In this broad cultural history, Susan Owens reveals what spirits and apparitions can tell us about our culture and about ourselves, and explores how ghosts have inhabited a wide range of roles from medieval times to the present day.

Taking the reader through the lives of our monarchs, this book tells a tale of bastardy, courage, conquest, brutality, vanity, vulgarity, corruption, anarchy, absenteeism, piety, nobility, divorce, execution, civil war, madness, magnificence, profligacy, frugality, philately, abdication, dutifulness, family breakdown and family recovery.

An accessible synthesis of the prescient best seller exploring seventeenth-century catastrophe and the impact of climate change

An analysis of later Stuart economic culture that contributes significantly to our understanding of early modern society.

A spectacular visual history of exploration and cartography, stunningly illustrated throughout with some of the most beautiful maps ever created

An authoritative and accessible history of the cultural miracle that is the written word.

An authoritative and accessible history of the cultural miracle that is the written word.

A farewell to Eastern Europe and its vanishing culture.

A stirring anthology of speeches from every period of British history.

The last eight centuries of China's relationship with the world told through the eyes of traders, invaders, civil servants, visionaries, and traitors.

The first work covering a key element of the strategic relationship between states from ancient history to the late 20th century, Great Strategic Rivalries fills a major gap in the historiography of state relations.

Leading historians select and describe the 20 most significant events in British History.

Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? The author puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians.

Contains two substantial essays, by Marguerite Poland and Jeff Opland, that offer an account, for the first time, of Jonas Ntsiko's life and times, his early schooling in Grahamstown, his three years of study in England, his ordination as a deacon in the Anglican Church and his ten-year career in church service.

This is a revised version of an unrivalled small reference work for working historians.

In recent decades, oral history has matured into an established field of critical importance to historians and social scientists alike. Handbook of Oral History captures the current state-of-the-art, identifies major strands of intellectual development, and predicts key directions for future growth in theory, research, and application.

264 wood and ivory carvings of animals, plants and people, none of them larger than a matchbox; apprentice potter Edmund de Waal was entranced by the collection when he first encountered it in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. When he inherited them, he discovered that they unlocked a story larger than he could have imagined.

The first book to tell the history of Britain through its headwear