AN ECONOMIST AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A fresh, exciting, “readable and informative” history (The New York Times) of seventeenth-century England, a time of revolution when society was on fire and simultaneously forging the modern world. • “Recapture[s] a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker“[Healy] makes a convinci...

**A riveting account of the five heated months in which King Charles I attempted to arrest five dissident Members of Parliament by bringing an armed force to the House of Commons—a shocking act of political terrorism that pushed England toward civil war and planted the seeds of the American RevolutionNamed a Book of the Year by The Times, The Telegraph, and History Today**“Netflix should make this enjoyable English civil war history into a...

The English 'Old Poor Law' was the first national system of tax-funded social welfare in the world. It provided a safety net for hundreds of thousands of paupers at a time of very limited national wealth and productivity. The First Century of Welfare, which focusses on the poor, but developing, county of Lancashire, provides the first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century. Drawing on thousands of individual petitions for poor relief, presented b...

AN ECONOMIST AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A fresh, exciting, “readable and informative” history (The New York Times) of seventeenth-century England, a time of revolution when society was on fire and simultaneously forging the modern world. • “Recapture[s] a lost moment when a radically democratic commonwealth seemed possible.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker“[Healy] makes a convinci...

**A riveting account of the five heated months in which King Charles I attempted to arrest five dissident Members of Parliament by bringing an armed force to the House of Commons—a shocking act of political terrorism that pushed England toward civil war and planted the seeds of the American RevolutionNamed a Book of the Year by The Times, The Telegraph, and History Today**“Netflix should make this enjoyable English civil war history into a...

**An award-winning Cambridge history professor “makes a forceful argument and tells a story with great verve” (The Wall Street Journal)—that the West is, and always has been, truly global.“Those archaic ‘Western Civ’ classes so many of us took in college should be updated, argues Quinn, [who] invites us to . . . revel in a richer, more polyglot inheritance.”—The Boston Globe**AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL ...

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year * A Southwest Book of the Year “Top Pick” “American history did not begin in the Northeast. It began in the Southwest,’ Parker asserts, in this sweeping history.” —The New Yorker A revelatory work of Southwest history that recenters the American origin story two-thousand miles west of Plymouth Rock, in El Paso, Texas—heart of Indigenous power and resistance, locus of Spanish colonization of North...

****Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction**This is the definitive history of Britain’s tumultuous relationship with Europe – as it’s never been told before.*'*Powerful, precise, morally engaged, wonderfully alert to character, context and the greater purpose of political life' – Rory Stewart, author of Politics on the Edge'A** lucid, thoughtful and richly provocative book' – Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times

A monumental and exhilarating history of European thought from the end of Antiquity to the beginning of the Enlightenment—500 to 1700 AD—tracing the arc of intellectual history as it evolved, setting the stage for the modern era.Charles Freeman, lauded historical scholar and author of The Closing of the Western Mind (“A triumph”—The Times [London]), explores the rebirth of Western thought in the centuries that followed the demise of the classical ...

A dazzlingly ambitious history of the ancient world that places women at the center—from Cleopatra to Boudica, Sappho to Fulvia, and countless other artists, writers, leaders, and creators of historyAround four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women*—whether they were si...

“An elegant, wide-ranging history” (The New York Review of Books) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease thatreveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.“Levenson takes readers through an entertaining . . . journey of missed opportunities in microbiology and the eventual advances that arose in this field.”—ScienceScientists and enthusiastic ...

**Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands narrates the fierce debate over America's role in the world in the runup to World War II through its two most important figures: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who advocated intervention, and his isolationist nemesis, aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh.“An immersive account of America’s fierce debate about joining World War II.” — The Washington Post"Brands’s elegant account of the political...