In the years before the Civil War, many Americans saw the sea as a world apart, an often violent and insular culture governed by its own definitions of honor and ruled by its own authorities. The truth, however, is that legal cases that originated at...

In the climactic part of his three-book series exploring the importance of public image in the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, Kevin Sharpe employs a remarkable interdisciplinary approach that draws on literary studies and art history as well as politic...

"Reconstruction after the Civil War" explores the role of former slaves during this period in American history. Looking past popular myths and controversial scholarship, John Hope Franklin uses his astute insight and careful research to provide an ac...

The phrase "Cold War" was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on world politics: "We may be heading not for a general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity". The Soviet U...

For sale in CIS only! During the decade prior to the Arab Spring dozens of Muslim, Christian and Jewish religious channels were established across the Middle East, advocating different forms of religiosity and shaping public perceptions through thei...

Sifting through a wide range of primary Russian sources, Leon Aron considers what sparked the profound shift in values that occurred in the Soviet Union before its fall. He pinpoints several principal questions brought to light in the glasnost-era pr...

The thirteenth century saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has called it the "century of the encyclopedias". Variously referred to as a "speculum", "thesaurus", or "imago mundi" – the term encyclopedia was no...

In this lively and pathbreaking book, William Monter sketches Europe's increasing acceptance of autonomous female rulers between the late Middle Ages and the French Revolution. Monter surveys the governmental records of Europe's thirty women monarchs...

For sale in CIS only! On 27 February 2002, fifty-eight people died when a train coach caught fire just outside a small-town railway station in Gujarat, Western India. The incident marked the beginning of one of the worst outbursts of Hindu-Muslim vi...

As the site of several miracles in the Jewish and Christian traditions, the Jordan is one of the world's holiest rivers. It is also the major political and symbolic border contested by Israelis and Palestinians. Combining biblical and folkloric studi...