Revolution History

The true story for fans of the PBS Masterpiece series Victoria, this page-turning biography reveals the real woman behind the myth: a bold, glamorous, unbreakable queen—a Victoria for our times. Drawing on previously unpublished papers, this stunning portrait is a story of love and heartbreak...

From the bestselling author of The Sleepwalkers comes an epic history of the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe, and the charismatic figures who propelled them forward, with deep resonance and frightening parallels to today. As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the...

Between 1485 and 1688, England became a Protestant country under Henry VIII. His daughter, Elizabeth I, battled for succession and supremacy at home, and the discovery of 'the round world' enabled a vast continent across the Atlantic to be explored. While this new era was spawning the beginnings of modern America, England was engaged in a bloody civil war and sustained a Republican experiment under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell.

In No Useless Mouth, Rachel B. Herrmann argues that Native Americans and formerly enslaved black colonists ultimately lost the battle against hunger and the larger struggle for power because white British and United States officials curtailed the abilities of men and women to fight hunger on their own terms. By describing three interrelated behaviors - food diplomacy, victual imperialism, and victual warfare - the book shows that, during this tumultuous period, hunger prevention efforts offered strategies to claim power, maintain communities, and keep rival societies at bay.

Hungary is more than just vampire stories and cheesy violin-playing waiters named “Laszlo”. It has a rich history that goes back to the first wild Magyar horsemen, who arrived there in the late ninth century. For a time, the Magyars were both mercenaries and raiders, a horse-bound version of the Vikings in France and Britain. They terrorized the populations of Austria, Germany, and even Italy and eastern France. After the Austro-Hungarian defeat in WWI, Hungary became an independent nation.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870-1924) is better known by his alias Lenin. A Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist, he served as the head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia became the Soviet Union, a one-party state governed by the Communist Party.

From the author of the acclaimed history The Island at the Center of the World, an intimate new epic of the American Revolution that reinforces its meaning for today. With America's founding principles being debated today as never before, Russell Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. Drawing on new sources, he weaves the lives of six people into a seamless narrative that casts fresh light on the range of experience in colonial America on the cusp of revolution.

It's time to step back into history and learn about the American Revolution. In this new and captivating book, you’ll discover what made the American Revolution so special and how it still influences us today.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Carter’s national security advisor and one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers—from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today. Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key...

In a book that “sets a new standard in economic history” (Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist), acclaimed economic historian Victoria Bateman tells the story of how women made the world rich How many female entrepreneurs, economic revolutionaries, merchants, and industrialists...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A “richly imagined biography” (The New York Times Book Review) of General Alex Dumas, who rose from slavery to command vast armies in the French Revolutionary Wars—and whose exploits were immortalized in his son’s novels The Count...

Drawing on the diaries of one woman in 18th-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier. Between 1785 and 1812, a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine.

This "provocative study" looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class (the New Yorker). The era didn't just bring about misery and poverty. On the contrary, Emma Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom.

An astonishing retelling of 20th-century history from the Ottoman perspective, delivering profound new insights into World War I and the contemporary Middle East. Between 1911 and 1922, a series of wars would engulf the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, in which the central conflict, of course, was World War I - a story we think we know well. As Sean McMeekin shows us in this revelatory new history of what he calls the "wars of the Ottoman succession", we know far less than we think.

The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. Our nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.

The vibrant, sprawling saga of Empress Maria Theresa—one of the most renowned women rulers in history—and three of her extraordinary daughters, including Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen of France. Out of the thrilling and tempestuous eighteenth century comes the sweeping family saga of...

This panoramic book shows how the Greek Revolution was a demographic upheaval more consequential than the overthrow of a ruler. Drawing on Ottoman sources together with archival evidence from Greece, Britain, France, Russia, and Switzerland, the book reframes the birth of modern Greece within the imperial history of the global nineteenth century.

From the cassoulet that won a war to the crêpe that doomed Napoleon, from the rebellions sparked by bread and salt to the new cuisines forged by empire, the history of France is intimately entwined with its gastronomic pursuits. A witty exploration of the facts and legends surrounding some of the most popular French foods and wines by a French cheesemonger and an American academic, A Bite-Sized History of France tells the compelling and often surprising story of France from the Roman era to modern times.

In this “extraordinary and brilliant book” (Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves), a prize-winning historian offers the definitive account of the sixteenth-century uprising that revolutionized Europe The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the...

A paradigm-shifting work that revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science.