Showing titles in 19th Century

In a single definitive narrative, City of Sedition tells the spellbinding story of the huge-and hugely conflicted-role New York City played in the Civil War. No city was more of a help to Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort, or more of a hindrance. No city raised more men, money, and...

Best-selling author of Italian Ways Tim Parks follows the hair-raising journey of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, 250 miles on foot from Rome to Ravenna, to look at Italy past and present.

The consensus view of the Civil War - that it was first and foremost a war to restore the Union, and an antislavery war only later when it became necessary for Union victory - dies here. James Oakes’s groundbreaking history shows how deftly Lincoln and congressional Republicans pursued antislavery throughout the war, pragmatic in policy but steadfast on principle. In the disloyal South the federal government quickly began freeing slaves, immediately and without slaveholder compensation, as they fled to Union lines.

'I will be good,' promised the thirteen-year-old Victoria, when she understood that she would be Queen of the most powerful country in the world. That, of course, is a matter of opinion. And there are other layers to the story. With a combination of novelistic flair and historical accuracy, Kate...

'Before biography was fashionable, Antonia Fraser made the past popular' Guardian 'As a pure storyteller, Antonia Fraser has few equals' Sunday Times CAROLINE NORTON, a nineteenth-century heroine who wanted justice for women. Poet, pamphleteer and artist's muse, Caroline Norton dazzled...

New York Times bestselling author Sally Jenkins and distinguished Harvard professor John Stauffer mine a nearly forgotten piece of Civil War history and strike gold in this surprising account of the only Southern county to secede from the Confederacy. The State of Jones is a true story about the...

From the beginnings of big-city police work to the rise of the Mafia, Rogues' Gallery is a colorful and captivating history of crime and punishment in the bustling streets of Old New York. Rogues' Gallery is a sweeping, epic tale of two revolutions, one feeding off the other, that played out on...

A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One hundred thousand men and women rushed heedlessly north to make their fortunes; very few did, but many thousands of them died in the attempt. In 1897, the United States was mired...

They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history. Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the...

On 16 March 1807, the British Parliament passed The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. In the following year the Royal Navy's African Squadron was formed, its mission to stop and search ships at sea suspected of carrying slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Middle East. With typical thoroughness, the Royal Navy went further, and took the fight to the enemy, sailing boldly up uncharted rivers and creeks to attack the barracoons where the slaves were assembled ready for shipment.

Join narrator Charles King in this fantastic guide to one of the most important periods in European history, as he talks us through more than 100 amazing facts about the Napoleonic Wars. With individual chapters covering subjects such as an overview of the conflict, military commanders and notable figures, weaponry used and developed during the time and many more, this is a perfect audiobook to add to any military historian’s collection.

Bloomsbury presents This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz, read by Christine Rendel 'Compelling' -- Spectator A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS PICK 'A wonderful book' -- Guardian The first comprehensive biography of Emily Brontë in over two decades. Emily Jane Brontë was just 27...

On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Diaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order.

Like it or not, 26 January in Australia has become a significant day of both celebration and mourning. Most countries, if not all, have a national day. The reasons to celebrate a national day include independence from a colonial power, the signing of a treaty, or an act by a monarch, political leader or patron saint. Australia is the only country whose national day celebrates the colonisation of an already occupied territory. Controversially, it continues to do this despite most of its citizens both acknowledging this and the devastating impact upon its original inhabitants.

The dramatic untold story of Eugénie de Montijo, the woman who created haute couture, fought for women’s rights, opened France’s schools to girls and ruled the country as its last empress, yet today remains almost unknown. Although a nineteenth-century woman, her almost twenty-first-century...

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a harrowing new history of the Civil War’s prisoner of war camps, North and South. It is newly estimated that 750,000 soldiers died in the American Civil War. But less well-known than the war’s death toll are the roughly 400,000 Union and Confederate troops...

"My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery," declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation‑state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758-1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony. Then he became a general in the colonial army of the new French Republic. When it was discovered that France once again supported slavery, Dessalines declared war on his former allies.

In 1906, Britain's grip on the world was unassailable. Its navy ruled the seas, and its trade empire spanned the globe. But in the small port town of Tuticorin, a lawyer named V.O. Chidambaram Pillai—known to the world as VOC—had a revolutionary idea that would challenge the might of the...

In 1827 the Royal Navy purchased a Baltimore clipper and renamed her the Black Joke. Assigned to the Preventative Squadron, she patrolled the west coast of Africa and freed 3,692 captives from enslavement. Beloved by seafarers and celebrated by the public, the Black Joke would become the most famous weapon in the campaign for abolition. But in her previous life as the Henriqueta, the Black Joke had been a slave ship. Through the experiences of slavers and abolitionists, captives and crew, Stephen Taylor charts the vessel's extraordinary double life.

Ask google Who discovered gold in Australia? and you'll promptly get 'Edward Hammond Hargraves'. Hargraves has for decades (and decades) received the fame, fortune and adulation from all corners of the country, but did he earn it? This is the story of an oversized layabout who received years of accolades and free lunches, despite lumbering from one embarrassment to another, and of those who spent decades trying to expose him and seek their share of the glory.