Hourly History: 42 books

The man that the world knows as Winston Churchill looms large on the stage of world history. Like some sort of colossus from antiquity, Churchill strides between two major epochs in the world, one foot planted in the glory days of the British Empire when the sun never set on history's largest known...

The story of the Mayflower is one of adventure, courage, and destiny. The Mayflower was the ship that launched a nation. She left from England in September of 1620, carrying 102 English Separatists to a new life, one that came with the freedom to practice their religious beliefs as they saw fit. These...

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted from the end of World War II until the end of the 1980s. Over the course of five decades, they never came to blows directly. Rather, these two world superpowers competed in other arenas that would touch almost every corner of the globe.  Inside...

During the Middle Ages, the nations of Europe forged new identities that moved them away from the lost glory of the Roman Empire into their own ethnicity. The experience of maturation was often clumsy and out of step, an evolutionary process that saw the nation's developing at their own pace as they...

The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 in the French colony of Saint Domingue, when a group of slaves rebelled in order to secure their freedom and the end of slavery. In the midst of the French Revolution, slaves took advantage of volatile political, racial, and social circumstances.  Inside...

From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world. Using reason as its core value, the Enlightenment believed...

In this brief introduction to the subject of Egyptian Mythology the author has given a lot of thought to the context of the subject. This makes it an easy read. There is a useful Historical Timeline which allows the reader to follow the complexities of Egyptian history and locate the mythology within...

The saga of the Vikings rises and falls on the banks of history, ebbing and flowing with popular opinion and whimsical anecdotes. The Vikings are routinely typecast and labeled anywhere from bloodthirsty tyrants to valiant heroes. They have been condemned as pirates and praised as explorers. We have...

What do you think of when you consider the Middle Ages?  Knights in armor and damsels in distress?  Vikings plundering monasteries? Religious dissenters burning at the stake? The dead bodies piling up as war, famine, and plague devastated Europe? Think again. While all these are part of the...

The bloodiest battle of the Civil War was also its turning point. From this point onwards, the Confederate forces would never gain a hold in the North again. Inside you will read about... ✓ Before July there was Lee ✓ Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? ✓ Rumours of War ✓ Hooker's Last Stand ✓...

The Battle of Waterloo has become synonymous with the word "defeat" but who lost, and why was it important?  In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte left the island of Elba, and in a space of 100 days took power, and challenged the entire world to meet him on his terms. When that failed, he offered...

It has been more than one hundred years since the RMS Titanic sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic ocean. The disaster has captivated history buffs and non-history buffs alike, and it is easy to see why. Some of the most illustrious people of the day were on board: some survived, and some did...

Sweeping across the known world with unchecked devastation, the Black Death claimed between 75 million and 200 million lives in four short years. In this engaging and well-researched book, the trajectory of the plague's march west across Eurasia and the cause of the great pandemic is thoroughly explored.  Inside...

In the midst of World War I, the Easter Rising took place in Dublin and throughout Ireland in April, 1916. The revolutionary movement faced many problems from the beginning, including splintered leadership, disorganized support, opposition from moderate supporters of home rule, and prepared retaliation...