The History Press imprint: 4918 books

When the Gaspee entered the waters of Narragansett Bay outside Newport in 1772, revolutionary Rhode Island was a hotbed of traders, smugglers and anti-British sentiment. In just a few months, the ship would be burned and its commander shot by possibly the first gunfire of the American Revolution. Join...

The SS grew out of Adolf Hitler’s and Heinrich Himmler’s obsession to prevent the treachery they believed to have caused the German defeat in the First World War. It was to be an elite corps of politically aware soldiers whose primary aim was to prevent the undermining of the Nazi Party by rendering...

A brigade was formed in 1944 as part of the British Army and fought with distinction in Italy. It was the first all-Jewish army, and knowledge of its existence and its role in defeating the Nazis gave an immense boost to Jews everywhere. After the war the brigade helped Jewish refugees beat the British blockade of Palestine.

The invention of the airplane was the dawn of a new way of traveling, its potential quickly realized as aircraft were developed to carry mail, and then passengers, over distances that would previously have taken many hours or even days. Successive aircraft in turn changed how we experience flight...

Law and justice are not always one and the same. On November 27, 1980, Peter Pringle waited in an Irish court to hear the following words: "Peter Pringle, for the crime of capital murder . . . the law prescribes only one penalty, and that penalty is death." The problem was that Peter did...

Canals reached their zenith in the eighteenth century during the Industrial Revolution, before the arrival of the railways usurped their position, whereupon a number of them fell into disrepair and disuse. Forgotten for many years, canals and waterways have enjoyed an enormous resurgence in popularity...

James Brindley essentially invented the canal in Britain, engineering the Bridgewater Canal in 1761 and creating the spark for the industrial revolution. This is the first 20th-century Brindley biography.

A Grim Almanac of Oxfordshire is a day-by-day catalogue of 366 ghastly tales from the county’s past. There are murders and manslaughters, including the killing by Mrs. Barber of her entire family in 1909 while temporarily insane, and the brutal murder of four-year-old Edward Busby in 1871, killed...

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Second World War, from the highest-rated fighter aces to the most inventive escape equipment used to break out of Colditz; from army pay by rank to the largest battleships; from the most stirring speeches to the biggest tactical errors; from the strangest...

Two sisters: born nine years apart to a mad French king during the turbulent years of the Hundred Years War, the bitter series of conflicts that set the House of Plantagenet against the House of Valois. Catherine de Valois, the beautiful young bride of Henry V, conducted a passionate love affair with...

In 1914, the East London Federation of Suffragettes, led by Sylvia Pankhurst, split from the WSPU. Sylvia's mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel, had encouraged her to give up her work with the poor women of East London—but Sylvia refused. Besides campaigning for women to have an equal right...

Martin Luther was so angered by the sale of indulgences (pardons for sins granted by the Pope) that, in 1517, he nailed 95 arguments for reform of the Roman Catholic Church to the doors of the church and the castle at Wittenberg. This act began one of the most momentous periods of change in history:...

A poem: "General Shute." The General inspecting the trenches, exclaimed with a horrified shout, 'I refuse to command a Division, Which leaves its excreta about.', But nobody took any notice, No one was prepared to refute, That the presence of shit was congenial, compared to the presence...

The figure of the troubadour combines the ideals of knighthood with the inspiration of the poet and musician. It created a cultural explosion which influenced the whole course of Western art and civilization. This history traces the story from the birth of the first troubadour in 1071 to the execution...