirit of Capitalism answers a fundamental question of economics: what are the reasons (rather than just the conditions) for sustained economic growth? Liah Greenfeld focuses on the problem of motivation behind the epochal change in behavior, which from the sixteenth century on has reoriented one economy after another from subsistence to profit, transforming the nature of economic activity. A detailed analysis of the development of economic consciousness in England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States allows her to argue that the motivation behind the modern, growth-oriented economy was nationalism.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
- The Story of 0
- Michele Sharon Jaffe
- This work unfolds the idea of "nothing" out of a Titian painting of Danaë and the shower of gold. Jaffee's philological and pictorial argument links, across several languages, such seemingly disparate concepts as money, coins, mothers (through the mint's matrix), subjects, courtiers, prostitutes (through etymologies that join minting, standing-under, standing-for), ciphers, codes, and the codex form. This ambitious book is a cultural history of the "cipher" zero as code and as nothing, as the absence of value and the place-holder constructing value. It traces the wide-ranging implications of "nothing"--not only in mathematics but also in literature.
- Paperback 1999 / Hardcover 1999
- The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan
- Edited by Robert D. Crews
- Edited by Amin Tarzi
- The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan explores the paradox at the center of a challenging phenomenon: how has a seemingly anachronistic band of religious zealots managed to retain a tenacious foothold in the struggle for Afghanistan's future? Grounding their analysis in a deep understanding of the country's past, leading scholars of Afghan history, politics, society, and culture show how the Taliban was less an attempt to revive a medieval theocracy than a dynamic, complex, and adaptive force rooted in the history of Afghanistan and shaped by modern international politics.
- Hardcover 2008
- That Neutral Island
- Clair Wills
- 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 2007
- Timewalkers
- Clive Gamble
- Gamble reconsiders the remarkable record of geographical expansion that began with the early hominids of sub-Saharan Africa. Through this astonishing dispersal of humans, which exceeds that of all other mammals, he traces calculated responses to variations in climate and environment.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- The Travelers' World
- Harry Liebersohn
- An unforgettable voyage filled with delightful characters, dramatic encounters, and rich cultural details, The Travelers' World heralds a moment of intellectual preparation for the modern global era. Harry Liebersohn examines the transformation of global knowledge during the great age of scientific exploration. We now travel effortlessly to distant places, but the questions about perception, truth, and knowledge that these intercontinental mediators faced still resonate.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
- The Two Princes of Calabar
- Randy J. Sparks
- 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.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2008
- A View to a Death in the Morning
- Matt Cartmill
- A View to a Death in the Morning shows us how hunting has figured in the Western imagination from the myth of Artemisto the tale of Bambi. This richly illustrated book will captivate readers on every side of the dilemma, from the most avid hunters to their most vehement opponents to those who simply wonder about the importance of hunting in human nature.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds
- Kurt A. Raaflaub, Editor
- Nathan Rosenstein, Editor
- A unique, multi-authored social history of war from the third millennium B.C.E. to the tenth century C.E. in the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Europe (Egypt, Achaemenid Persia, Greece, the Hellenistic World, the Roman Republic and Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the early Islamic World, and early Medieval Europe), with parallel studies of Mesoamerica (the Maya and Aztecs) and East Asia (ancient China, medieval Japan). The product of a colloquium at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, this volume offers a broadly based, comparative examination of war and military organization in their complex interactions with social, economic, and political structures as well as cultural practices.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- Year of the Heroic Guerrilla
- Robert V. Daniels
- From Paris to Peking, from Saigon to Washington, the pillars of the postwar world tottered on the brink of collapse in 1968. Year of the Heroic Guerrilla is the first global analysis of that universal upheaval, from the Tet offensive and the abdication of Lyndon Johnson to the "cultural revolution" in China and the convention and riots in Mayor Daley's Chicago.
- Paperback 1996