18th Century

In this vivid and compelling narrative, the Seven Years' War - long seen as a mere backdrop to the American Revolution - takes on a whole new significance. Relating the history of the war as it developed, Anderson shows how the complex array of forces brought into conflict helped both....

Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The History and Legacy of the Haitian Revolution’s Most Famous Leaders chronicles how the only successful slave uprising came about and examines the backgrounds of the men who led it....

General Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar—because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers....

The history of China as a single nation began more than 2,000 years ago, when Qin Shi Huangdi first united a group of warring kingdoms into a single empire....

From one of the truly preeminent historians of our time, this is a landmark book chronicling the French Revolution. Simon Schama deftly refutes the contemporary notion that the French Revolution represented an uprising of the oppressed poor against a decadent aristocracy and corrupt court....

Liberty's First Crisis, writer Charles Slack tells the story of the 1798 Sedition Act, the crucial moment when high ideals met real-world politics and the country's future hung in the balance....

For more than three and a half years, from 1779 to 1783, the tiny territory of Gibraltar was besieged and blockaded, on land and at sea, by the overwhelming forces of Spain and France....

Revealing the democratic and economic forces propelling history's most colorful criminals, The Invisible Hook establishes pirates' trailblazing relevance to the contemporary world....

How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture....

Explore the triumph and terror that existed in France during the French Revolution. Review the causes and the lasting effects brought about during this tumultuous time period when the common people of France struggled to remake their world upon the cornerstone of liberty....