Global History

The best-known songs in the world are violent, sexist, and religious - so why do we celebrate national anthems when we should be rewriting them? The story begins in a London theatre in 1745, where the modern idea of anthems started out as triumphant expressions of national superiority. They glorified violence, claimed the support of God for their country, and...

What led so many German Protestant theologians to welcome the Nazi regime and its policies of racism and anti-Semitism? In this provocative book, Robert P. Ericksen examines the work and attitudes of three distinguished, scholarly, and influential theologians who greeted the rise of Hitler with enthusiasm and support. In so doing, he shows how National Socialism could appeal to well-meaning...

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today's idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to centre stage and asks what it reveals about...

"A wonderful subject, beautifully written, evoking a world startlingly like and unlike our own" — Rory Stewart "A brilliant portrait not just of a great and unjustly forgotten man, but of an entire age" — William Dalrymple "Important reading at any time in history; essential in the world of today" — Peter Frankopan In December 1971, after having stepped down...

A sweeping overview of world affairs, especially having come across the name of William Yandell Elliott, Professor of Politics at Harvard through the first half of the 20th century. Sean found that Elliott had created a kindergarten of Anglo-American imperialists amongst his students, who included Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, and McGeorge Bundy. Upon further investigation, Sean came...

Big History tells the story of the universe, from the beginning to now, by interweaving the fields of biology, geology, and anthropology to offer an all-encompassing account of Earth's history. Flowing seamlessly from the birth of the universe to life on a planet inhabited by billions of people, this is a mind-altering account of the fate of the Earth and...

The autobiographical narrative of Anne, Lady Halkett. Born in the early 1620s, Anne, Lady Halkett (née Murray) grew up on the fringes of the English court during a period of increasing political tension. From 1644 to 1699, Halkett recorded her personal and political experiences in both England and Scotland in a series of manuscript meditations and an autobiographical narrative called...

A provocative analysis of the deadly Cold War conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington. Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable hellscapes, the surrogate wars of the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that have persisted into the present. In this ambitious work, Alfred W....

The epic history of world order, revealing how the decline of the West may be a good thing for its future. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the West has been in crisis. Social unrest, political polarisation, and the rise of other great powers—especially China—threaten to unravel today's Western-led world order. Many fear this would lead to global chaos....

The New York Times Headlines in History Page-A-Day® Calendar 2027 This day in history: Travel back in time via headlines from The New York Times and discover hundreds of the world's most fascinating and important events as they originally appeared in the paper. Perfect for news junkies, students, and history buffs! Milestones and iconic moments: Features political turning points, watershed...

Worlds Together, Worlds Apart provides a compelling chronological foundation for world history. A global story frames each chapter, making thousands of years of history less daunting for students and instructors. New lead authors and master teachers Jeremy Adelman and Elizabeth Pollard distill cutting-edge scholarship with a focus on introductory students. By supporting students in making comparisons and connections across the...

Worlds Together, Worlds Apart provides a compelling chronological foundation for world history. A global story frames each chapter, making thousands of years of history less daunting for students and instructors. New lead authors and master teachers Jeremy Adelman and Elizabeth Pollard distil cutting-edge scholarship with a focus on introductory students. By supporting students in making comparisons and connections across the...

Shortlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown Award 2023 The history of a demonic tradition that was stolen from women – and then won back again. 'Remarkable work... Extraordinary, meticulous detail' Literary Review 'Deftly fuses scholarly rigour, control of literary and archaeological sources' BBC History Magazine Creatures like Lilith, the seductive first wife of Adam, and mermaids, who lured sailors to...

A leader in the field presents a cohesive narrative of world history that effectively addresses the main challenge of the introductory survey: how to navigate beginning students through the vast detail of the subject. McNeill uses connective webs—along which trade, religious beliefs, technologies, pathogens, and much else travelled—to organise details and keep the big picture in view. Students emerge with...

Challenging the restrictive and relativistic intellectual and cultural orthodoxies on the left that engulfed universities, the media, and big tech in the 2010s, the Intellectual Dark Web—a loose collective of politically diverse intellectuals, commentators, and scholars critical of political correctness, identity politics, and cancel culture—relied on alternative platforms like podcasts, digital magazines, and YouTube to advocate for free speech, universal...

