Books
History
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Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC: Athens to London 1894-2012
The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC is a dramatic account of the history of the world’s foremost sporting spectacle. Read more...
Rule and Ruin
As the 2012 elections approach, the Republican Party is rocketing rightward away from the center of public opinion. Republicans in Congress threaten to shut down the government and force a U.S. debt default. Read more...
The Right Kind of History
A ground-breaking account of the teaching of history in England's state schools from the early 1900s to the present day, this accessible study is a major contribution to the current debates about the place of history in the classroom and the national curriculum. Read more...
Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia
The autocratic rule of both tsar and church in imperial Russia gave rise not only to a revolutionary movement in the nineteenth century but also to a crisis of meaning among members of the intelligentsia. Read more...
John Brown Still Lives!
From his obsession with the founding principles of the United States to his cold-blooded killings in the battle over slavery's expansion, John Brown forced his countrymen to reckon with America's violent history, its checkered progress toward racial equality, and its resistance to substantive change. Read more...
Charles Simeon: An ordinary pastor of extraordinary influence
Pastor of but one church all his working life in a small university town, Charles Simeon sowed seeds that continue to reproduce themselves throughout the world. Read more...
After Adam Smith
Few issues are more central to our present predicaments than the relationship between economics and politics. Read more...
Herculaneum: Past and Future
In AD 79, the volcano Vesuvius erupted, burying the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and rock, and leaving them remarkably well preserved for centuries. Read more...
Reading the Ruins
From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist apparitions, the bombsites of London were both unsettling and inspiring terrains. Yet throughout the years prior to the Second World War, British culture was already filled with ruins and fragments. Read more...
Colonizing Southampton
This book concerns the emergence and impact of the summer colony in the village of Southampton, New York, between the years 1870 and 1900, particularly the often fraught relations between the area’s wealthy resort population and its year-round residents. Read more...
The Pakistan Cauldron
Pakistan's stability is key to regional peace, to the future of Afghanistan, and to the global struggle against violent extremism. Understanding Pakistani politics is crucial to working with this challenging American ally. Read more...
A Revolution of the Mind
Democracy, free thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, sexual and racial equality--these values have firmly entered the mainstream in the decades since they were enshrined in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights Read more...
Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England
This groundbreaking study of coinage in early medieval England is the first to take account of the very significant additions to the corpus of southern English coins discovered in recent years and to situate this evidence within the wider historical context of Anglo-Saxon England and its continental neighbours Read more...
Shi'a Islam in Colonial India
Interest in Shi'ism Islam has increased greatly in recent years, although Shi'ism in the Indian subcontinent has remained largely underexplored. Read more...
The French Idea of History
"A fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat . . . the champion of the hardest, narrowest, and most inflexible dogmatism . . . part learned doctor, part inquisitor, part executioner." Thus did Émile Faguet describe Joseph-Marie de Maistre (1753–1821) in his 1899 history of nineteenth-century thought. This Read more...
The Closed Commercial State
This book presents an important new account of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Closed Commercial State, a major early nineteenth-century development of Rousseau and Kant's political thought. Read more...
States of Credit
States of Credit provides the first comprehensive look at the joint development of representative assemblies and public borrowing in Europe during the medieval and early modern eras. Read more...
St John's College, Cambridge: A History
Within a generation of its foundation on the site of a decayed hospital at the behest of Lady Margaret Beaufort, England's queen mother, the College of St John the Evangelist had established itself as one of the kingdom's foremost educational establishments: in the words of one notable contemporary, as 'an university within it selfe' indeed. Read more...
Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity
How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity is a brilliant exploration of how the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Read more...
Tommy this an’ Tommy that
There is nothing new about the military covenant, a freshly minted term for something that’s been around for as long as soldiering itself. Read more...
Tea: A history of the drink that changed the world
Tea is a phenomenon that has changed the attitudes of one nation to another, exposed divisions of class and race, ossified social behaviour, shaped the ethics of business, influenced relations between management and labour and led to significant advances in medicine. Read more...
Afghanistan: Land of Conflict and Beauty
John Griffiths delves into the history, culture, social fabric, internal politics and economy of this intriguing and backward country. Read more...
A Social History of England, 900-1200
The years between 900 and 1200 saw transformative social change in Europe, including the creation of extensive town-dwelling populations and the proliferation of feudalised elites and bureaucratic monarchies. Read more...
The Inner Life of Empires
They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. Read more...
The Carolingian World
At its height, the Carolingian empire spanned a million square kilometres of western Europe – from the English Channel to central Italy and northern Spain, and from the Atlantic to the fringes of modern Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Read more...
Familes and States in Western Europe
This collection of essays traces the relationship between families and states in the major countries of Western Europe since 1945, examining the power of states to shape family life and the capacity of families to influence states. Read more...
The Barbed-Wire University
The conventional picture of life in an Allied POW camp conjures up images of daring escapes (Colditz and The Great Escape) or the terrible brutality of the Far East (Bridge on the River Kwai). Read more...
The Production of Books in England 1350–1500
Between roughly 1350 and 1500, the English vernacular became established as a language of literary, bureaucratic, devotional and controversial writing. Read more...
Changes of State
This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. Read more...
Pashmina: The Kashmir Shawl and Beyond
The classic Kashmir shawl is among the most exquisite textile woven, the product of consummate skill and artistry applied to one of the world's most delicate fibres. Read more...
Fatal Colours
The Battle of Towton 1461 was unique in its ferocity and brutality, as the armies of two kings of England engaged with murderous weaponry and in appalling conditions to conclude the first War of the Roses. Read more...
