It covers 3,000 years of history from the city’s quasi-mythical origins, through the Etruscan kings, the opulent glory of classical Rome, the decadence and decay of the Middle Ages and the beauty and corruption of the Renaissance, to its time at the heart of Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Exploring the city’s streets and buildings, peopled with popes, gladiators, emperors, noblemen and peasants, this volume details the turbulent and dramatic history of Rome in all its depravity and grandeur.

    It examines the impact of the revolution on society as a whole--on different classes, ethnic groups, the army, men and women, youth. Its centralconcern is to understand how one structure of domination was replaced by another. The book registers the primacy of politics, but situates political developments firmly in the context of massive economic, social, and cultural change. Since the fall of Communism there has been much reflection on thesignificance of the Russian Revolution. The book rejects the currently influential, liberal interpretation of the revolution in favor of one that sees it as rooted in the contradictions of a backward society which sought modernization and enlightenment and ended in political tyranny.

    Marvel at colorful murals in Riomaggiore, rent a boat in Sestri Levante, or explore the Church of the Cappuccin Monks in Monterosso al Mare. You'll get Rick's firsthand advice on the best sights, eating, sleeping, and nightlife, and the maps and self-guided tours will ensure you make the most of your experience. More than just reviews and directions, a Rick Steves Snapshot guide is a tour guide in your pocket.Rick Steves' Snapshot guides consist of excerpted chapters from Rick Steves' European country guidebooks. Snapshot guides are a great choice for travelers visiting a specific city or region, rather than multiple European destinations. These slim guides offer all of Rick's up-to-date advice on what sights are worth your time and money. They include good-value hotel and restaurant recommendations, with no introductory information (such as overall trip planning, when to go, and travel practicalities).

    The girls are nineteen, on holiday and staying with a young medical student, James. The events of that summer cast a long shadow over their careers, marriages and motherhood. When they meet again 25 years later, the baby in the phone box returns to haunt them, and they are forced to confront the truth that has remained silent all this time. The Partridge and the Pelican explores motherhood, secrets and the enduring ties of friendship.

    But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations--such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution--fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

    From the chaos of the Civil War to the simple beauty of the islands; from legendary revolutionaries to modest fisherfolk, every image has been exquisitely transformed and every page bursting with life. Using a combination of cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology and his own historical research, John Breslin has meticulously colourised these pictures with breath-taking attention to detail and authenticity. With over 250 photographs from all four provinces, and accompanied by fascinating captions by historian Sarah-Anne Buckley, Old Ireland in Colour breathes new life into the scenes we thought we knew, and brings our ancestors back to life before our eyes.

    In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago," Pringle tells the story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world. Vavilov's plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood. He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. He called it a "mission for all humanity."To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov's dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents. In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, Vavilov built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today.But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage.Stalin's collectivization of farmland caused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine. Vavilov's master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin's impossible demands for immediate results.In Stalin's Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists were systematically repressed in favor of the peasant horticulturalist Trofim Lysenko, with his fraudulent claims and speculative theories. Vavilov was the most famous victim of this purge, which set back Russian biology by a generation and caused the country untold harm. He was sentenced to death, but unlike Galileo, he refused to recant his beliefs and, in the most cruel twist, this humanitarian pioneer scientist was starved to death in the gulag.Pringle uses newly opened Soviet archives, including Vavilov's secret police file, official correspondence, vivid expedition reports, previously unpublished family letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to bring us this intensely human story of a brilliant life cut short by anti-science demagogues, ideology, censorship, and political expedience.

    At its apogee in the 1930s, 42 million Britons governed 500 million foreign subjects. Britannia ruled the waves and a quarter of the earth's surface was painted red on the map. Where Britain's writ did not run directly, its influence, sustained by matchless industrial and commercial sinews, was often paramount.Yet no empire (except the Russian) disappeared more swiftly. Within a generation this mighty structure sank almost without trace, leaving behind a scatter of sea-girt dependencies and a ghost of empire, the British Commonwealth of nations. Equally, it can be claimed that Britain bequeathed its former colonies economic foundations, a cultural legacy, a sporting spirit, a legal code and a language more ubiquitous than Latin ever was.In a book of unparalleled scholarship, Piers Brendon presents the story of the decline and eclipse of British might, the major historical event in the closing stages of the second millennium. Full of vivid particulars, brief lives, telling anecdotes, comic episodes, symbolic moments and illustrative vignettes, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire evokes remote places as well as distant times. From the war for American independence, the end of the Raj, the 'scram out of Africa' and the unfinished business of the Falklands and Hong Kong to the new 'informal' empire of the United States, this is a comprehensive and engaging account.