Britain and Russia maintained a frosty civility for a few years after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. However, by the 1820s, their relations degenerated into constant acrimonious rivalry over Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia – the Great Game – and, towards the end of the century, East Asia. The First Cold War presents for the first time the Russian perspective...

Just over a thousand years ago, the Song dynasty emerged as the most advanced civilization on earth. Within two centuries, China was home to nearly half of all humankind. In this concise history, we learn why the inventiveness of this era has been favourably compared with the European Renaissance, which in many ways the Song transformation surpassed. With the chaotic...

An original study of empire creation and its consequences, from ancient through early modern times. The world's first great empires established by the ancient Persians, Chinese, and Romans are well known, but not the empires that emerged on their margins in response to them over the course of 2,500 years. These counterempires or shadow empires, which changed the course of...

Arctic historian Ken McGoogan approaches the legacy of nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin from a contemporary perspective and offers a surprising new explanation of an enduring Northern mystery. Two of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin's expeditions were monumental failures—the last one leading to more than a hundred deaths, including his own. Yet many still see the Royal Navy man as...

This first truly global history of the suppression of piracy links maritime raiding to empire building in the nineteenth century. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, imperial powers around the world came into direct confrontation with local resistance in the form of maritime raiding. From the Atlantic basin to the western Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf and the...

Queerness remains one of the most stigmatised and overlooked aspects of Holocaust history, often erased due to the lingering homophobia of survivors. People Without History Are Dust challenges this silence, weaving together compelling stories of German, Dutch, Czech, and Polish Jewish Holocaust victims and survivors, including Anne Frank, Molly Applebaum, Margot Heuman, and Gad Beck, whose experiences help illuminate the...

Globalization has profoundly shaped the world we live in, yet its rise was neither inevitable nor planned. It is also one of the most contentious issues of our time. While it may have made goods less expensive, it has also sent massive flows of money across borders and shaken the global balance of power. Outside the Box offers a fresh...

Exploring death, religion, science and social crisis, a startling history of the occult between the world wars, when Spiritualism was truly an international obsession. The interwar period was a golden age of the uncanny. Clairvoyants, fakirs, Theosophists, mind-readers, miracle-workers and jinn-summoners—all assured the masses that, just like the newly discovered invisible forces of electricity, radiation and magnetism, unseen spiritual powers...

An acclaimed historian of ideas shows how capitalist extremists profit from the collapse of the democratic nation. Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalisation has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities—tax havens, free ports,...

Thirty years ago, a bomb landed in the field of Australian consciousness of itself and its land in the form of Eric Rolls' A Million Wild Acres. The ensuing explosion has caused extensive and heated debate ever since amongst historians, ecologists, environmentalists, poets and writers. Now reissued in a commemorative 30th Anniversary Edition for a new generation of readers and...

From classical Greece to Roe v. Wade, a long-overdue history of abortion. An ancient entertainer unable to work while pregnant; a medieval holy woman performing a 'miraculous termination'; a Reformation-era abortion provider prosecuted as a witch; a Victorian midwife saving her patients from the workhouse. Women have always sought to end pregnancies, and long succeeded. This book tells their stories....

1922 was a year of great turbulence and upheaval. Its events reverberated throughout the rest of the twentieth century and still affect us today, 100 years later. Empires fell. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after more than six centuries. The British Empire had reached its greatest extent but its heyday was over. The Irish Free State was declared and demands for...

A selected history of the protests in New Zealand that shape modern day Aotearoa, starting with the early 1800s, through to anti-nuclear and land rights. Mandy Hager looks at the background, the structure of the protest and how it affected attitudes. Includes a brief look at the Pacific Islands claims for independence.

Instructors have made Worlds Together, Worlds Apart the number one selling collegiate survey because its global-by-design narrative builds each chapter around big themes in world history. This approach allows most of the regions to be discussed in each chapter while focusing updates on cutting-edge global topics that students care about, such as gender, the environment, migration, and technology. The New...

Working in a World of Hurt fills a significant gap in the studies of the psychological trauma wrought by war. It focuses not on soldiers, but on the men and women who fought to save them in casualty clearing stations, hospitals, and prison camps. The writings by doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, and other medical personnel reveal the spectrum of their...

