By 1400, the once-mighty Byzantine Empire stood on the verge of destruction. Most of its territories had been lost to the Ottoman Turks, and Constantinople was under close blockade. Against all odds, Byzantium lingered on for another fifty years unti...

Sifting through a wide range of primary Russian sources, Leon Aron considers what sparked the profound shift in values that occurred in the Soviet Union before its fall. He pinpoints several principal questions brought to light in the glasnost-era pr...

From the vantage point of nearly sixty years devoted to research and the writing of history, J. H. Elliott steps back from his work to consider the progress of historical scholarship. From his own experiences as a historian of Spain, Europe, and the...

How do people move from tribal and religiously based understandings of society to a concept of the modern nation-state? This book examines the complex and pivotal case of Turkey. Tracing the shifting valences of vatan (Arabic for "birthplace" or "hom...

In 2000, Mexico's long invincible Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidential election to Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN). The ensuing changeover – after 71 years of PRI dominance – was hailed as the beginning of a ne...

While Bloomsbury is now associated with Virginia Woolf and her early-twentieth-century circle of writers and artists, the neighbourhood was originally the undisputed intellectual quarter of nineteenth-century London. Drawing on a wealth of untapped a...

From Jewish clothing merchants to Bangladeshi curry houses, ancient docks to the 2012 Olympics, the area east of the City has always played a crucial role in London's history. The East End, as it has been known, was the home to Shakespeare's first th...

In this first book-length analysis of the origins of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Craig Daigle draws on documents only recently made available to show how the war resulted not only from tension and competing interest between Arabs and Israelis,...

America's global cultural impact is largely seen as one-sided, with critics claiming that it has undermined other countries' languages and traditions. But contrary to popular belief, the cultural relationship between the United States and the world h...

Examining the lives and works of three iconic personalities – Germaine de Stael, Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier – Kathleen Kete creates a groundbreaking cultural history of ambition in post-Revolutionary France. While in the old regime the traditionali...