General

This is a classic regional and comparative study of early modern witchcraft. The history of witchcraft continues to attract attention with its emotive and contentious debates. The methodology and conclusions of this book have impacted not only on...

Ranging from the Russian revolution of 1917 to the collapse of Eastern Europe in the 1980s this study examines Communist rule. By focusing primarily on the USSR and Eastern Europe Stephen White covers the major topics and issues affecting these...

Mobile Saints examines the central medieval (ca. 950-1150 CE) practice of removing saints' relics from rural monasteries in order to take them on out-and-back journeys, particularly within northern France and the Low Countries. Though the permanent...

This is the first scientific biography of Milan Rastislav Stefanik (1880-1919) that is focused on analysing the process of how he became the Slovak national hero. Although he is relatively unknown internationally, his contemporaries compared him...

Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World surveys the ways in which people from the time of Luther and Columbus to that of Thomas Jefferson used Christian ideas and institutions to regulate and shape sexual norms and conduct, and examines the...

In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, he shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to...

In these pathbreaking essays, Roy Rosenzweig charts the impact of new media on teaching, researching, preserving, presenting, and understanding history. Negotiating between the "cyberenthusiasts" who champion technological breakthroughs and the "digital...

Women engineers have been in the public limelight for decades, yet we have surprisingly little historically grounded understanding of the patterns of employment and education of women in this field. Most studies are either policy papers or limited to...

Elaine Tyler May's 1988 Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era is a ground-breaking piece of historical and cultural analysis that uses its findings to build a strong argument for its author's view of the course of modern US history. The...

Despite having no formal training in urban planning, Jane Jacobs deftly explores the strengths and weaknesses of policy arguments put forward by American urban planners in the era after World War II. They believed that the efficient movement of cars was...

Understanding why revolutions take place when they do, and as they do, is important in itself. Understanding how they are rooted in the societies they upend - and the ways in which those societies share crucial similarities - is arguably even more so...

Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century's most innovative thinkers - and his work on Discipline and Punish was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever...

W.E.B Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk is a seminal work in the field of sociology, a classic of American literature - and a solid example of carefully-structured reasoning. One of the most important texts ever written on racism and black identity in...

The end of the Cold War, which occurred early in the 1990s, brought joy and freedom to millions. But it posed a difficult question to the world's governments and to the academics who studied them: how would world order be remade in an age no longer...

Few works can claim to form the foundation stones of one entire academic discipline, let alone two, but Thucydides's celebrated History of the Peloponnesian War is not only one of the first great works of history, but also the departure point from which...

Many people want to understand what revolutions are and - especially - how they come about, from the academics who study them to the states that wish to prevent (or, in some cases, provoke) them. But it is arguably the US scholar Theda Skocpol who has...

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer and writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist...

Thomas Paine's 1791 Rights of Man is an impassioned political tract showing how the critical thinking skills of evaluation and reasoning can, and must, be applied to contentious issues. Divided into two parts, Rights of Man is, first, a response to...

Thomas Paine's 1776 Common Sense has secured an unshakeable place as one of history's most explosive and revolutionary books. A slim pamphlet published at the beginning of the American Revolution, it was so widely read that it remains the all-time best...

The 85 essays that make up The Federalist Papers' clearly demonstrate the vital importance of the art of persuasion. Written between 1787 and 1788 by three of the "Founding Fathers" of the United States, the Papers were written with the...

Hegel's 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is renowned for being one of the most challenging and important books in Western philosophy. Above all, it is famous for laying out a new approach to reasoning and philosophical argument, an approach that has been...

Edmund Burke's 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France is a strong example of how the thinking skills of analysis and reasoning can support even the most rhetorical of arguments. Often cited as the foundational work of modern conservative political...

Benedict Anderson's 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of "nations" and "nationalism". A book that helped reshape the field of nationalism studies, Imagined Communities...

Thomas Hobbes is a towering figure in the history of modern thought and political philosophy. He remains best remembered for his 1651 treatise on government, Leviathan, a work that shows at the very best the reasoning skills of a deeply original and...

'Reconstruction' is the name given to the period that, beginning shortly before the end of the American Civil War and running until 1877, saw the frustration of federal government's attempts to integrate the newly freed slaves into the American political...

How was the Soviet Union like a soup kitchen? In this important and highly revisionist work, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick explains that a reimagining of the Communist state as a provider of goods for the 'deserving poor' can be seen as a powerful...

For those who lived through the Cold War period, and for many of the historians who study it, it seemed self-evident that the critical incidents that determined its course took place in the northern hemisphere, specifically in the face-off between NATO...

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay on the history of the United States remains one of the most famous and influential works in the American canon. That is a testament to Turner's powers of creative synthesis; in a few short pages, he succeeded in...

Keith Thomas's classic study of all forms of popular belief has been influential for so long now that it is difficult to remember how revolutionary it seemed when it first appeared. By publishing Religion and the Decline of Magic, Thomas became the...

Joan Scott's work has influenced several generations of historians and helped make the topic of gender central to the way in which the discipline is taught and studied today. At root a new way of conceptualizing capitalist societies, Scott's theories...

Perhaps no work of history written in the 20th century has done more to undermine an existing consensus and cause its readers to re-evaluate their own preconceptions than has Jonathan Riley-Smith's revisionist account of the motives of the first...

Few historians trace grand themes across many centuries and places, but Ernst Kantorowicz's great work on the symbolic powers of kingship is a fine example of what can happen when they do. The King's Two Bodies is at once a superb example of the critical...

Tony Judt decided to write Postwar in 1989, the year the collapse of the Soviet Union provided European history with a rare example of a clearly-signposted 'end of an era'. It's scarcely surprising, then, that the great virtue of Judt's book is the...

Georges Lefebvre was one of the most highly-regarded historians of the 20th century - and a key reason for the high reputation he enjoys can be found in The Coming of the French Revolution. Lefebvre's key contribution to the debate over what remains...

In The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg does more than introduce his readers to a novel group of supposed witches - the Benandanti, from the northern Italian province of Friulia. He also invents and deploys new and creative ways of tackling his source...

Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the 'cultural turn' taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to...

John Dower's War Without Mercy is an attempt to resolve the problem of why the United States fought World War II so very differently in the Pacific and European theaters. Specifically, the author sets out to explain why there was such vicious hostility...

How was it possible for opponents of slavery to be so vocal in opposing the practice, when they were so accepting of the economic exploitation of workers in western factories - many of which were owned by prominent abolitionists? David Brion Davis's The...

One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines. This is not a charge that can be laid at the door of Alfred Crosby. His book The...

What caused the rise of Chicago, and how did the city's expansion fuel the westward movement of the American frontier - and influence the type of society that evolved as a result? Nature's Metropolis emerged as a result of William Cronon asking and...