Witnessing Slavery is a timely and original investigation into the role of the eyewitness account in the representation of slavery in British and European art. Gathering together over 160 paintings, watercolours, drawings, and prints, this book offers an unprecedented examination of the shifting iconography of slavery between 1760 and 1840. In addition to considering how the work of artists such...

An apostolic lifestyle characterized by total material renunciation, homelessness, and begging was practiced by monks throughout the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Such monks often served as spiritual advisors to urban aristocrats whose patronage gave them considerable authority and independence from episcopal control. This book is the first comprehensive study of this type of Christian poverty and...

An exploration of the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound, music, voice instrument, and machine. Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human...

The proliferation of railroads around the world was integral to the emergence of a global market-based economy at the turn of the twentieth century. This deeply researched and comprehensive book examines the history of rail in Japan from a global perspective, offering new insight into the connections between the world economy and Japan's industrialization. Naofumi Nakamura traces the international locomotive...

Confronting the rifts created by our common conceptual vocabulary for North American colonial studies How can we tell colonial histories in ways that invite intercultural conversation within humanistic fields that are themselves products of colonial domination? Beginning with a famous episode of failed communication from the narrative of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, The Silence of the Miskito Prince explores...

This revelatory book traces how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their close associates put scientific principles into practice across their painting, poetry, sculpture, and architecture. In their manifesto, The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelites committed themselves to creating a new kind of art modelled on science, in which precise observation could lead to discoveries about nature and humanity. In Oxford and London, Victorian...

An account of the alliance between the Catholic Church and the Italian Fascist regime in their campaign against Protestants Based on previously undisclosed archival materials, this book tells the fascinating, untold, and troubling story of an anti-Protestant campaign in Italy that lasted longer, consumed more clerical energy and cultural space, and generated far more literature than the war against Italy’s...

This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the "rise of the West" is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World, and upon the maturing...

On a sunny day, men and women march through the streets wearing orange collarettes and carrying colourful banners. However, this is not the Orange Order in Northern Ireland but the same organisation in Africa. This book moves beyond the cliché to delve deeply into the inner structure and rituals of the Orange Order and its global reach. The Orange Order,...

A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world “An epic work of breathtaking scope and moral power, The Long Land War offers the definitive account of the rise and fall of land rights around the world over the last 150 years.” —Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted: Poverty and...

An eloquent call to draw on the lessons of the past to address current threats to international order The ancient Greeks hard-wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and courage—to spur citizens and...

From true-crime legend T. J. English, the epic, behind-the-scenes saga of “Los Muchachos,” one of the most successful cocaine trafficking organizations in American history—a story of glitz, glamour, and organized crime set against 1980’s Miami. Despite what Scarface might lead one to believe, violence was not the dominant characteristic of the cocaine business. It was corruption: the dirty cops, agents,...

Born amid immense suffering and bloodshed, the Kingdom of Jerusalem remained a battlefield for almost 200 years. The Crusades gave rise to the Military Orders of the Templars and Hospitallers, and served as a backdrop to the careers of some of history's most famous leaders, including Richard 'The Lionheart' and Saladin. At times, the savagery of the Crusaders left their...

At the outset of the twentieth century, malaria was Italy’s major public health problem. It was the cause of low productivity, poverty, and economic backwardness, while it also stunted literacy, limited political participation, and undermined the army. In this book, Frank Snowden recounts how Italy became the world centre for the development of malariology as a medical discipline and launched...

An energetic and exhilarating account of the Victorian entertainment industry, its extraordinary success and enduring impact The Victorians invented mass entertainment. As the nineteenth century’s growing industrialised class acquired the funds and the free time to pursue leisure activities, their every whim was satisfied by entrepreneurs building new venues for popular amusement. Contrary to their reputation as dour, buttoned-up prudes,...

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) made a pioneering and durably influential argument for women's equality. Emerging from the turbulent decade of the French Revolution, her vindication delivered a systematic critique of the treatment of women across time and place. Drawing on extensive experience teaching and writing about Wollstonecraft, Susan J. Wolfson offers new insight into...

A cultural geographer and an art historian offer fresh interpretations of Muybridge’s famous motion studies through the lenses of mobility and race. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed horses in motion, proving that all four hooves leave the ground at once for a split second during a full gallop. This was the beginning of Muybridge’s decades-long investigation into instantaneous photography,...

