Showing titles in 19th Century

On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, historian Lucy Worsley leads us into the world in which our best-loved novelist lived. This new telling of the story of Jane's life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her and the way in which home is used in her novels to mean both a place of pleasure and a prison. It wasn't all country houses and ballrooms; in fact her life was often a painful struggle.

The Napoleonic Wars saw fighting on an unprecedented scale in Europe and the Americas. It took the wealth of the British Empire, combined with the might of the continental armies, almost two decades to bring down one of the world's greatest military leaders and the empire that he had created. Napoleon's ultimate defeat was to determine the history of Europe for almost 100 years. From the frozen wastelands of Russia, through the brutal fighting in the Peninsula to the blood-soaked battlefield of Waterloo, this book tells the story of the dramatic rise and fall of the Napoleonic Empire.

We know what life was like for Victoria and Albert. But what was it like for a commoner like you or me? How did it feel to cook with coal and wash with tea leaves? Drink beer for breakfast and clean your teeth with cuttlefish? Dress in whalebone and feed opium to the baby? Surviving everyday life came down to the gritty details, the small necessities and tricks of living. Drawing on Ruth's unique firsthand experience gained from living on a Victorian farm for a year, this book will teach you everything you need to know about 19th-century living. 

The iconic Australian exploration story - brought to life by Peter FitzSimons, Australia's storyteller. 'They have left here today!' he calls to the others. When King puts his hand down above the ashes of the fire, it is to find it still hot. There is even a tiny flame flickering from the end of one log. They must have left just hours ago. Melbourne, 20 August 1860. In an ambitious quest to be the first Europeans to cross the harsh Australian continent, the Victorian Exploring Expedition sets off, with 15,000 well-wishers cheering them on.

The Civil War represented a momentous change in the character of war. It combined the projection of military might across a continent on a scale never before seen with an unprecedented mass mobilization of peoples. Yet despite the revolutionizing aspects of the Civil War, its leaders faced the same uncertainties that have vexed combatants since the days of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War.

Gunter K. Koschorrek was a machine-gunner on the Russian front in WWII. He wrote his illicit diary on any scraps of paper he could lay his hands on. As keeping a diary was strictly forbidden, he sewed the pages into the lining of his thick winter coat and deposited them with his mother on infrequent trips home on leave. The diary went missing, and it was when he was reunited with his daughter in America some 40 years later that it came to light and became Blood Red Snow.

In 1858, 14-year-old Narcisse Pelletier sailed from Marseilles in the French trader Saint-Paul. With a cargo of Bordeaux wine, they stopped in Bombay, then Hong Kong, and from there they set sail with more than 300 Chinese prospectors bound for the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. Around the eastern tip of New Guinea, however, the ship became engulfed in fog, struck reefs and ran aground. 

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.

Most of us today rarely see a dead body. In 19th-century Sydney, when health was precarious and workplaces and the busy city streets were often dangerous, witnessing a death was rather common. And any death that was sudden or suspicious would be investigated by the coroner. Henry Shiell was the Sydney city coroner from 1866 to 1889. In the course of his unusually long career, he delved into the lives, loves, crimes, homes, and workplaces of colonial Sydneysiders.

The Pursuit of Power draws on a lifetime of thinking about 19th-century Europe to create an extraordinarily rich, surprising and entertaining panorama of a continent undergoing drastic change. The aim of this audiobook is to reignite the sense of wonder that permeated this remarkable era, as rulers and ruled navigated overwhelming cultural, political and technological changes.

Best-selling author and historian Lucy Worsley tracks a new course through Queen Victoria's life, examining how she transformed from dancing princess to the Widow of Windsor and became one of Britain's greatest monarchs along the way. Taking 24 significant days from Victoria's life, from her birth, her wedding and her coronation to her husband's death, and many more in between, allows us to see Victoria up close and personal, examining how she lived hour to hour.

Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just 20 years, from October 1795, when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'état, he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the revolution had descended.

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death. In 1864, Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave inspires his men to take action.

Written by two of the world's leading authorities on the subject, Imperial Germany and War, 1871-1918 examines the most essential components of the imperial German military system, with an emphasis on such foundational areas as theory, doctrine, institutional structures, training, and the officer corps. In the period between 1871 and 1918, rapid technological development demanded considerable adaptation and change in military doctrine and planning.

Belonging is a magnificent cultural history abundantly alive with energy, character and colour. It spans centuries and continents; from the Jews' expulsion from Spain in 1492, it navigates miracles and massacres, wandering, discrimination, harmony and tolerance, to the brink of the 20th century and, it seems, a point of profound hope. It tells the stories not just of rabbis and philosophers but of a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a boxer in Georgian England; a general in Ming China; and an opera composer in 19th-century Germany.

There can be few more exciting or frightening moments in European history than the spring of 1848. Almost as if by magic, in city after city, from Palermo to Paris to Venice, huge crowds gathered, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, and the political order that had held sway since the defeat of Napoleon simply collapsed. Christopher Clark's spectacular new book recreates with verve, wit and insight this extraordinary period.

The splendid finale to Eric Hobsbawm's study of the 19th century, The Age of Empire covers the area of Western Imperialism and examines the forces that swept the world to the outbreak of World War One - and shaped modern society.

In the 1860s a new word entered the economic and political vocabulary of the world: 'capitalism'. The global triumph of capitalism is the major theme of history in the decades after 1848. It was the triumph of a society which believed that economic growth rests on competitive private enterprise, on success in buying everything in the cheapest market (including labour) and selling it in the dearest. 

A deeply engaging and completely original book about nineteenth-century Britain’s fascination with good quality murder. Murder in nineteenth-century Britain was ubiquitous – not necessarily in quantity but in quality. This was the era of penny-bloods, early crime fiction and melodramas for the masses.

Just after Christmas 1803, convict William Buckley fled an embryonic settlement in the land of the Kulin nation (now the Port Phillip area), to take his chances in the wilderness. A few months later, the local Aboriginal people found the six-foot-five former soldier near death. Believing he was a lost kinsman returned from the dead, they took him in, and for 32 years Buckley lived as a Wadawurrung man, learning his adopted tribe's language, skills and methods to survive.