It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. This fascinating work of global history offers a vividly detailed and engaging narrative of globalization writ small, viewed from the decks and ...

On October 3, 1873, the U.S. Army hanged four Modoc headmen at Oregon’s Fort Klamath. The condemned had supposedly murdered the only U.S. Army general to die during the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. Their much-anticipated execution marked the end of the Modoc War of 1872–73. But as Boyd Cothran demonstrates, the conflict’s close marked the beginning of a new struggle over the memory of the war. Examining representations of the Modoc War in the context of rapidly expanding cultural...

One of Canada's founding peoples, the Irish arrived in the Newfoundland fishing stations as early as the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century they were establishing farms and settlements from Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes. Then, in the 1840s, came the failures of Ireland's potato crop, which people in the west of Ireland had depended on for survival. "And that," wrote a Sligo countryman, "was the beginning of the great trouble and famine that destroyed Ireland."Fligh...

Peter Cashin was at the centre—the stormy centre—of Newfoundland’s political and public life for more than thirty years. Known to many as “the fighting Major,” in a tribute to his wartime service with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, he played a decisive role at every major stage in the political drama that transformed Newfoundland from a British Dominion to a Canadian Province. Peter Cashin wrote a memoir soon after he retired from public life in 1953. Part of it was published shortly bef...

A history of the British Empire told through twenty meals eaten around the worldIn The Taste of Empire, acclaimed historian Lizzie Collingham tells the story of how the British Empire's quest for food shaped the modern world. Told through twenty meals over the course of 450 years, from the Far East to the New World, Collingham explains how Africans taught Americans how to grow rice, how the East India Company turned opium into tea, and how Americans became...

As Europeans moved into new lands in Queensland in the 19th century, violent encounters with local Aboriginals mostly followed. Drawing on extensive original research, Timothy Bottoms tells the story of the most violent frontier in Australian colonial history.'This is an important, well researched book: challenging, compelling and controversial. It is a must read for anyone interested in Australian history.' - Henry ReynoldsThe Queensland frontier ...

For the first time, The Australian Wars brings what for too long has been considered the historical past into connection with its reverberations in the present.It is estimated up to 100,000 people died in the frontier wars that raged across Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all Australians killed in foreign battles to date. But there are few memorials marking these first, domestic wars.The Australian...

Charlotte Badger is a woman around whom many stories have been woven: the thief sentenced to death in England and then transported to New South Wales; the pirate who joined a mutiny to take a ship to the Bay of Islands; the first white woman resident in Aotearoa; the wife of a rangatira, and many more. In this remarkable piece of historical detective work, Jennifer Ashton shows what we know about Charlotte Badger, and how the stories about her have shifted over time. From a Worcester court...

In the late 1630s, Andrea Stuart's earliest known maternal ancestor set sail from England, lured by the promise of the New World, to settle in Barbados where he fell by chance into the lucrative life of a sugar plantation owner.With George Ashby's first crop, the cane revolution was underway and would go on to transform the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches, establishing a thriving worldwide industry that bound together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers.As it g...

From Tristram Hunt, award-winning author of The Frock-Coated Communist and leading UK politician, Ten Cities that Made an Empire presents a new approach to Britain's imperial past through the cities that epitomised itThe final embers of the British Empire are dying, but its legacy remains in the lives and structures of the cities which it shaped. Here Tristram Hunt examines the stories and defining ideas of ten of the most important: Boston, Bridg...

The epic story of one of Australia's greatest maritime disasters, the wreck of the Dunbar.'gripping, engaging popular history' - Sydney Morning HeraldThe Dunbar was one of the most advanced and celebrated sailing ships of the mid-19th century. Built to carry passengers in speed and luxury on the long route from Britain to Australia, it was the Titanic of its day.Late at night on 20 August 1857, af...

A groundbreaking history of the Black Joke, the most famous member of the British Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron, and the long fight to end the transatlantic slave trade.The most feared ship in Britain’s West Africa Squadron, His Majesty’s brig Black Joke was one of a handful of ships tasked with patrolling the western coast of Africa in an effort to end hundreds of years of global slave trading. Sailing after the spectacular fall of Napoleon ...