Melania the Elder and her granddaughter Melania the Younger were major figures in early Christian history, using their wealth, status, and forceful personalities to shape the development of nearly every aspect of the religion we now know as Christianity. This volume examines their influence on late antique Christianity and provides an insightful portrait of their legacies in the modern world....

London’s New Scene is a groundbreaking and extensively researched account of the 1960s London art scene. In the 1960s, London became a vibrant hub of artistic production. Postwar reconstruction, jet air travel, television arts programmes, new colour supplements, a generation of young artists, dealers, and curators, the influx of international film companies, the projection of “creative Britain” as a national...

Published in 1974, Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam was a watershed moment in the study of Islam. By locating the history of Islamic societies in a global perspective, Hodgson challenged the orientalist paradigms that had stunted the development of Islamic studies and provided an alternative approach to world history. Edited by Edmund Burke III and Robert Mankin, Islam and...

The tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood’s glitzy façade, exposing the city's ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder. These two spectacular dead bodies, one found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947, the other found dead in her home in August 1962,...

Devotion to the crucified Christ is one of the most familiar, yet most disconcerting artifacts of medieval European civilization. How and why did the images of the dying God-man and his grieving mother achieve such prominence, inspiring unparalleled religious creativity as well as such imitative extremes as celibacy and self-flagellation? To answer this question, Rachel Fulton ranges over developments in...

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER "Brutal." —Huffington Post "Scathing." —New York Post "[D]epicts Biden's decline in vivid detail." —Politico “So many revelations.” —Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe "Bombshell." —Jesse Watters, host of FOX’s Jesse Watters Primetime The authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Shattered provide a revelatory, inside look at the...

Designing Reform investigates the rich architecture of post-Mao China and its broad cultural impact. In the years following China’s Cultural Revolution, architecture played an active role in the country’s reintegration into the global economy and capitalist world. Looking at the ways in which political and social reform transformed Chinese architecture and how, in turn, architecture gave structure to the reforms,...

What do we really know about how and where religions began, and how they spread? In this bold new book, award-winning author Robin Derricourt takes us on a journey through the birth and growth of several major religions, using history and archaeology to recreate the times, places and societies that witnessed the rise of significant monotheistic faiths. Beginning with Mormonism...

The momentous encounter between Christian thought and Greek philosophy reached a high point in fourth-century Byzantium, and the principal actors were four Greek-speaking Christian thinkers whose collective influence on the Eastern Church was comparable to that of Augustine on Western Latin Christendom. In this erudite and informative book, a distinguished scholar provides the first coherent account of the lives and...

Prior to European colonisation, the world was thickly populated with hundreds of independent states and vibrant regional state systems. Yet these states are typically excluded from traditional international relations scholarship, which has mostly focused on the European experience. Before Colonisation provides a groundbreaking comparative analysis of non-Western states and state systems in the nineteenth century. Using an original data set...

In beautifully written and powerfully thought prose, A World Out of Reach offers a crucial record of the cataclysmic spring of 2020—a record for us to share with one another, and for posterity, in the voices of writers of disparate backgrounds. When the coronavirus outbreak came to the West, The Yale Review began asking writers to think out loud on...

The greatly expanded and enhanced 2nd edition of A World History of War Crimes provides an authoritative and accessible introduction to the global history of war crimes and the laws of war. Tracing human efforts to limit warfare, from codes of war in antiquity designed to maintain a religiously conceived cosmic order to the gradual use in the modern age...

A new, comprehensive, one volume history of Southeast Asia that spans prehistory to the present. Ricklefs brings together colleagues at the National University of Singapore whose expertise covers the entire region, encompassing political, social, economic, religious and cultural history.Opening with an account of the ethnic groups and initial cultural and social structures of Southeast Asia, the book moves through the...

It is often said that the devil has all the best tunes. He also has as many names as he has guises. Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub (in Christian thought), Ha-Satan or the Adversary (in Jewish scripture) and Iblis or Shaitan (in Islamic tradition) has throughout the ages and across civilizations been a compelling and charismatic presence. For two thousand years the...

Provides a balanced historical narrative of the contemporary causes of conflict in the Middle East, ideal for students and scholars. The recent history of the Middle East has involved unprecedented violence and war. The Contemporary Middle East: Foreign Intervention and Authoritarian Governance Since 1979 explores the causes of the sustained turbulence in the region by focusing on three separate yet...

