Showing titles in 19th Century

Combining impeccable scholarship and literary elegance, David Wetzel depicts the drama of machinations and passions that exploded in a war that forever changed the face of European history.

In 1848, Europe was engulfed in a firestorm of revolution. The streets of cities from Paris to Bucharest and from Berlin to Palermo were barricaded and flooded by armed insurgents proclaiming political liberties and national freedom. The conservative order which had held sway since the fall of Napoleon in 1815 crumbled beneath the revolutionary assault.

To get a sense of the kind of prestige that Claude Monet enjoys within the art world, one need only learn that his Le Bassin Aux Nympheás (1919) - from his series of paintings featuring water lilies - sold for the equivalent of more than $70 million. This is a staggering price, especially considering that early in his life, Monet had been so poor and debt-ridden that some of his paintings were taken from him by creditors.

"Ambition is like the balloonist. To some extent, the rise is nice and he does enjoy a splendid view and a vast landscape. But when he rises more, vertigo occurs, the air becomes thin and the risk of a big fall increases." With this parable, the Austrian Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg inadvertently predicted the destiny to which he would bravely ride, despite the warnings and the sweet talkers. In any case, he followed his heart's mandate. And Charlotte, the princess, was "one of the most cultured and beautiful" in Europe.

In the 1880s, control over northeastern Africa was a political minefield into which Prime Minister Gladstone did not want to step—until his emissary Charles Gordon was besieged in Khartoum, and the city became the focal point for war. It was the height of European colonialism. Injustices were administered, bloody battles fought, and civilians caught in the crossfire. Among the British officers were figures who would later adopt starring roles in the First World War, such as Egyptian Army sapper Captain Herbert Kitchener.

The northeastern quarter of the continent of Africa is drained and watered by the Nile. Among and about the headstreams and tributaries of this mighty river lie the wide and fertile provinces of the Egyptian Soudan. Situated in the very centre of the land, these remote regions are on every side divided from the seas by 500 miles of mountain, swamp, or desert. The great river is their only means of growth, their only channel of progress.

In this fascinating work, winner of the Wolfson Prize for History Mark Mazower uncovers the history of the Balkans with detail and clarity. He explores the reasons for current conflicts and examines the Balkans as a religious, cultural, and economic melting pot for Europe and Asia. Through Robert O'Keefe's articulate narration, listeners will be absorbed by this rich world.

Paris in the Belle Époque is remembered as a golden age of cultural flourishing and political progress. The period between the revolutionary 1870s and the outbreak of war in 1914 saw the modern French capital take shape: by day Parisians could admire the rising Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur Basilica, while at night they roamed the Bohemian world of the Moulin Rouge. But as Mike Rapport reveals in this authoritative and beautifully written new history, City of Light, City of Shadows, beneath the elegant veneer Paris was at war with itself.

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to volunteer as a nurse in the war met with racism and refusal. Undaunted, Seacole set out independently to the Crimea where she acted as doctor and 'mother' to wounded soldiers while running her business, the 'British Hotel'. A witness to key battles, she gives vivid accounts of how she coped with disease, bombardment and other hardships at the Crimean battlefront.

On January 22, 1879, the British Army in South Africa was swept aside by the seemingly unstoppable Zulu warriors at the Battle of Isandlwana. Nearby, at a remote outpost on the Buffalo River, a single company of the 24th Regiment and a few dozen recuperating hospital patients were passing a hot, monotonous day. It seemed certain that the Rorke's Drift detachment would share the same fate. And yet, against incredible odds, the British managed to defend their station.

The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.

From the best-selling author of Natasha's Dance, The Europeans is a richly enthralling, panoramic cultural history of 19th-century Europe, told through the intertwined lives of three remarkable people: a great singer, Pauline Viardot, a great writer, Ivan Turgenev, and a great connoisseur, Pauline's husband, Louis. Their passionate, ambitious lives were bound up with an array of writers, composers and painters all trying to make their way through the exciting, prosperous and pan-European culture that came about as a result of huge economic and technological change.

In the 1840s, the Donnelly family immigrates from Ireland to the British province of Canada. Almost immediately problems develop as the patriarch of the family is sent to the Kingston Penitentiary for manslaughter, leaving his wife to raise their eight children on her own. The children are raised in an incredibly violent community and cultivate a devoted loyalty to their mother and siblings, which often leads to problems with the law and those outside of the family.

In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days’ shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. The three men's lives play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.

A provocative account showing that "China" - and its 5,000 years of unified history - is a national myth, created only a century ago with a political agenda that persists to this day. China's current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but "China" as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals.

The fourth and final year of the Civil War offers one of that era’s most compelling narratives, defining the nation and one of history’s great turning points. Now, S.C. Gwynne’s Hymns of the Republic addresses the time Ulysses S. Grant arrives to take command of all Union armies in March 1864 to the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox a year later. He breathes new life into the epic battle between Lee and Grant; the advent of 180,000 black soldiers in the Union army; Sherman’s March to the Sea; the rise of Clara Barton; and much more.

The requirements needed to be a peace officer in the Wild West were often determined only by the individual's skill with a gun, and their courage. At times, judgment was needed with only seconds to determine it, and that also meant that there was the odd occasion where justice and law never quite meant the same thing. The expression "justice without law" was never truer than in the formative years of the West.

Everybody imagines the world's most interesting man to be a fictional, gray-haired lothario who drinks Mexican beer and boasts of his legendary exploits. But what if a man like this really lived? It turns out he did, and there were two of them--both Victorian explorers.

Arriving at the port of New York in 1882, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde quipped he had "nothing to declare but my genius." But as this sparkling narrative reveals, Wilde was, rarely for him, underselling himself. A chronicle of his sensational eleven-month speaking tour of America, Declaring His Genius offers an indelible portrait of both Oscar Wilde and the Gilded Age. Neither Wilde nor America would ever be the same.

In this widely praised book, Annik LaFarge presents a very different Frédéric Chopin from the melancholy, sickly, Romantic figure that has predominated for so long. The artist she discovered is, instead, a purely independent - and endlessly relevant - spirit: an innovator who created a new musical language; an autodidact who became a spiritually generous, trailblazing teacher; a stalwart patriot during a time of revolution, pandemic, and exile.