This 11 volume set includes: Vo1 : Our Oriental Heritage; Vol 2: The Life of Greece; Vol.3: Caesar and Christ; Vol 4: The Age of Faith; Vol 5: The Renaissance; Vol 6: The Reformation; Vol 7: The Age of Reason Begins; Vol 8: The Age of Louis XIV; Vol 9:The Age of Voltaire; Vol. 10: Rousseau and Revolution; Vol 11: The Age of Napoleon

    Recognizing that The Great War was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole, author Modris Eksteins examines the lives of ordinary people, works of modern literature, and pivotal historical events to redefine the way we look at our past and toward our future.

    Miguel León-Portilla had the incomparable success of organizing texts translated from Nahuatl by Ángel María Garibay Kintana to give us the The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico: Indigenous people of Tenochtitlán, Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Chalco and Tlaxcala were formed about the struggle against the conquerors and the final ruin of the Aztec world.An account of the omens that announced the disaster, a description of Cortes' progress, a chronicle of the heroic battle of the ancient Mexicans in defense of their culture and of their own lives, a civilization that was lost forever, a great epic poem of the origins of Mexican nationality, The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico is already a classic book and an indispensable reading work.

    Martin as source material for Game of Thrones, comes a classic book on innovation and technological change in medieval EuropeIn this account of Europe’s rise to world leadership in technology, Frances and Joseph Gies show how early modern technology and experimental science were direct outgrowths of the decisive innovations of medieval Europe, in the tools and techniques of agriculture, craft industry, metallurgy, building construction, navigation, and war. The Gieses report that many of Europe’s most important inventions—the horse harness, the stirrup, the magnetic compass, cotton and silk cultivation and manufacture, papermaking, firearms, and “Arabic” numerals—had their origins outside Europe, in China, India, and the Middle East. Europe synthesized its own innovations—the three-field system, water power in industry, the full-rigged ship, the putting-out system—into a powerful new combination of technology, economics, and politics.

    Long celebrated as a pathbreaking achievement in the social history of the ancient world, M.I. Finley's brilliant study remains, as classicist Bernard Knox notes in his introduction to this new edition, "as indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader"--a fundamental companion for students of Homer and Homeric Greece.

    Composed in the late 1960's, Blythe's volume paints a vivid picture of a community in which the vast changes of the twentieth century are matched by deep continuities of history, tradition, and nature.

    Ross Dunn here recounts the great traveler's remarkable career, interpreting it within the cultural and social context of Islamic society and giving the reader both a biography of an extraordinary personality and a study of the hemispheric dimensions of human interchange in medieval times.

    The descent of the French Revolution from rapturous liberation into an orgy of apparently pointless bloodletting has been the focus of countless reflections on the often malignant nature of humanity and the folly of revolution.David Andress, a leading historian of the French Revolution, presents a radically different account of the Terror. In a remarkably vivid and page-turning work of history, he transports the reader from the pitched battles on the streets of Paris to the royal family's escape through secret passageways in the Tuileries palace, and across the landscape of the tragic last years of the Revolution. The violence, he shows, was a result of dogmatic and fundamentalist thinking: dreadful decisions were made by groups of people who believed they were still fighting for freedom but whose survival was threatened by famine, external war, and counter-revolutionaries within the fledging new state. Urgent questions emerge from Andress's trenchant reassessment: When is it right to arbitrarily detain those suspected of subversion? When does an earnest patriotism become the rationale for slaughter?Combining startling narrative power and bold insight, The Terror is written with verve and exceptional pace. It is a dramatic new interpretation of the French Revolution that draws troubling parallels with today's political and religious dundamentalism."A vivid and powerful narrative of the years 1789-95... The narrative is dense yet fast-moving, from the storming of the Bastille to the execution of King Louis XVI to the paranoid politics of the National Convention." --DAVID GILMOUR, THE New York Times Book Review"In such alarming times, it is important to understand what exactly terror is, how it works politically, and what, if anything, can be done to combat it. The historian David Andress has made a serious contribution to this central subject of our times with an accessible account of the way terror overtook the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century." --RUTH SCURR, The Times (London)DAVID ANDRESS, a leading historian of the French Revolution, is Reader in Modern European History at the University of Portsmouth and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

    Southern describes the chief forms of social, political & religious organization.

    But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions around the world.In The Cold War, Westad offers a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battle transformed every corner of our globe. From Soweto to Hollywood, Hanoi, and Hamburg, young men and women felt they were fighting for the future of the world. The Cold War may have begun on the perimeters of Europe, but it had its deepest reverberations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where nearly every community had to choose sides. And these choices continue to define economies and regimes across the world.Today, many regions are plagued with environmental threats, social divides, and ethnic conflicts that stem from this era. Its ideologies influence China, Russia, and the United States; Iraq and Afghanistan have been destroyed by the faith in purely military solutions that emerged from the Cold War.Stunning in its breadth and revelatory in its perspective, this book expands our understanding of the Cold War both geographically and chronologically, and offers an engaging new history of how today’s world was created.

