17th Century

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world....

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" - spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s - when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond....

Now an esoteric of legal and criminal history, A Hangman's Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Franz Schmidt's executions, which included hangings, beheadings, and other methods, as well as details of each capital crime and the reason for the punishment....

January, 1649. After seven years of fighting in the bloodiest war in Britain’s history, Parliament faced a problem: what to do with a defeated king, a king who refused to surrender....

This audiobook examines the meteoric rise of Sweden as the pre-eminent military power in Europe during the Thirty Years War during the 1600s....

Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal....

Clare Jackson's dazzling original account of English history's most turbulent and radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis....

England, 1651. Oliver Cromwell has defeated his royalist opponents in two civil wars, executed the Stuart King Charles I, laid waste to Ireland, and crushed the late king's son and his Scottish allies....

Discover the “fascinating and outrageously readable” account of the roguish acts of the first pirates to raid the Pacific in a crusade that ended in a sensational trial back in England—perfect for readers of Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough (Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times...

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer....

Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the 200-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day....

During the long 18th century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. Author Jürgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East....

From poverty to pets, from medicine to magic, from slang to sex, from wallpaper to women's rights....

As he explodes many accepted pirate myths (i.e. "walking the plank" is pure fiction), Cordingly replaces them with a truth that is more complex and often bloodier....

Events moved fast in the 1650s. Something cataclysmic happened every year, something that would thrust the newly formed republic, its people, and its eventual 'Lord Protector' Oliver Cromwell, in an entirely new direction.

Why spiritual and supernatural yearnings, even investigations into the occult, flourished in the era of rationalist philosophy.....

Drawing on rich, original sources, Lubaaba Al-Azami traces the origins of a relationship between two nations - one outsider and one superpower.

Once valued at close to seven trillion dollars by today’s standards, the Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, became the world’s first multinational corporation....

This biography brings Sarah Churchill's own voice, passionate and intelligent, back to life and casts a critical eye over images of the Duchess handed down through art, history and literature....

A remarkable portrait of one of the most talented, thoughtful, loyal, moral, artistically alert and yet, somehow, disastrous of all this country's rulers....

The history of China as a single nation began more than 2,000 years ago, when Qin Shi Huangdi first united a group of warring kingdoms into a single empire....

In the 14th century, a ruthless killer stalked the streets of England, wiping out up to 60 percent of the terror-stricken nation's inhabitants....

Digging the Past offers fine-grained case studies of projects heralded as innovations both in the 17th century and in our own time: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows....

In this engaging, anecdotal history of food, world conquest, and desire, a chef-turned-journalist tells the story of three legendary cities that transformed the globe in the quest for spice....

In 1642, King Charles I and the elected Parliament of England went to war over the future of the Stuart kingdom. Over the next nine years, three civil wars would be fought, devastating the populations of England, Scotland, and Ireland....