Modern category: 14410 books
The People's Republic of Amnesia
Tiananmen Revisited
Language: English
Release Date: May 5, 2014
Finalist for the 2015 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism Longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Award for the Best Non-Fiction book in the world on Foreign Affairs An Economist Book of the Year, 2014 A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice "One of the best analyses of the impact...
by Linda Benson
Language: English
Release Date: April 20, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: April 20, 2016
Exploring the remarkable story of China’s rise to global prominence, China since 1949 provides a concise yet comprehensive overview of the events that have shaped the country since the middle of the twentieth century.
Covering the Maoist era through the Reform period to the present day, this...
Erasmus Darwin
A Life of Unequalled Achievement
Language: English
Release Date: July 18, 2012
It has been said of Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) that no one from his day to ours has ever rivalled him in his achievements in such a wide range of fields. He was a far-sighted scientific genius, fertile in theory and invention, and one of the foremost physicians of his time. His gift for friendship...
Strange Rebels
1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
Language: English
Release Date: March 11, 2014
Few moments in history have seen as many seismic transformations as 1979. That single year marked the emergence of revolutionary Islam as a global political force, the beginning of market revolutions in China and Britain that would radically alter the international economy, and the first stirrings...
by Edward W. Said
Language: English
Release Date: October 24, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 24, 2012
In these six essays--delivered on the BBC as the prestigious Reith Lectures--Edward Said addresses the ways in which the intellectual can best serve society in the light of a heavily compromised media and of special interest groups who are protected at the cost of larger community concerns. Said suggests...
by Ali A. Allawi
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: April 28, 2009
Islam as a religion is central to the lives of over a billion people, but its outer expression as a distinctive civilization has been undergoing a monumental crisis. Buffeted by powerful adverse currents, Islamic civilization today is a shadow of its former self. The most disturbing and possibly fatal...
Massacre
The Life and Death of the Paris Commune
Language: English
Release Date: December 9, 2014
From a pre-eminent Yale historian comes the first popular history of the 1871 Paris Commune, a seminal episode in modern European history.
The Paris Commune lasted for only 64 days in 1871, but during that short time it gave rise to some of the grandest political dreams of the nineteenth century--before...
Liberty or Death
The French Revolution
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 2016
The French Revolution has fascinated, perplexed, and inspired for more than two centuries. It was a seismic event that radically transformed France and launched shock waves across the world. In this provocative new history, Peter McPhee draws on a lifetime’s study of eighteenth-century France and Europe...
The Age of the Democratic Revolution
A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 - Updated Edition
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2014
For the Western world, the period from 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era in which the outlines of the modern democratic state came into being. Here for the first time in one volume is R. R. Palmer's magisterial account of this incendiary age. Palmer argues that the American, French, and...
Ramillies 1706
Year of Miracles
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2006
On Sunday 23 May 1706, near the village of Ramillies in modern Belgium, the Anglo-Dutch army commanded by John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, inflicted a devastating defeat on the French army of the Duke de Villeroi. Marlborough's triumph on that day ranks alongside Blenheim as one of the great...
The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society
Adam Smith's Response to Rousseau
Language: English
Release Date: April 14, 2008
Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries...
Condorcet
Writings on the United States
Language: English
Release Date: May 30, 2012
Condorcet (1743–1794) was the last of the great eighteenth-century French philosophes and one of the most fervent américanistes of his time. A friend of Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine and a member of the American Philosophical Society, he was well informed and enthusiastic about the American Revolution....
Ernst Toller and German Society
Intellectuals as Leaders and Critics, 1914–1939
Language: English
Release Date: October 10, 2013
During the years of Weimar and the Third Reich, Toller was one of the more active of the "other Germany's" left-wing intellectuals. A leader of the Bavarian Soviet of 1919, he had in addition won the Kleist prize and was recognized as one of Germany's best playwrights. Indeed, during the...
The Marquess of Queensberry
Wilde's Nemesis
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2013
The Marquess of Queensberry is as famous for his role in the downfall of one of our greatest literary geniuses as he was for helping establish the rules for modern-day boxing. The trial and two-year imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, lover of Queensberry’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, remains one of literary...