Explore 60 of the world's most extraordinary and mysterious archaeological structures and locations to uncover fascinating insights into mankind's early understanding of the cosmos. 

Many ancient, even prehistoric, monuments and temples around the world show an amazingly sophisticated understanding of the heavens. They reflect this sacred knowledge in...

During the 1990s, as New York was transformed from a crumbling city into a vibrant metropolis, the New York Mets were anything but vibrant. Beginning in 1999, the team waged a battle to recapture the hearts of New York baseball fans from their crosstown rivals, and they came closer to succeeding than anyone dared dream. At the same time, mayor Rudy...

Who are the new Chinese intellectuals? In the wake of the crackdown on the 1989 democracy movement and the rapid marketization of the 1990s, a novel type of grassroots intellectual emerged. Instead of harking back to the traditional role of the literati or pronouncing on democracy and modernity like 1980s public intellectuals, they derive legitimacy from...

This special edition of Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, an official NASA publication, commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the July 20, 1969, Moon landing with a thrilling insider's view of the space program. Essays by participants — engineers, astronauts, and administrators — recall the program's unprecedented challenges. Written in direct...

Madame Marie Tussaud is known worldwide for the chain of wax museums she started over 200 hundred years ago. Less known is that her original wax models were often of the famous and infamous people she personally knew during and after the French Revolution. These were people like Voltaire, Robespierre, and Napoleon — people who changed the world. Even more...

Mount Uniacke, Acacia Grove, Winckworth, Saint's Rest, Spruce Tree Cottage. Ever wonder how Nova Scotia houses got their names? The better-known names are largely connected with prominent historical figures who resided in commodious homes with sprawling grounds, but the naming tradition was far more prevalent than that. In this book, the author explains...

When a man is tired of London he is tired of life…

The history of London is bound up with the infamous river that flows through its centre.

The Thames has witnessed the rise and fall of an Empire. The births and deaths of bloodthirsty rulers. And the rapid evolution of a thriving metropolis. It is both the giver of life to the city and the...

In the spirit of The Boys in the Boat comes the captivating true story of the Hawaiian cowboys who changed rodeo and the West forever. In August 1908, three unknown riders arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, their hats adorned with wildflowers, to compete in the world’s greatest rodeo. They had travelled 3,000 miles from Hawaii, where their ancestors had herded...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s name does not appear in any First Amendment treatise or casebook. And yet when the best-selling poet and proprietor of City Lights Books was indicted under California law for publishing and selling Allen Ginsberg’s poem, Howl, Ferglinghetti buttressed the tradition of dissident expression and ended an era when minds were still...

The Greatest Day in History charts the events leading up to Armistice Day 1918, the day the First World War finally came to an end. Everyone remembered where they were on 11 November 1918, from Marlene Dietrich in Berlin and Gandhi on his sick bed to Charles de Gaulle in a German prison camp.

Eamon de Valera was in Lincoln Gaol. The Kaiser was in...

The Middle Class is a canter through the history of the men and women who made modern Britain and who now, in greater numbers than ever, dominate the country. There are pauses to analyse their ideals, dreams, ambitions and tastes. The book opens with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and ends with Margaret Thatcher and her translation of middle-class values into...

Percy Sykes began his career with Army Intelligence in India. Their main concern was the threat to India of the Russian advances across Central Asia. In 1893 they sent Sykes into eastern Persia on the first of many expeditions. Always with his terrier and often with his sister or his wife, he rode over thousands of miles of unknown desert, marsh and...

A Mohawk Memoir from the War of 1812 presents the story of John Norton, or Teyoninhokarawen, an important war chief and political figure among the Grand River Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) in Upper Canada. Norton saw more action during the conflict than almost anyone else, being present at the fall of Detroit, the capture of Fort Niagara, the battles of...

Cecil Rhodes 'lived only for his schemes and enjoyed life only as a cannon ball enjoys space, travelling to its aim blindly and spreading ruin on its way. He was a great man, no doubt — a man who rendered immense service to his country, but humanity is not much indebted to him.' The time is ripe for a new biography of Cecil Rhodes: the hero of...

History of Italy and the Balkans also includes descriptions of related countries such as the Papal States and Malta. In total the book presents the histories of fourteen states. 

These books are designed as companion texts and when read together will give readers a good understanding of the important personalities and their contributions to European...

In this important new book, Paul T. Phillips argues that most professional historians – aside from a relatively small number devoted to theory and methodology – have concerned themselves with particular, specialized areas of research, thereby ignoring the fundamental questions of truth, morality, and meaning. This is less so in the thriving general...

Lies My Teacher Told Me is one of the most important—and successful—history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell...

A REMARKABLE TRUE-LIFE HEART OF DARKNESS

In 1868, Jack Renton, a teenage Scots sailor, was shanghaied in San Francisco. In 1876, he was rescued from captivity on the Pacific island of Malaita, home to a fearsome tribe of headhunters. After the rescue, in a sensational best-selling memoir, Renton recounted his eight-year adventure: how he jumped ship and...

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the gateway between the medieval world and the modern, centuries when the western societies moved from an age governed principally by religion and superstition to an age directed principally by reason and understanding. Although the worlds of science and philosophy took giant strides away from the medieval view...

For better or worse, what we are is often determined by our family; the events that occurred many years before we were born, and the choices that were made by our forebears are our inheritance - we are the inexorable product of family history. So it is with nations. The history of Great Britain has been largely defined by powerful and influential families...

'It shows the variety and depth of the men sent into harms way during World War II, something emphasised by the population of Stalag Luft III. Most of the Allied POWs were flyers, with all the technical, tactical and planning skills that profession requires. Such men are independent thinkers, craving open air and wide-open spaces, which meant than an...

Modern humans have come a long way in the seventy thousand years they’ve walked the earth. Art, science, culture, trade—on the evolutionary food chain, we’re true winners. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and sometimes—just occasionally—we’ve managed to truly f*ck things up.

Weaving together history, science, politics and pop culture, Humans offers...

A witty history of the state that's always in the news, for everything from alligator attacks to zany crimes.

There's an old clip of Bugs Bunny sawing the entire state of Florida off the continent—and every single time a news story springs up about some shenanigans in Florida, someone on the internet posts it in response. Why are we so ready to wave goodbye...

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An internationally bestselling, fresh, and entertaining take on the 2,000-year history of Germany—a country at the heart of the West’s survival

As the West...

Murder by poison alarmed, enthralled, and in many ways encapsulated the Victorian age. Linda Stratmann's dark and splendid social history reveals the nineteenth century as a gruesome battleground where poisoners went head-to-head with authorities who strove to detect poisons, control their availability, and bring the guilty to justice. She corrects many...

The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in...

From the Charge of the Light Brigade to Scott of the Antarctic and beyond, it seems as if glorious disaster and valiant defeat have been essential aspects of the British national character for the past two centuries. In this fascinating book, historian Stephanie Barczewski argues that Britain's embrace of heroic failure initially helped to gloss over the...