Hardcover History Treasure Trove

Hardcover History Treasure Trove

An American woman at the centre of the Berlin resistance, executed by guillotine in 1943, whose story almost disappeared entirely.

That's where this box starts, and the standard holds. Bandits hijacking a train full of Western passengers in 1920s China. An airship crashing on the polar ice and the rescue that killed Amundsen. Émile Zola vanishing into English exile over the Dreyfus affair. A single Prague house that absorbed a century of European catastrophe.

Then the big arguments: Ian Kershaw on postwar Europe, Brad DeLong on the economic century, William Magnuson on the corporation as an institution, Patrick Wyman on the forty years that made the modern world, and Caroline Dodds Pennock on the Indigenous Americans who crossed the Atlantic eastward.

Hardcovers, properly researched and properly written. The kind of history that gets read twice.

1. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler — Rebecca Donner | ISBN: 9781786892195 | RRP: $34.99
   The extraordinary story of Mildred Harnack, an American academic who became a central figure in the Berlin underground and was executed on Hitler's direct order. Written by her great-great-niece using the family's own papers — meticulous, moving, and quietly furious.
2. The Disappearance of Emile Zola: Love, Literature, and the Dreyfus Case — Michael Rosen | ISBN: 9781681775166 | RRP: $39.99
   When Zola wrote J'Accuse and faced imprisonment, he fled to England and spent eleven months in hiding. Michael Rosen tells the story of that strange exile and the affair that split France in two.
3. Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 — Charles Emmerson | ISBN: 9781610397827 | RRP: $59.99
   The seven years in which the old European order collapsed and everything that followed was set in motion — revolution, pandemic, redrawn borders, and the ideologies that would define the century. Panoramic and exceptionally well told.
4. The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China — James M Zimmerman | ISBN: 9781541701700 | RRP: $49.99
   In 1923, bandits derailed a luxury express and took dozens of foreign passengers hostage in the Chinese hills. A genuinely gripping piece of narrative history about an incident with consequences far beyond the kidnapping itself.
5. For Profit: A History of Corporations — William Magnuson | ISBN: 9781541601567 | RRP: $49.99
   From Roman tax-farming companies to the Medici bank, the East India Company, Ford, and Facebook — the corporation traced across two thousand years. A clear-eyed account of an institution we rarely stop to examine.
6. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World — Patrick Wyman | ISBN: 9781538701188 | RRP: $49.99
   The four decades between 1490 and 1530 that produced the Reformation, the printing revolution, global exploration, and modern finance — told through individual lives and made entirely comprehensible.
7. Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding — Joanna Wolfarth | ISBN: 9781474623216 | RRP: $49.99
   A cultural and personal history of something universal and almost never written about seriously — wet nurses, milk banks, art, mythology, and the author's own experience. Original, thoughtful, and quietly radical.
8. On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe — Caroline Dodds Pennock | ISBN: 9781474616904 | RRP: $55.00
   The thousands of Indigenous Americans — enslaved people, diplomats, translators, travellers — who crossed to Europe in the sixteenth century. A superb reversal of the usual story and a major work of recovery.
9. Scholars of Mayhem: My Father's Secret War in Nazi-Occupied France — Daniel C Guiet | ISBN: 9780735225206 | RRP: $46.00
   A son uncovers his father's wartime work with the SOE in occupied France — sabotage, resistance networks, and a life his family knew almost nothing about. Personal, gripping, and rigorously researched.
10. The Global Age: Europe 1950-2017 — Ian Kershaw | ISBN: 9780735223981 | RRP: $49.99
    The concluding volume of Kershaw's monumental history of modern Europe, charting the continent from postwar rubble to twenty-first-century uncertainty. Authoritative, ambitious, and essential.
11. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century — J Bradford DeLong | ISBN: 9780465019595 | RRP: $49.99
    How humanity got vastly richer between 1870 and 2010, and why it didn't deliver the world anyone expected. Brad DeLong writes economic history with real argumentative force and a long view.
12. The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House — Norman Eisen | ISBN: 9780451495792 | RRP: $49.99
    A single Prague mansion and the five people who occupied it across a century of occupation, war, and revolution — including the author himself as US ambassador. An inspired way to tell a very large story.
13. Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule — Gordon Thomas | ISBN: 9780451489043 | RRP: $49.99
    An account of German resistance across its many forms — the plotters, the students, the clergy, the ordinary people — and the enormous cost almost all of them paid.
14. The Unnamable Present — Roberto Calasso | ISBN: 9780374279479 | RRP: $39.99
    The Italian polymath turns his attention to the twentieth century and our own moment — terrorism, secularism, tourism, and the strange condition of modern consciousness. Unclassifiable and unlike anyone else.
15. N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia — Mark Piesing | ISBN: 9780062851529 | RRP: $49.99
    The 1928 crash of the airship Italia on the polar ice, and the chaotic international rescue that followed — during which Roald Amundsen disappeared forever. A superb piece of forgotten exploration history.
16. All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War — Paul Jankowski | ISBN: 9780062433527 | RRP: $59.99
    A single winter examined in close detail across multiple capitals, showing how the slide toward war looked to the people living through it — contingent, confusing, and not at all inevitable.
17. Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess — Adam Zamoyski | ISBN: 9780008521684 | RRP: $45.00
    The remarkable life of Princess Izabela Czartoryska, who used her wealth, intellect, and influence to preserve Polish culture through decades of partition. Adam Zamoyski brings his trademark elegance to a story of quiet defiance.