Profiles in History

Beginning with Caesar’s legendary political assassination, immortalized in art and literature through the ages, Greg Woolf delivers a remarkable meditation on Caesar’s murder as it echoes down the corridors of history, affecting notions and acts of political violence to our day.

The first use of total warfare came when the Basque town of Guernica was destroyed by the bombs of the German Condor. Patterson recounts the events of 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.

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.

Socrates’s death in 399 BCE has figured largely in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity—many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In this book, Emily Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination.

Bonfire Night, observed annually to memorialize the Gunpowder Plot, is one of England’s most festive occasions. Why has the memory of this act of treason and terrorism persisted for 400 years? Sharpe unravels the web of religion and politics that gave rise to the plot, and wittily shows how celebration of that night has changed over the centuries.

David Horspool sees Alfred as inextricably linked to the legends and stories that surround him, and rather than attempting to separate the myth from the “reality,” he explores how both came together to provide a historical figure that was all things to all men.

In a style that is more detective story than conventional biography, Williams explores the multiple narratives of Cook’s death. In short, Williams examines the story of Cook’s progress from obscurity to fame and, eventually, to infamy—a story that, until now, has never been fully told.

On Easter Monday 1916, while much of Dublin holidayed at the seaside and placed bets at the horse races, a disciplined group of Irish Volunteers seized the city’s General Post Office in what would become the defining act of rebellion against British rule—and the most significant single event in modern Irish history. This book unravels the events in and around the GPO during the Easter Rising of 1916, revealing the twists and turns that the myth of the GPO has undergone in the last century.