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...

Drew A. Swanson has written an "environmental" history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurt...

This insightful volume offers a radical reassessment of the infamous "Gulag Archipelago" by exploring the history of Vorkuta, an arctic coal-mining outpost originally established in the 1930s as a prison camp complex. Author Alan Barenberg's eye-open...

Weaving Indian and Euro-American histories together in this groundbreaking book, Sami Lakomaki places the Shawnee people, and Native peoples in general, firmly at the centre of American history. The book spans nearly three centuries, from the years l...

In this scholarly yet intensely personal history, author Edina Becirevic's explores the widespread ethnic cleansing that occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 through 1995, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Serbs against Bosn...

The acclaimed French painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) strove to renew history painting by creating epic art in a nonacademic manner. In this thought-provoking book, Peter Cooke explains how Moreau essentially created pictorial Symbolism through his...

Elijah ben Solomon, the "Genius of Vilna", was perhaps the best-known and most understudied figure in modern Jewish history. In this book Eliyahu Stern offers a new narrative of Jewish modernity based on Elijah's life and influence. While the experie...

Rising to a triumphant height of 630 feet, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a revered monument to America's western expansion. Envisioned in 1947 but not completed until the mid-1960s, the arch today attracts millions of tourists annually and is one...

"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...

During the Gilded Age, which saw the dawn of America's enduring culture wars, Robert Green Ingersoll was known as "the Great Agnostic". The nation's most famous orator, he raised his voice on behalf of Enlightenment reason, secularism, and the separa...