Text: English, German (translation)

Francophone intellectuals writing in the lead-up to the decolonisation were faced with an impossible dilemma. How could they redefine their culture, and the 'humanity' they felt had been denied by the colonial project, in terms that did not replicate the...

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman.The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a...

From the award-winning author of A Splendid Exchange, a fascinating new history of financial and religious mass manias over the past five centuries "We are the apes who tell stories," writes William Bernstein. "And no matter how misleading the narrative,...

What is fame? A name? A face? The "it" in "making it"? In this wide-ranging and ambitious book, Leo Braudy traces the evolving definition of fame from the time of Homer to the present. As Braudy points out, fame is far from just a 20th-century obsession:...

A bold new history showing that the fear of Communism was a major factor in the outbreak of World War IIThe Spectre of War looks at a subject we thought we knew—the roots of the Second World War—and upends our assumptions with a masterful new...

The critical story of thirteen empires, showing their key role in the foundation of today’s global civilization. For over five hundred years, empires have been a feature of the political landscape, and today, many contemporary conflicts resonate with...

Throughout Western history, there have been those who felt compelled to share a dissenting opinion on public matters, while still hoping to avoid the social, political, and even criminal consequences for exercising free speech. In this collection of...

How competing visions of world order in the 1940s gave rise to the modern concept of globalismDuring and after the Second World War, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects...

How Enlightenment Europe rediscovered its identity by measuring itself against the great civilizations of AsiaDuring the long eighteenth century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and...

The Gibb Memorial Trust was founded in 1902 in memory of Elias John Wilkinson Gibb, a scholar who devoted his life to researching the history, literature, philosophy and religion of the Turks, Persians and Arabs. His particular interest was the poetry of...

Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World traces the changing significance of a dozen saints and holy sites from the fourth century to the twentieth and from Africa, Sicily, Wales, and Iceland to Canada, Boston, Mexico, Brazil, and the Caribbean...

An intellectual history of scurvy in the eighteenth centuryScurvy, a disease often associated with long stretches of maritime travel, generated sensations exceeding the standard of what was normal. Eyes dazzled, skin was morbidly sensitive, emotions...

The startling economic and political answers behind Europe's historical dominanceBetween 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and...

The 1982 Falklands War was not only one of the most extraordinary military confrontations of recent years but also a turning point in the politics of Britain and Argentina. This unusual book makes it possible for us to follow the development of the war...

How rulers in ancient and medieval Europe expressed their power through cities, buildings, and sitesThe Power of Place explores the nature of power—the power of kings, emperors, and popes—through the places that these rulers created or developed,...

Deemed "the best history of oil ever written" by Business Week and with more than 300,000 copies in print, Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the global pursuit of oil, money, and power has been extensively updated to address the current...

The predominant cultural expectation for women in medieval and Renaissance Europe, as propagated and institutionalized by both the literate aristocracy and the medieval Church, was quite straightforward. The ideal woman was to be chaste and obedient,...

A major history of technology and Western conquestFor six hundred years, the nations of Europe and North America have periodically attempted to coerce, invade, or conquer other societies. They have relied on their superior technology to do so, yet these...

"The history of the world has been the history of peoples on the move, as they occupy new lands and establish their claims over them. Almost invariably, this has meant the violent dispossession of the previous inhabitants. David Day tells the story of...