Part of Eric Hobsbawm's epic four-volume history of the modern world, along with The Age of Capitalism, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes.

    For some mothers, it’s their children. For others, it’s artistic expression, invention, social cause, or even a nation that they helped to birth. In Tough Mothers, Jason Porath brings his wisdom and wit to bear on fifty fascinating matriarchs.In concise, deeply researched vignettes, accompanied by charming illustrations, Porath illuminates these fearsome women, explores their lives, and pays tribute to their accomplishments. Here are famous women as well as lesser known figures from around the globe who have left their indelible mark as they changed the course of history, including:The Mother Who Sued to Save Her Children from Slavery—Sojourner TruthThe Mother of Rock n’ Roll—Sister Rosetta TharpeThe Mother of Holocaust Children—Irena SendlerThe Mothers of The Dominican Republic—The Mirabal SistersThe Mother of Yemen’s Golden Age—Arwa al-SulayhiA celebration of motherhood and female achievement, Tough Mothers reminds us of the power of women to transform our lives and our world.

    The contemporary consensus was that she admirably fulfilled their expectations for a royal consort and king's mother. Who was this 'perfect princess'? In this first major biography, Joan's background and career are examined to reveal a remarkable story. Brought up at court following her father's shocking execution, Joan defied convention by marrying secretly aged just twelve, and refused to deny her first love despite coercion, imprisonment and a forced bigamous marriage. Wooed by the Black Prince when she was widowed, theirs was a love match, yet the questionable legality of their marriage threatened their son's succession to the throne. Intelligent and independent, Joan constructed her role as Princess of Wales. Deliberately self-effacing, she created and managed her reputation, using her considerable intercessory skills to protect and support Richard. A loyal wife and devoted mother, Joan was much more than just a famous beauty

    Wilder's unpublished memoirs to picture the people, places, and events that informed her ninety years and inspired her well-beloved Little House books

    It wasn't the rough-riding new president, Teddy Roosevelt, but his outrageous and outrageously charming teenage daughter, Alice. From the moment she strode into town- carrying a snake and dangling a cigarette- to the image of her seven decades later, entertaining Republican and Democrat presidents in Washington's most celebrated salon, Alice Roosevelt Longworth was literally a legend in her own time. This new biography-the first in twenty years- is a richly entertaining portrait of America's most memorable first daughter. Alice in fact strode across the whole twentieth century, living her entire life on the political stage and in the public eye, earning the nickname "the other Washington monument." She grew up knowing Civil war veterans, lived through two world wars, helped put the roar in the Roaring Twenties, and campaigned against her cousin Franklin's New Deal. Smoking, gambling, and dressing flamboyantly, she flouted social connections and opened the door for other women to do the same. Her barbed tongue was infamous, but whenever she talked, powerful people listened, as she was one of the most astute political minds of her age. She advised her father; her husband, Nicholas Longworth, who was the Speaker of the House, and her lover William Borah, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the most powerful man in Washington. Using love letters and other documents disclosed for the first time, Stacy Cordery provides scandalous proof of the real father of Alice's child as well as evidence of her other previously unknown love affairsAlice Roosevelt Longworth was for eight decades the social doyenne in a town where socializing was state business. Politicians, diplomats, journalists, and the famous and infamous of every stripe clamored to be invited to her teas. Meetings in her drawing room helped to change the course of history, from undermining the Leagues of Nations to boosting Richards Nixon's fortunes.

    Madame President is the inspiring, often heartbreaking story of Sirleaf’s evolution from an ordinary Liberian mother of four boys to international banking executive, from a victim of domestic violence to a political icon, from a post-war president to a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author Helene Cooper deftly weaves Sirleaf’s personal story into the larger narrative of the coming of age of Liberian women. The highs and lows of Sirleaf’s life are filled with indelible images; from imprisonment in a jail cell for standing up to Liberia’s military government to addressing the United States Congress, from reeling under the onslaught of the Ebola pandemic to signing a deal with Hillary Clinton when she was still Secretary of State that enshrined American support for Liberia’s future. Sirleaf’s personality shines throughout this riveting biography. Ultimately, Madame President is the story of Liberia’s greatest daughter, and the universal lessons we can all learn from this “Oracle” of African women.

    Tim Heald's vivid and elegant biography portrays a woman who was beautiful and sexually alluring—even more so than Princess Diana years later—and whose reputation for naughtiness co-existed with the glamour. The mythology is that Margaret's life was "ruined" by her not being allowed to marry the one true love of her life—Group Captain Peter Townsend. Therefore her marriage to Lord Snowdon and her well-attested relationships with Roddy Llewellyn and others were mere consolation prizes. Margaret's often exotic personal life in places like Mustique is a key part of her story. The author received extraordinary help from those closest to Princess Margaret, including her family (Lord Snowdon and her son, Lord Linley), three of her private secretaries, and many of her ladies in waiting; as well as gaining the Queen's permission to use the royal archives. Heald asks why one of the most famous and loved little girls in the world, who became a juvenile wartime sweetheart, ended her life a sad wheelchairbound figure, publicly reviled and ignored. This is a story of a life in which the private and the public seemed permanently in conflict.