    To carry out President Xi Jinping’s flagship foreign-policy effort, China promises to spend over one trillion dollars for new ports, railways, fiber-optic cables, power plants, and other connections. The plan touches more than one hundred and thirty countries and has expanded into the Arctic, cyberspace, and even outer space. Beijing says that it is promoting global development, but Washington warns that it is charting a path to global dominance. Taking readers on a journey to China’s projects in Asia, Europe, and Africa, Jonathan E. Hillman reveals how this grand vision is unfolding. As China pushes beyond its borders and deep into dangerous territory, it is repeating the mistakes of the great powers that came before it, Hillman argues. If China succeeds, it will remake the world and place itself at the center of everything. But Xi may be overreaching: all roads do not yet lead to Beijing.“A reality check on Beijing’s global infrastructure project.”—Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post"For all the hype and hand-wringing over how the [Belt and Road] could usher in the Chinese century, Hillman’s engaging mix of high-level analysis and fieldwork in more than a dozen countries paints a much more nuanced picture."—Keith Johnson, Foreign Policy

    Told by a geologist with a novelist's sense of language and narrative, Sand examines the science—sand forensics, the physics of granular materials, sedimentology, paleontology and archaeology, planetary exploration—and at the same time explores the rich human context of sand. Interwoven with tales of artists, mathematicians, explorers, and even a vampire, the story of sand is an epic of environmental construction and destruction, an adventure in staggering scales of time and distance, yet a tale that encompasses the ordinary and everyday. Sand, in fact, is all around us—it has made possible our computers, buildings and windows, toothpaste, cosmetics, and paper, and it has played dramatic roles in human history, commerce, and imagination. In this luminous, kinetic, revelatory account, we do indeed find the world in a grain of sand.

    . . . A stimulating and finely written book." (Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad) From the first shots of the American Revolution in 1776 to the last agony of the Paris Commune in 1871, Adam Zamoyski recreates an era when determined men and women were willing to die for the cause of an idealized nation, and who transformed the society of Europe and its colonies. Moving fluidly through the history of the tumultuous years that embraced the American and French revolutions, the Irish Rebellion, the Polish uprisings, the liberation of South America, and the Italian Risorgimento, Holy Madness captures the passion of revolutionary figures who were caught up in the fervor of the nationalist crusade, while exposing the dangerous fallacies of their idealism.

    The overwhelming majority of works on empire concentrate on the European maritime powers. Lieven’s comparative approach highlights the important role played by Russia in the expansion of Europe and its rise to global dominance. The book contrasts the nature, strategies, and fate of empire in Russia with that of its major rivals, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and British empires, and considers a broad range of other cases from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States, Indonesia, India, and the European Union.Many of the dilemmas of empire persist in today’s world, and Lieven throws new light on some of the most intractable current examples, including the crisis in the former Soviet Union, the troubles in Ulster, and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. This major examination of the imperial experience presents history on the grandest scale, combining formidable erudition with stimulating readability.

    The volume brings together the most important and influential aspects of Ian Kershaw’s research on the Holocaust for the first time. The writings are arranged in three sections—Hitler and the Final Solution, popular opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Final Solution in historiography—and Kershaw provides an introduction and a closing section on the uniqueness of Nazism.Kershaw was a founding historian of the social history of the Third Reich, and he has throughout his career conducted pioneering research on the societal causes and consequences of Nazi policy. His work has brought much to light concerning the ways in which the attitudes of the German populace shaped and did not shape Nazi policy. This volume presents a comprehensive, multifaceted picture both of the destructive dynamic of the Nazi leadership and of the attitudes and behavior of ordinary Germans as the persecution of the Jews spiraled into total genocide.

    Siam Mapped challenges much that has been written on Thai history because it demonstrates convincingly that the physical and political definition of Thailand on which other works are based is anachronistic.

    Boosters of the city have long capitalized on this splendor, recently likening it to the fairytale capital of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, the Emerald City. But just as Dorothy, Toto, and their traveling companions discover a darker reality upon entering the green gates of the imaginary Emerald City, those who look more closely at Seattle’s landscape will find that it reveals a history marked by environmental degradation and urban inequality.This book explores the role of nature in the development of the city of Seattle from the earliest days of its settlement to the present. Combining environmental history, urban history, and human geography, Matthew Klingle shows how attempts to reshape nature in and around Seattle have often ended not only in ecological disaster but also social inequality. The price of Seattle’s centuries of growth and progress has been paid by its wildlife, including the famous Pacific salmon, and its poorest residents. Klingle proposes a bold new way of understanding the interdependence between nature and culture, and he argues for what he calls an “ethic of place.” Using Seattle as a compelling case study, he offers important insights for every city seeking to live in harmony with its natural landscape.