It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.

    After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with similar abandon and relentless persistence, destroying European powers from Spain to Sweden as they marched on the contested soil of Germany. Fanatics, speculators, and ordinary people found themselves trapped in a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction. The Thirty Years War was a turning point in the making of modern Europe and the modern world: out of it came the system of nation-states that remains fundamental to international law. C.V. Wedgwood's magisterial book is the only comprehensive account of the war in English, as well as a triumph of scholarship and literature. Includes maps and charts.

    He tells of the many rejoicings in Europe over the successes of the Crusaders in A.D. 1221. But little did Europe know that two decades later, the Mongol hordes organized by Genghis Khan would turn the Middle East into a heap of ruins and spread terror throughout the West.A work of enduring scholarship and literary excellence, The Mongol Empire is a classic on the rise and fall of the world's largest empire. It describes the incredible ascent of the Mongol people, which, through the political and military genius of Genghis Khan, overwhelmed and subdued the nations of most of the world. It demonstrates the transformation of barbarous nomads into the most efficient rulers of their time and describes the crumbling of their vast empire and the assumption of its legacy by the formerly subjugated China and Russia.Maurice Collis in Time and Tide said of The Mongol Empire: "It has the rare merit of being both scholarly and exciting.... The entire world comes on to his canvas, romantic and fantastical persons pass in our view, and at the conclusion we realize that we have seen the whole of what Marco Polo saw only in part." while The Observer commented, "it is a fine book, full of dramatic occasion well used, clear in proportions."

    Professor Nevins has expanded & revised the original text of 1937 & offers stimulating insight into historians' methods of interpreting and presenting the past from the brilliance of Thucydides to the most recent (1962) scholarship on Europe & America.He sets apart the different approaches to history - biographical, cultural, intellectual, geographical, and political - illuminating the peculiar goals, problems, and development of each discipline. He discusses the question of pre-history and its companion science, archaeology; and he spans the history of the collection and use of records - including the mischief of "garbled" and "cheating" documents, some of which have been sources of popular myths. The Gateway to History is at once an antidote against superficiality and an intriguing example of the author's contention that "realities are seldom dull" when they are approached with an active mind and imagination.