The idea that land should be – or even could be – treated like any other commodity has not always been a given. For much of British history, land was bought and sold in ways that emphasized its role in complex networks of social obligation and politi...

For sale in CIS only! How did China become China? And where is it leading us? We talk as if it had always existed: eternal China with its 5,000 years of uninterrupted history. But the name "China" was first used by sixteenth-century Europeans, and i...

In this fascinating study, preeminent historian Marc Fumaroli reveals how an imagined "republic" of ideas and interchange fostered the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. He follows exchanges among Petrarch, Erasmus, De...

Supermarkets were invented in the United States, and from the 1940s on they made their way around the world, often explicitly to carry American-style economic culture with them. This innovative history tells us how supermarkets were used as anticommu...

<p>A much-needed concise biography of America's first president. As editor of the award-winning Library of America collection of George Washington's writings and a curator of the great man's original papers, John Rhodehamel has establishe...

Most of us are aware that words such as geometry, mathematics, phobia and hypochondria derive from ancient Greek, but did you know that marmalade, pirate, sketch and purse can also trace their linguistic origins back to the Athens of 500 bce? This b...

Berlin Operation, 1945, tells the story of the Red Army's penultimate offensive operation in the war in Europe. Here the forces of three fronts (Second and First Belorussian and First Ukrainian) forced the Oder River and surrounded the defenders of t...

The first two decades after the end of the Cold War were characterised by government's desires to reduce the sizes of their armed forces, not least in order to save money. Hand in hand with this general reduction went an intellectual and doctrinal re...

The sad plight of the Five Civilized Tribes – the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole – during America's Civil War is both fascinating and often overlooked in the literature. From 1861-1865, the Indians fought their own bloody civil war...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Born January 1, 1993 after the split with Slovakia, the Czech Republic is one of the youngest members of the European Union. Despite its youth, this new state and the areas just outside it...