British Civil War

With hindsight, the victory of Parliamentarian forces over the Royalists in the English Civil War may seem inevitable, but this outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Timothy Venning explores many of the turning points and discusses how they might so easily have played out differently.

In 1204, the great Angevin Empire was fragmenting under King John's rule. Unable to withstand France's invasion of Normandy, John also faced difficult relations with the papacy, and rising dissent among his barons. By the time John died in 1216, the failed Magna Carta gave way to civil conflict, and more than half of the country had fallen to the dauphin of France. These troubles were then passed, along with the crown, to John's nine-year-old son, Henry III.

In the early morning of 20th April 1949, HMS Amethyst was fulfilling orders to travel to Nanking to stand guard for the British Embassy during the height of the Chinese Civil War when she was fired upon by guns from the riverbank. Shells pounded into the ship, killing the commanding officer and destroyed the bridge before the ship grounded on the bank. How did the Amethyst escape the battering of Chinese Communist guns?

This groundbreaking study of agriculture's role in the war defies long-held notions that Northern industrialization and urbanization led to clashes between North and South. Huston argues that the ideological chasm between plantation owners in the South and family farmers in the North led to the political eruption of 1854-1856 and the birth of a sectionalized party system.