Abraham Lincoln and Chicago both generate countless books, but this is the first in-depth examination of the actual relationship between the Prairie State's biggest city and its most famous citizen.The Illinois Rail Splitter's influence can be felt across the Land of Lincoln, but his relationship with Chicago was pivotal in his journey to the national stage. Lincoln first came to Chicago in 1847, a year before the Illinois-Michigan Canal opened and brought spectacu...

Kilvert's World of Wonders takes a fresh look at the Victorian era, one that does not turn away from the smoke stacks and crowded streets of popular imagining, but which sees them from the distance of the rural countryside. Though a countryman and lover of country ways, here the well know diarist is shown to be deeply stirred by what he saw as a society being changed and improved by science, technology, and by the liberal, enlightened ideas that were starting to circulate. The social chang...

Led by Erasmus Darwin, the Lunar Society of Birmingham was formed from a group of amateur experimenters, tradesmen and artisans who met and made friends in the Midlands in the 1760s. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the centre of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toy-maker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; the larger-t...

A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A history and celebration of the many far-flung volunteers who helped define the English language, word by word.“Enthralling and exuberant, Sarah Ogilvie tells the surprising story of the making of the OED. Philologists, fantasists, crackpots, criminals, career spinsters, suffragists, and Australians: here is ...

“Vivid with a Mesozoic bestiary” (Tom Holland), this on-the-ground, page-turning narrative weaves together the chance discovery of dinosaurs and the rise of the secular age.When the twelve-year-old daughter of a British carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from the country’s southern shoreline in 1811, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had in fact discovered the “first” ichthyosaur, and over t...

'Man and the Natural World, an encyclopaedic study of man's relationship to animals and plants, is completely engrossing ... It explains everything - why we eat what we do, why we plant this and not that, why we keep pets, why we like some animals and not others, why we kill the things we kill and love the things we love ... It is often a funny book and one to read again and again' Paul Theroux, Sunday Times'The English historian Keith Thomas has revealed modes of...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERSurnames are much more than convenient identity tags; they are windows into our families’ pasts. Some suggest ancestral trades (Butcher, Smith, Roper) or physical appearance (Long, Brown, Thynne). Some provide clues to where we come from (McDonald, Evans, Patel). And some – Rymer, Brocklebank, Stolbof – offer a hint of something just a little more exotic or esoteric.All are grist to the mill for David McKie who, in Wh...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HESSELL-TILTMAN HISTORY PRIZE 2017AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016Religious strife, civil conflict, waves of immigration, the rise and fall of industry, great prosperity and grinding poverty – the handful of streets that constitute modern Spitalfields have witnessed all this and much more.In Spitalfields, one of Britain's best-loved historians tells the stories of the streets he has lived in fo...

A unique, in-depth view of Victorian London during the record-breaking summer of 1858, when residents both famous and now-forgotten endured “The Great Stink” togetherWhile 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, historian Rosemary Ashton reveals in this compelling microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, tu...

In this remarkable book Adrian Desmond and James Moore, world authorities on Darwin, give a completely new explanation of how Darwin came to his famous view of evolution, which traced all life to an ancient common ancestor. Darwin was committed to the abolition of slavery, in part because of his family's deeply held beliefs. It was his 'Sacred Cause' and at its core lay a belief in human racial unity. Desmond and Moore show how he extended to all life the idea of human brotherhood held by ...

There have been more prisons in London than in any other European city. Of these, Newgate was the largest, most notorious and worst. Built during the twelfth century, it became a legendary place - the inspiration of more poems, plays and novels than any other building in London. It was a place of cruelty and wretchedness, at various times holding Dick Turpin, Titus Oates, Daniel Defoe, Jack Sheppard and Casanova. Because prisons were privately run, any time spent ...

Selected by Bernardine Evaristo as an Observer Best Books 2021Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England's links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company.Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. It also explores the links between rural poverty, particularly enclosure, and colonial figures, such as plantation-owners and East India...