    Filled with chilling tales of looted palaces and burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding peasants and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution, it is the story of how a centuries’-old elite, famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the Tsar and Empire, and its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia.Yet Former People is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class—so-called “former people” and “class enemies”—overcame the psychological wounds inflicted by the loss of their world and decades of repression as they struggled to find a place for themselves and their families in the new, hostile order of the Soviet Union. Chronicling the fate of two great aristocratic families—the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns—the book reveals how even in the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on. Told with sensitivity and nuance by acclaimed historian Douglas Smith, Former People is the dramatic portrait of two of Russia’s most powerful aristocratic families, and a sweeping account of their homeland in violent transition.

    8-page color illustrations.

    Suleiman became besotted with her, and forsook all other mistresses. Then, in an unprecedented step, he made her the first and only queen in the Ottoman court. Although shrouded in scandal, the canny and sophisticated Roxelana became a shrewd diplomat and administrator, who helped Suleyman keep pace with a changing world in which women - from Queen Elizabeth to Catherine de Medici - increasingly held the reins of power.In Empress of the East, Pierce reveals the true history of an elusive figure who pushed the Ottoman Empire towards modernity.

    It offers close examination of battlefield victories, personal torments, military genius, Bonaparte′s titanic ego and his relationships with the French government, Talleyrand, Wellington and Josephine. A consummate biography of a complex man.

    From Sophia who died shortly before she would have become Queen as heir to Queen Anne, to Adelaide, consort to William IV whose failure to provide an heir ensured the succession passed to his niece Queen Victoria. During this period, an array of colourful personalities came and went - George I's ill-fated wife Sophia Dorothea of Celle who was imprisoned for adultery for over 30 years until her death; the equally tragic Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark and sister of George III who married an incipient schizophrenic, saw her lover put to death, was divorced and imprisoned, released after pressure from her brother, only to die of typhoid or scarlet fever aged just 23; George IV's notorious consort , his cousin Caroline of Brunswick, who danced naked on tables and was refused access to his coronation; and their daughter Charlotte, whose death in childbirth in 1817 necessitated the hasty marriages of several of her middle-aged uncles in a desperate race to provide a legal heir to the throne.

    Unger's book exceptionally well done. It's an admirable account of the marquis's two revolutions-one might even say his two lives-the French and the American. It also captures the private Lafayette and his remarkable wife, Adrienne, in often moving detail." -Thomas Fleming, author, Liberty!: The American Revolution"Harlow Unger's Lafayette is a remarkable and dramatic account of a life as fully lived as it is possible to imagine, that of Gilbert de Motier, marquis de Lafayette. To American readers Unger's biography will provide a stark reminder of just how near run a thing was our War of Independence and the degree to which our forefathers' victory hinged on the help of our French allies, marshalled for George Washington by his 'adopted' son, Lafayette. But even more absorbing and much less well known to the general reader will be Unger's account of Lafayette's idealistic but naive efforts to plant the fruits of the American democracy he so admired in the unreceptive soil of his homeland. His inspired oratory produced not the constitutional democracy he sought but the bloody Jacobin excesses of the French Revolution."-Larry Collins, coauthor, Is Paris Burning? and O Jerusalem!"A lively and entertaining portrait of one of the most important supporting actors in the two revolutions that transformed the modern world."-Susan Dunn, author, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light"Harlow Unger has cornered the market on muses to emerge as America's most readable historian. His new biography of the marquis de Lafayette combines a thoroughgoing account of the age of revolution, a probing psychological study of a complex man, and a literary style that goes down like cream. A worthy successor to his splendid biography of Noah Webster."-Florence King, Contributing Editor, National Review"Enlightening! The picture of Lafayette's life is a window to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history."-Michel Aubert La Fayette

    Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Hermione Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton—tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings, she developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton’s life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens, her heroic relief efforts during the Great War, the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and childless, her one brush with passion came and went in midlife, an affair vividly, intimately recounted here. With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton’s life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her far to be more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.

    How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world’s greatest empire? And how did they lose it all? This is the intimate story of twenty tsars and tsarinas, some touched by genius, some by madness, but all inspired by holy autocracy and imperial ambition. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s gripping chronicle reveals their secret world of unlimited power and ruthless empire-building, overshadowed by palace conspiracy, family rivalries, sexual decadence and wild extravagance, with a global cast of adventurers, courtesans, revolutionaries and poets, from Ivan the Terrible to Tolstoy and Pushkin, to Bismarck, Lincoln, Queen Victoria and Lenin.