With a love for adventure as great as his lifelong fascination with butterflies, America's best-known lepidopterist set himself an irresistible challenge: how many of the 800 species of butterflies known in the U.S. could he track down in a single ye...

The life story of Mary I – daughter of Henry VIII and his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon – is often distilled to a few dramatic episodes: her victory over the attempted coup by Lady Jane Grey, the imprisonment of her half-sister Elizabeth, the bur...

Artemis of Ephesos was one of the most widely worshiped deities of the Greco-Roman world. Her temple, the Artemision, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and for more than half a millennium people flocked to Ephesos to learn the great...

Scholars of British America generally conclude that the early eighteenth-century Anglo-American empire was commercial in economics, liberal in politics, and parochial in policy, somnambulant in an era of "salutary neglect", but, in Marlborough's Amer...

After the end of the War of Austrian Succession in 1748, thousands of unemployed and sometimes unemployable soldiers and seamen found themselves on the streets of London ready to roister the town and steal when necessary. In this fascinating book Nic...

As a prolific photographer for "House Beautiful", "Better Homes and Gardens", "Architectural Digest", and "Sunset" magazine, Maynard L. Parker was a pioneer in documenting domestic spaces and landscapes for postwar America. His extensively published,...

Menachem Begin, father of Israel's right wing and sixth prime minister of the nation, was known for his unflinchingly hawkish ideology. And yet, in 1979 he signed a groundbreaking peace treaty with Egypt for which he and Egyptian president Anwar Sada...

"Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside" occupies a distinctive and somewhat notorious place within George Meredith's already unique body of work. Modern Love is now best known for the emotionally intense sonnet cycle which Meredith's own cont...

When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro explores this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book. Building on his highly popular Yale courses, Professor Shapiro evaluates...

Thomas Babington Macaulay's "History of England" was a phenomenal Victorian best-seller defining a nation's sense of self, its triumphant rise to a powerfully homogenous nation built on a global empire and its claim to be the modern nation, marking t...