    

    Its success "might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic." In The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless men,' the outbursts of sexual freedom and deliberate blasphemy, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs. It is a portrait not of the bourgeois revolution that actually took place, but of the impulse towards a far more fundamental overturning of society."Incorporates some of Dr. Hill's most profound statements yet about the 17th-century revolution as a whole." -- The Economist

    His work was received with widespread acclaim by the scholarly community and the reading public. In 1902 Mommsen was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and acclaimed as 'the greatest living master of the art of historical writing'. Mommsen rejected traditional Enlightenment accounts, which glorified ancient Rome; instead, guided by a new and rigorous criticism of sources, Mommsen began the demythologisation of Roman history. In a vivacious and engaging style, Mommsen drew bold parallels between the nineteenth century and classical Rome. Information about this Folio Society edition (taken from the Editorial Note):Theodor Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte was first published in three volumes between 1854 and 1856, and was subsequently revised several times. The text of the present volume is derived from William Purdie Dickson’s translation, first published in four volumes by Richard Bentley in London in 1868, of the fourth German edition.The text printed in the ensuing pages preserves slightly less than half of the 1868 edition’s three-quarters of a million words. In abridging a work of such magnitude, strict guiding principles tend to be honoured as much in their breach as in their observance. With that caveat in mind, therefore, the intention in this edition has been to provide, within a single volume, a continuous narrative of the history of Rome, from the origins of the city down to the Civil War that resulted in the sole rule of Julius Caesar (c.753—46BC). At the same time, it is hoped that the selection represents the essential character of Mommsen’s historical vision, and can be read with both pleasure and profit by a non-specialist audience.In pursuit of these goals, the relative amount of space devoted to each of the main periods of Roman history has been preserved, and Mommsen’s own book divisions and titles retained. Similarly, the original chapter titles and breaks—and indeed even the paragraphing—has been followed as closely as possible. Wirth some obvious exceptions, marginal precedence has been given to social and constitutional developments, and to political events and conflicts in Rome and Italy, over foreign policy and the detailed narration of overseas wars. Consequently, the significant amount of background information that Mommsen provided concerning the foreign nations with which Rome came into violent contact—Etruscans, Celts, Carthaginians and the peoples of the Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean among them—has been almost entirely excised. And the summaries on literature and the arts that were tacked on to the end of each book have also had to be omitted. Within these broad parameters, however, every effort has been made to ensure that the full spectrum of Mommsen's themes, methodology, and style is portrayed.So that the text retains its readability, all cuts have been made silently, without the distraction of frequent ellipses. Where it has proved impossible to provide a continuous narrative in Mommsen’s own words, then editorial linking passages, printed in smaller type than the rest of the text, have been supplied. These confine themselves to the bare essentials and take a deliberately conservative line in order to sit more comfortably with the main narrative. the new maps and extensive chronology are also intended to compensate for information otherwise excised. A handful of editorial footnotes and other brief interpolations have been added where essential for sense. All such additions to the original text, as well as any other localised rewordings necessitated by the cuts, are contained within square brackets. Most of Mommsen’s analogies to subsequent historical events, which are one of the many delights of his work, require no explanation for an educated readership.Any attempt to update Mommsen’s scholarship would be presumptuous, if not completely foolhardy, and so all points of fact and interpretation have been allowed to stand without comment. thus, for example, Mommsen’s belief that Caesar was probably born in 102BC—rather than 100 BC, as is now generally accepted—has not been amended. Nor has it been deemed necessary to bring into line with current accepted norms either the spelling of proper nouns or Disckon’s faithful equivalents of Mommsen’s deliberately idiosyncratic and anachronistic rendition of Latin terms. Of these, the most noticeable is undoubtedly the word ‘burgess’ instead of ‘citizen’. While proving that few things date faster than modernity, they also provide an important reminder that Mommsen wrote his history with the pressing political and national issues facing both pre-unification Germany and the rest of the mid-nineteenth0century Europe directly in mind.

    The tale of Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie," and his heroic but doomed attempt to regain his grandfather's (James II) crown - remains the stuff of legend: the hunted fugitive, Flora MacDonald, and the dramatic escape over the sea to the Isle of Skye. But the full story - the real history - is even more dramatic, captivating, and revelatory.Much more than a rebellion, the events of '45 were the final act in an ongoing civil war that threatened to destabilize the British nation and destroy its embryonic empire. The Bonnie Prince and his army of Scottish highlanders alone couldn't have been much of a threat, but with the involvement of England's perennial enemy, Catholic France, it was a far more dangerous and potentially catastrophic situation for the English crown. With encouragement and support from Louis XIV, Charles Edward's triumphant Jacobite army encroached all the way to Derby, a mere 120 miles from London, before a series of missteps ultimately doomed the rebellion to crushing defeat and annihilation at Culloden in April 1746 - the last battle ever fought on British soil.Jacqueline Riding conveys the full weight of these monumental years of English history as the future course of Great Britain as a united kingdom was irreversibly altered.

    David Starkey looks at the monarchy as a whole, charting its history from Roman times, to the Wars of the Roses, the chaos of the Civil War, the fall of Charles I and Cromwell's emergence as Lord Protector - all the way up until the Victorian era when Britain's monarchs came face-to-face with modernity.