19th Century

A literally world-changing book, Darwin put forward the anti-religious and scientific idea that humans in fact evolved over millions of generations from animals....

A pioneering history of cross-cultural knowledge that exposes enduring fractures in unity across the world's largest continent....

In this fascinating work, winner of the Wolfson Prize for History Mark Mazower uncovers the history of the Balkans with detail and clarity....

The terrible conflict that dominated the mid-19th century, the Crimean War, killed at least 800,000 men and pitted Russia against a formidable coalition of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire....

London Labour and the London Poor is a rare and fascinating insight into the lives and struggles of the 19th-century poor. Written by journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew, it collects hundreds of testimonials from the lower strata of Victorian society....

In 1856 Paul Du Chaillu marched into the equatorial wilderness of West Africa determined to bag an animal that, according to legend, was nothing short of a monster....

In her book Victory for the Vote, women's history expert Doris Weatherford offers an engaging and detailed narrative history of women's seven-decade fight for the vote, and the continuing current-day struggle for human rights and equality....

Between the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the Second World War, the nation was shaken by war and peace....

In 1893 Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen set sail for the North Pole in the Fram, a ship specially designed to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and travel north with the sea's drift. Experts said that such a ship couldn't be built....

Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War....

1816 was a remarkable year - mostly for the fact that there was no summer. As a result of a volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, weather patterns were disrupted worldwide for months, allowing for excessive rain, frost, and snowfall....

This "provocative study" looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class (the New Yorker)....

His most famous work, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, is a treatise on economics and a social critique of consumption and of consumerism, based on the social stratification of people and the division of labor....

Occultée par la vision littéraire antagoniste de La Case de l'oncle Tom et d'Autant en emporte le vent, la guerre de Sécession demeure méconnue...

How the demise of the Habsburg Empire, postwar sovereignty, and new diplomatic frontiers shaped the nature of citizenship, identity, and belonging across Europe.

This panoramic book tells the story of how revolutionary ideas from the Enlightenment about freedom, equality, evolution, and democracy have reverberated through modern history....

In this bold new account of how celebrity works, author Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame....

On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. Although there was no evidence that the Spanish were responsible, yellow newspapers whipped Americans into a frenzy....

La biographie de référence d’un homme singulier, haï par la droite puis par la gauche, incarnation d’une "certaine idée de la France" "Georges Clemenceau...

Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation tracks the unlikely series of events and characters that turned a collection of disparate nations into a British colony in 1914....