Western Civ 101 was never quite like this!"The Pharisees showed off their goodness by praying in synonyms" . . . "The fourteenth century was an unpleasant era to be alive in, much less dead in" . . . "The Vaccuum is a large empty space where the popes live in Rome" . . .This is the history you never learned in school (or maybe you did).Art Linkletter once noted that small children often mix fantasy and reality, making their views of everyday life wildly askew. But w...

Spies, Sadists and Sorcerers unveils the history you were never taught at school. With a breath-taking sweep spanning Rome to the modern day, popular historian and author Dominic Selwood challenges the traditional version of some of the best-known events of the past. From ancient Christianity to the voyages of Columbus, and from the medieval Crusades to ISIS and the modern Middle East, this book debunks dozens of historical myths.You will learn that:– Magna Carta was an inf...

A concise survey of the culture and civilization of mankind, The Lessons of History is the result of a lifetime of research from Pulitzer Prize–winning historians Will and Ariel Durant.With their accessible compendium of philosophy and social progress, the Durants take us on a journey through history, exploring the possibilities and limitations of humanity over time. Juxtaposing the great lives, ideas, and accomplishments with cycles of war and conquest, t...

From the Ice Age to the Cold War, from Reykjavik to the Volga, from Minos to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Davies here tells the entire story of Europe in a single volume. It is the most ambitious history of the continent ever undertaken.

Discover the history of Europe - from the Dark Ages to present day - by the author of the bestselling A Short History of EnglandEurope is an astonishingly successful place. But it would take volumes to tell its story, right? Wrong. From warring peoples to peace, wealth and freedom, Andrew Jenkins distils its evolution into this short, single-volume history.From Greece and Rome, through the French Revolution to the Second World War and modern times....

Celebrated historian John Hirst offers a fascinating exploration of the qualities that made Europe a world-changing civilisation.The Shortest History of Europe begins with a rapid overview of European civilisation, describing its birth from an unlikely mixture of classical learning, Christianity and German warrior culture. Over the centuries, this unstable blend produced highly distinctive characters pious knights and belligerent popes, romantics spouting folklore and revolutionaries imita...

What is Europe? Firstly, of course, it is a continent made up of countless disparate peoples, races and nations, and governed by different ideas, philosophies, religions and attitudes. Nonetheless, it has a common thread of history running through it, stitching the lands and peoples of its past and present together into one fabric and held together by the continent's great institutions, such as the Church of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, the European Union, individual monarchies, trade orga...

The second edition of this best-selling textbook is thoroughly updated to include expanded coverage of the late eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, and incorporates recent advances in gender history, global connections and cultural analysis. It features summaries, timelines, maps, illustrations and discussion questions to support the student. Enhanced online content and sections on sources and methodology give students the tools they need to study early modern European history. Leadi...

Much of what we know about the greatest medical disaster ever, the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren -- the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the final, awful end by respiratory failure -- are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was, and how it made history, remain shrouded in a haze of myths.Norman Cantor, the premier historian of the Middle Ages, draws t...

The Habsburgs are the most famous dynasty in continental Europe. From the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, they ruled much of Central Europe, and for two centuries were also rulers of Spain. Through the Spanish connection, they acquired lands around the Mediterranean and a chunk of the New World, spreading eastwards to include the Philippines. Reaching from South-East Asia to what is now Ukraine, the Habsburg Empire was truly global. In this Very Short Introduction Martin Ra...

Winner of the American Library Association’s Newbery Medal“Remains a marvel: a sparkling, erudite, idiosyncratic tour through the human experience.... What a pageant this charming narrator continues to offer us!” —Wall Street JournalWinner of the first John Newberry Medal, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, originally written for the author’s grandchildren, has charmed generations with its warmth and wisdom. B...

The Book of Firsts is an entertaining, enlightening, and highly browsable tour of the major innovations of the past twenty centuries and how they shaped our world.Peter D’Epiro makes this handy overview of human history both fun and thought-provoking with his survey of the major “firsts”—inventions, discoveries, political and military upheavals, artistic and scientific breakthroughs, religious controversies, and catastrophic events—of the last two thousand...