"Prisoners, Lovers, and Spies" is a book about concealing and revealing secret communications. It is the first history of invisible writing, uncovered through stories about scoundrels and heroes. Spies were imprisoned or murdered, adultery unmasked,...

Information is power. For more than five hundred years the success or failure of nations has been determined by a country's ability to acquire knowledge and technical skill and transform them into strength and prosperity. Leading historian Jeremy Bla...

Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceas...

Arlette Farge's Le Gout de l'archive is widely regarded as a historiographical classic. While combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, historian Farge was struck by the extraordinarily intimate portraya...

The Second World War created and the Cold War sustained a "special relationship" between America and Britain, and the terms on which that decades-long conflict ended would become the foundation of a new world order. In this penetrating analysis, a ne...

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses – the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and extent. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from E...

Nearly a century has passed since the assassination of Austria-Hungary's Archduke Ferdinand, yet the repercussions of the devastating global conflict that followed echo still. In this provocative book, historian Ian Beckett turns the spotlight on twe...

"The war to end all wars" rings out a bitter mockery of the First World War, often viewed as the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century, the crucible from which Soviet, Fascist and Nazi dictatorships emerged. Today's conventional wisdom is that...

It is no exaggeration to say that the Hankey, one small British ship that circled the Atlantic Ocean in 1792 and 1793, transformed Atlantic World history. This extraordinary book tells the just-uncovered story of the Hankey, from its altruistic begin...

While the British were able to accomplish abolition in the trans-Atlantic world by the end of the nineteenth century, their efforts paradoxically caused a great increase in legal and illegal slave trading in the western Indian Ocean. Bringing togethe...