Social Democracy in the Making is an expansive and ambitious intellectual history of democratic socialism from one of the world’s leading intellectual historians and social ethicists. The fallout from twenty years of neoliberal economic globalism has sparked a surge of interest in the old idea of democratic socialism—a democracy in which the people control the economy and government, no group...

An illustrated exploration of the largely unpublished collection of eighteenth-century French drawings, albums, and sketchbooks at the Bibliothèque nationale de France Promenades on Paper explores the largely unmined collection of eighteenth-century drawings held in the Department of Prints and Photography of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Among the 50 featured artists are some of France’s most celebrated eighteenth-century practitioners, including...

This book presents the first biography written in English of the famous Babylonian lawgiver, King Hammurabi, who ruled from 1792 to 1750 BC. It offers a well-rounded view of this ancient Mesopotamian king's accomplishments by drawing on the extensive writings of his time, including those by Hammurabi himself. Numerous letters and reports by ambassadors to his court and others are...

Grafted Arts conceptualises "graft"—the violent and creative processes of suturing arts—as a method of empire building in western eighteenth-century India. Grafted Arts focuses on Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials who used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige, and generate devotion as they allied with, or fought against, each other to control...

The classic international bestseller - a marvellously exciting and stimulating look at the emergence and development of Western civilisation. Civilisation by Kenneth Clark presents a sweeping narrative on how Western Europe evolved in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. It examines the ideas, books, buildings, works of art, and significant individuals that constitute our civilisation. The author...

Is it possible to develop a radical socialist feminism that fights for the emancipation of women and of all humankind? Bread and Roses is a journey through the history of feminism. Using the concrete struggles of women, the Marxist feminist Andrea D'Atri traces the history of the women's and workers' movement from the French Revolution to Queer Theory. She analyses...

A groundbreaking history of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern age. In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale...

The idea that Christianity started as a clandestine movement among the poor is a widely accepted notion. Yet it is one of many myths that must be discarded if we are to understand just how a tiny messianic movement on the edge of the Roman Empire became the dominant faith of Western civilisation. In a fast-paced, highly readable book that...

Following the success of The China Questions, a new volume of insights from top China specialists explains key issues shaping today's US-China relationship. For decades, Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the US-China relationship? For the global economy and international security? Seeking to clarify...

An irreverent survey in comics spanning world history from the birth of Islam to the Byzantine Empire to the Italian Renaissance. Larry Gonick's celebrated series The Cartoon History of the Universe is a unique fusion of world history and the comics medium, a work of serious scholarship and a masterpiece of popular literature. Praised by historians as a narrative and...

In this deeply thoughtful book, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl turns a critical lens on prejudice. Surveying the study of prejudice since World War II, Young-Bruehl suggests an approach that distinguishes between different types of prejudices, the people who hold them, the social and political settings that promote them, and the human needs they fulfil. Startling, challenging, and courageous, this work offers an...

"A mind-blowing tour de force that unwraps the myriad objects of addiction that surround us. Intelligent, incisive, and sometimes grimly entertaining." - Rod Phillips, author of Alcohol: A History "A fascinating history of corporate America's efforts to shape our habits and desires." - Vox We live in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and shopping to binge eating and...

In 1966, two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment was to debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes's General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed "monetarism" and insisted the...

Provides a background in the history, principles, and practices of the field of public history. Public History: An Introduction from Theory to Application is the first text of its kind to offer both historical background on the ways in which historians have collected, preserved, and interpreted history with and for public audiences in the United States since the nineteenth century...

Globalization has profoundly shaped the world we live in, yet its rise was neither inevitable nor planned. It is also one of the most contentious issues of our time. While it may have made goods less expensive, it has also sent massive flows of money across borders and shaken the global balance of power. Outside the Box offers a fresh...

The most authoritative account of a pivotal event in legal and cultural history: the trials of Oscar Wilde on charges of “gross indecency” Among the most infamous prosecutions of a literary figure in history, the two trials of Oscar Wilde for committing acts of “gross indecency” occurred at the height of his fame. After being found guilty, Wilde spent two...

This expansive history of Black political thought shows us the origins—and the echoes—of anticolonial liberation on a global scale. On the Scale of the World examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and...