Showing titles in 19th Century

When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. The volcano's massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting major weather systems for more than three years. Amid devastating storms, drought, and floods, communities worldwide endured famine, disease, and civil unrest on a catastrophic scale.

Although the "women and children first" rule might seem like a common practice that has been observed for centuries, it was actually popularized by the 1852 shipwreck of the Royal Navy troopship HMS Birkenhead.

A radical look at Jane Austen as you've never seen her - as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. The Genius of Jane Austen celebrates Britain's favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such awesome movies time after time.

On Every Tide is a wide-ranging and challenging reassessment of the Irish diaspora. Drawing on the latest groundbreaking research, and his own career-long engagement with the complexities of Irish identity, Sean Connolly reveals the forces that compelled millions of Irish men and women to abandon their homeland, and explores their new lives in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

The enduring influence of the Catholic Church has many sources, but in the first half of the 19th century, the foundations upon which the church had rested were shaken. For many people, liberalism in the guise of liberty, equality, and fraternity was the quintessence of the evils that shook those foundations. At the Vatican Council of 1869-1870, the church made an effort to set things right by defining the doctrine of papal infallibility. Author John W. O'Malley draws us into the bitter controversies over papal infallibility that at one point seemed destined to rend the church in two.

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. Heroes would be born from places such as Little Roundtop and among the soldiers of Picketts Charge. And later, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, martyrs were created in the aftermath of the conflict, giving reason to a war that no one quite believed in fully until this point.

The story of Catholic Emancipation begins with the Anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in 1780, fuelled by a reduction in Penal Laws against Catholics harking back to the 16th century. Fifty years later, the passing of the Emancipation Bill was hailed as a 'bloodless revolution'. Yet, had the Irish Catholics been a 'millstone', or were they the prime movers?

This remarkable book recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.

This "provocative study" looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class (the New Yorker). The era didn't just bring about misery and poverty. On the contrary, Emma Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom.

The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismark, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together, to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war.

The Darkest Jungle tells the harrowing story of America's first ship canal exploration across a narrow piece of land in Central America called the Darien, a place that loomed large in the minds of the world's most courageous adventurers in the nineteenth century. With rivals from England and France days behind, the 27-member U.S. expedition landed on the Atlantic shore at Caledonia Bay in eastern Panama to begin their mad dash up the coast-hugging mountains of the Darien wilderness.

The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.

The Boy Generals: George Custer, Wesley Merritt, and the Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac is the first installment in a remarkable trilogy to examine the strategy, tactics, and relationships of the leading Union army’s mounted arm and their influence on the course of the Civil War in the Eastern Theater. George Armstrong Custer’s career has attracted its fair share of coverage, but most Custer-related studies focus on his decision-making and actions to the exclusion of other important factors, including his relationships with his fellow officers.

After Tripoli declared war on the United States in 1801, Barbary pirates captured 300 U.S. sailors and marines. President Jefferson sent navy squadrons to the Mediterranean, but he also authorized a secret mission to overthrow the government of Tripoli. He chose an unlikely diplomat, William Eaton, to lead the mission, but before Eaton departed, Jefferson grew wary of the affair and withdrew his support.

The Lion and The Dragon reveals the part that Britain played in the awakening of China, then covers relations between the two countries during the period when an aroused China did indeed shake the world. Lawrence James also follows the parallel trajectories of four competitive empires - the British, the Chinese, the Russian and the Japanese - during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then the fortunes of a fifth imperial power, the United States.

The world is filled with mysteries, and even in the modern age, much of the planet remains unexplored. The depths of the oceans and the intricate and extensive cave systems that honeycomb some parts of the Earth are still largely unknown. Thus, it should come as no surprise that when it comes to this terra incognita, people have projected all sorts of ideas.

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful and surprisingly true story of how a series of articles in the Sun newspaper in 1835 convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Purporting to reveal discoveries of a famous British astronomer, the series described such moon life as unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats. It quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era.

The Industrial Revolution, which took place in Great Britain between the middle of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th, transformed British industry and society and made Great Britain the most powerful nation in the world. The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen due to one, single factor but rather to a number of separate, yet, related developments which interacted to change the world profoundly and completely. Improvements in the production of iron allowed the construction of efficient, reliable steam engines.

D'Ajaccio à Sainte-Hélène, en passant par le Grand-Saint-Bernard, Austerlitz, Moscou, Waterloo, l'île d'Elbe, André Castelot a mis ses pas dans ceux de Napoléon Bonaparte pour respirer et restituer le décor de son prodigieux destin. Exploitant et mettant en valeur, avec son art célèbre du récit qui visualise les événements, les lieux et les personnages, une immense masse d'archives, de mémoires et de correspondance parfois inédits ou oubliés, il a écrit cette monumentale biographie si vivante, si colorée, si passionnante que depuis trente ans, son public se renouvelle sans cesse.

Published in the 200th anniversary year of the Battle of Waterloo, a witty look at how the French still think they won, by Stephen Clarke, author of 1000 Years of Annoying the French and A Year in the Merde. Two centuries after the Battle of Waterloo, the French are still in denial. If Napoleon lost on 18 June 1815 (and that's a big 'if') then whoever rules the universe got it wrong. As soon as the cannons stopped firing, French historians began rewriting history.