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An Open Elite? sets out to test the traditional view that for centuries English landed society has been open to new families made rich by business or public office. From...

In this ambitious study, Richard Wendorf establishes the grounds of comparison between two arts that have often been linked in a casual way but whose historical interrelations remain almost completely...

The brilliant sequel to the prize-winning Enlightenment. 'As an introduction to early modern thinking and the impact of past ideas on present lives, this book can find few equals and...

This book studies the evolution of the family from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and how the process radically influenced child-rearing, education, contraception, sexual behaviour and marriage.

How did Edward VII, whose reign lasted for only nine years, become one of the most popular and well-known of British monarchs? This biography, combining informative text with illustrations, provides...

A comprehensive intellectual history of the idea of the West How did "the West" come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did "Westerners"...

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...

Companion to the major new BBC documentary series CIVILISATIONS , presented by Mary Beard, David Olusoga and Simon Schama. In Part One, First Contact, we discover what happened to art...

Talented, well trained and confident in his own abilities and worth, Australia's first government architect was also hot-headed and tactless. Sentenced to death for forgery, then granted a last-minute reprieve,...

A 2008 BookSense pick now in paperback, from an acclaimed historian of the Civil War and the American Revolution As 1858 dawned, the men who would become the iconic figures...

"Albert Cashier" served three years in the Union Army and passed successfully as a man until 1911 when the aging veteran was revealed to be a woman named Jennie Hodgers....

This biography portrays the Young Pretender's struggle to rally the clans and restore a Stuart monarch to the British throne. How he nearly succeeded in changing the course of British...

One of a series of monographs on great 20th-century artists, this title is concerned with Oskar Kokoschka, a major figure in the Expresionist movement. After studying in Vienna, where he...

A Discover magazine Top Science Book Thomas Edison stunned America in 1879 by unveiling a world-changing invention--the light bulb--and then launching the electrification of America's cities. A decade later, despite...

This study investigates the importance of theatre in the works of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Louisa May Alcott and Henry James. Whether as critics, playwrights, actors or...

While Carlo Collodi's internationally revered Pinocchio may not have been the single source of the modernist fascination with puppets and marionettes, the book's appearance on the threshold of the modernist...

With a plot to grace any comic opera, the 1859-72 'Pig War' broke out when an American living on a quietly disputed small island in the Gulf of Georgia shot...

John Van der Kiste's book takes in the principal monarchies of Scandinavia going back to the beginning of the 19th century. He uses unpublished sources and photographs to show how...

This biography of the last king to lead British troups into baffle and his able wife provides intriquing insight into 18th century war and politics. Often derided as the buffoon...

Queen Victoria's son, Prince Leopold, died from haemophilia, but no member of the royal family before his generation had suffered from the condition. Medically, there are only two possibilities: either...

Amid the background of social turbulence in the mid-nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet's unconventional paintings of real people in everyday scenes came to embody values with radical political implications. James Rubin...

This descriptive gazetter looks, town by town, at all surviving theatres built between 1750 and 1950. It makes assesments of their quality, architecturally and theatrically and also assesses the potential...

In 1825 26 year old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. At first, some said that the fairies had taken her into their stronghold in a nearby...

Politics Without Democracy provides an entertaining and highly original view of how Britain made a peaceful transition to representative democracy - a change characterized in other countries by convulsive and...

Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 examines how the American frontier was presented in theatrical productions during the critical period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of...

The Industrial Revolution in Scotland is the first new student text on this subject for more than two decades. While the focus is on Scotland, Dr Whatley's approach is largely...

Charles Rennie Mackintosh's finest work dates from about a dozen intensely creative years around 1900. His buildings in Glasgow, and especially his craggy masterpiece the Glasgow School of Art, are...

Born in Ireland in the 1840's, Eliza Lynch left the country as a young girl, fleeing the potato famine with her parents. As a young woman, she became one of...

In "The Age of Revolution", Eric Hobsbawm traced the transformation of European life between 1789 and 1848 by the "Dual Revolution" - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. In...

The astonishing story of the Sassoons, one of the nineteenth century's pre-eminent commercial families and 'the Rothschilds of the East' The Sassoons were one of the great business dynasties of...

Florence Nightingale achieved fame for her leadership of a group of British nurses during the Crimean War. After the war, she dedicated herself to promoting public health. This book provides...

New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American...

In his own lifetime, Russian novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov was scarcely published. A quarter of a century after his death, his novel, "The Master and the Margarita", has become...

The Duke of Wellington, the most successful of British commanders, set a standard by which all subsequent British generals have been measured. His defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815...

Without the mechanization of the household, most women would still be bent over the kitchen sink, and yet we know extraordinarily little about the origins of the machines, which, in...

In 1899, on the eve of the Boer War, Captain Charles Cox from Parramatta took 100 Australian cavalrymen to train with the British army in England. These military apprentices became...

Lang, Harpur and Deniehy were three of the most outspoken proponents of the Australian Republic in the mid-19th century. Their arguments - concise, powerful and balanced - are as relevant...

The Divine Sarah, recognised as the world's greatest actress, is at the centre of this book, but the story it tells is much wider. Corille Fraser's lively writing and her...

A captivating exploration of the role in which Queen Victoria exerted the most international power and influence: as a matchmaking grandmother. As her reign approached its sixth decade, Queen Victoria's...

English stage censorship goes back to Tudor times, but only in the eighteenth century were the powers of the censor seriously organised. Further legislation in 1843 required theatre managers throughout...

This, the fourth volume to be published in the series Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History, charts the development of theatrical presentation at a time of great cultural and political...

Education of the Senses draws on a vast array of primary sources to reexamine nineteenth-century sexual behavior, overturning a number of stereotypes, especially about women and sexuality.

Between 1870 and 1940, tens of thousands of Australian women were drawn to London, their imperial metropolis and the center of the publishing, art, musical, theatrical, and educational worlds. Even...

The winner of a 1988 Somerset Maugham Award, this is a kaleidoscopic series of portraits from an era of tumultuous change in Europe as it was experienced and communicated by...

'More than just a work of first-class scholarship, Liberty's Exile's is a deeply moving masterpiece that fulfil's the historian's most challenging ambition: to revivify past experience.' Niall Fergusson On a...