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
For over three thousand years, the Mediterranean Sea has been one of the great centres of world civilisation. Read more...
Rome Across Time and Space
Medieval Rome was uniquely important, both as a physical city and as an idea with immense cultural capital, encapsulating the legacy of the ancient Empire, the glorious world of the martyrs and the triumph of Christian faith. Read more...
Bismarck: A Life
This is the life story of one of the most interesting human beings who ever lived. Read more...
Ely: Bishops and Diocese, 1109-2009
The diocese of Ely, formed out of the huge diocese of Lincoln, was established in 1109 in St Etheldreda's Isle of Ely, and the ancient Abbey became Ely Cathedral Priory. Read more...
Russia's Cold War
The phrase 'Cold War' was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on world politics: 'We may be heading not for a general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.' Read more...
Most Secret: The Hidden History of Orford Ness
Orford Ness was so secret a place that most people have never even heard of it. Read more...
Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel
Discoverers of the Universe tells the gripping story of William Herschel, the brilliant, fiercely ambitious, emotionally complex musician and composer who became court astronomer to Britain's King George III, and of William's sister, Caroline, who assisted him in his observations of the night sky and became an accomplished astronomer in her own right. Read more...
Cambridge's West Side Story
The transformation of the landscape of west Cambridge began with the enclosure in 1802/5 of the 1,300-acre Parish of St Giles, one of the two great open fields of the medieval Borough. Read more...
Oberammergau in the Nazi Era
The Bavarian mountain village of Oberammergau is famous for its decennial passion play. The play began as an articulation of the villagers' strong Catholic piety, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed into a considerable commercial enterprise. Read more...
Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe
Dressing Up shows why clothes made history and history can be about clothes. Read more...
She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth
When Edward VI - Henry VIII’s longed-for son - died in 1553, extraordinarily, there was no one left to claim the title King of England. Read more...
Britain and the Olympic Games
Britain and the Olympic Games traces the history of Britain’s love affair with the Olympic Games and shows exactly why the Olympic movement was re-born here. Read more...
The 1972 Munich Olympics
The 1972 Munich Olympics, remembered almost exclusively for the devastating terrorist attack on the Israeli team, were intended to showcase the New Germany and replace lingering memories of the Third Reich. Read more...
The Yorkshire Mary Rose
The ship 'General Carleton' was built in Whitby in 1777 and sank off the coast of Poland in 1785. Read more...
Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History
Fireworks are synonymous with celebration in the twenty-first century. Read more...
Off Duty!
An illustrated account by Ex-Wren Anne Lewis-Smith of the fun had whilst 'off-duty' by the Wrens who worked behind the scenes at Bletchley Park during World War II. Read more...
The Christian West and its Singers
The tradition of Western music has become the most influential in the world. Read more...
Sidney Sussex College: A History
Richard Humphreys, an alumnus of Sidney and an enthusiast for all aspects of its history, has unearthed fascinating facts, people and connections that present the life of an extraordinary community through four hundred years of English history. Read more...
Royston Cave: Used by Saints or Sinners?
Royston Cave-Used by Saints or Sinners? puts Royston’s unique cave, so remarkably engraved with religious figures, pagan and Masonic symbols, into its historical context. Read more...
Living in Arcadia
In Paris in 1954, a young man named André Baudry founded Arcadie, an organization for “homophiles” that would become the largest of its kind that has ever existed in France, lasting nearly thirty years. Read more...
The Defence of the Realm
To mark the centenary of its foundation, the British Security Service, MI5, has opened its archives to an independent historian, the first time any of the world's leading intelligence or security services has taken such a step. Read more...
The Evolution of the Modern Workplace
The last twenty-five years have seen the world of work transformed in Britain. Read more...
Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities
The contribution of the Ancient Greeks to modern western culture is incalculable. Read more...
Inside the Kingdom
Saudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox: it sits atop some of the richest oil deposits in the world, and yet the country's roiling disaffection produced sixteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. Read more...
The Dawn of Green
Located in the heart of England’s Lake District, Thirlmere, with its placid sheen, surrounding evergreens, and apparent lack of pollution or development, seems to epitomize the unadulterated bucolic ideal. Read more...
In Sight of America
When restrictive immigration laws were introduced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, they involved new requirements for photographing and documenting immigrants--regulations for visually inspecting race and health. Read more...
Before the Deluge
Ever since the French Revolution, Madame de Pompadour's comment, "Après moi, le déluge" (after me, the deluge), has looked like a callous if accurate prophecy of the political cataclysms that began in 1789. Read more...
God’s Philosophers
This is a powerful and a thrilling narrative history revealing the roots of modern science in the medieval world. Read more...
Friends and Enemies
Friends and Enemies delivers a lucid and provocative history of one of the world’s largest and most successful political organizations, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Read more...
From Cloisters to Cup Finals
Charterhouse football goes back to the days of the Hospital in the 17th century. Read more...
The Successes and Sacrifices of the British Army in 1914
The form of warfare changed radically and unexpectedly in 1914, and as a result large armies became deadlocked and suffered disastrous losses in their attempts to advance from their lines of primitive trenches. Read more...
Rebel Land
What is the meaning of love and death in a remote, forgotten, impossibly conflicted part of the world? Read more...
Pompeii
The ruins of Pompeii destroyed by Vesuvius in AD 79 offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman empire. Read more...
Khrushchev's Cold Summer
Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. Read more...
Bluestockings
In 1869, when five women enrolled at university for the first time in British history, the average female brain was thought to be 150 grams lighter than a man's. Read more...
