17th Century

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" - spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s - when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond....

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world....

New York Times bestselling author Laura Cumming tells the fascinating, little-known story of the massive explosion in Holland that killed Carel Fabritius, renowned painter of The Goldfinch and A View of Delft and nearly killed Johannes Vermeer—two of the greatest artists of the 17th century.

Why did England's one experiment in republican rule fail? In this fascinating history, Henry Reece explores the full story of the English republic's downfall.

A groundbreaking examination of the greatest event in history, the Scientific Revolution, and how it came to change the way we understand ourselves and our world....

England, 1651. Oliver Cromwell has defeated his royalist opponents in two civil wars, executed the Stuart King Charles I, laid waste to Ireland, and crushed the late king's son and his Scottish allies....

In 1632, an entire convent in the small French village of Loudun was apparently possessed by the devil....

In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today....

Between 1500 and 1800, the North Sea region overtook the Mediterranean as the most dynamic part of the world. At its core, the Anglo-Dutch relationship intertwined close alliance and fierce antagonism to intense creative effect....

Appointed to conquer the "crime capital of the world", the first police chief of Paris faces an epidemic of murder in the late 1600s....

Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the 200-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day....

As he explodes many accepted pirate myths (i.e. "walking the plank" is pure fiction), Cordingly replaces them with a truth that is more complex and often bloodier....

A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl....

It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company's flagship, was loaded with a king's ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java....

In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast....

It was 1786 when Arthur Phillip, an ambitious captain in the Royal Navy, was assigned the formidable task of organizing an expedition to Australia in order to establish a penal colony....

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than 300 daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island....

One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world....

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer....

Captain Alatriste is the story of a fictional 17th-century Spanish soldier who, after being wounded in battle during the Thirty Years' War, is forced to retire from the army....