History & Archaeology Books

Winner of Saltire Scottish History Book of the Year 2016They would be better dead, they said, than set adrift upon the world. But set adrift they were - thousands of them, their communities destroyed, their homes demolished and burned.Such were the...

Gadigal Country, Woolloomooloo Farm, Riley Estate, Burdekin's paddock, Burlington Picture Palace, First Church of Christ Scientist, party mansion, Yirranma Place.The many transformations of 262 Liverpool Street, lying at the corner of Forbes Street in...

Take a trip down memory lane with Bob Byrne ...Remember loading up the back of the car and heading away with the family over the summer holidays? Being part of Beatlemania when the group toured in '64? Watching Dennis Lillee deliver a stinging bouncer in...

Documentary photography offers one way of looking, but this type of looking is also about feeling. It is a style of making photographs designed to draw people into the world and activate their interest in something beyond themselves.Australian...

Wales is a land with a vast wealth of ghost stories, including fantastical animals, flickering death omens and unseen things that go bump in the night. Whether these tales are based on true events, or are the creations of active imaginations, is known...

When and how did we humans lose our connection with nature and how do we find it again?Matthew Yeomans seeks to answer these questions as he walks more than 300 miles through the ancient and modern forests of Wales, losing himself in their stories (and...

This is the first full-length study of the material and visual culture of the British labour movement in almost half a century. It draws together the fruits of recent research into a comprehensive material and visual analysis of the nineteenth-century...

In 2020 and 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Gwrych Castle was familiar to the British public as the setting of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! Lesser known is that, at the beginning of the Second World War, this once-grand country house...

The Society for the Reformation of Manners in Hull was formed in 1698 by religiously-inspired mariners, merchants and tradesmen who aimed to hinder the spread of sin and wickedness in their town. Their methods included initiating prosecutions against...

"A trailblazer in the field of premodern global history, Andrea here guides readers through the medieval expansion of the 'first Europe' from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. Ranging from Ireland to Ethiopia, from the Mongol Empire to the so-called...

Batik occupies a special place in Indonesian culture. Each fabric has a rich story to tell-as a reflection of the nation's religious beliefs (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam), sophisticated court cultures and cosmopolitan history (that...

In Tir the Welsh word for 'land' writer and ecologist Carwyn Graves takes us on a tour of seven key elements of the Welsh landscape, such as the ffridd, or mountain pasture, and the rhos, or wild moorland. By diving deep into the history and ecology of...

The surprise 2023 Hamas-Israel war has completely changed the central conflict in the Middle East. As the conflict has expanded to take in other regional players, the future of Israel as a regional superpower is now in doubt, as is the international...

What does Australia's military history reveal about us?In Beyond The Broken Years fifty years after The Broken Years, Bill Gammage's classic on World War One soldiers, was published provocative military historian Peter Stanley argues why it's vital for...

Indigenous artists from across the planet provide truth-telling about the past and inspiration to imagine better futures.marramarra (a Wiradjuri word meaning to create, make or do) explores how contemporary Indigenous artists and their communities are...

My hair is a statement and always will be, even when I no longer have any.The social revolution of the Swinging Sixties led to a renaissance of unchecked hair growth, and long hair, especially on men, was worn as a political or countercultural symbol of...

Opechancanough was born in the 1540s, as was his brother, Wahunsenacawh, better known as Powhatan, the Indian King and father of Pocahontas. Opechancanough lived near the location of the English settlement of Jamestown when John Smith and company built a...

From the Watergate scandal, deposition of Haile Selassie and the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union, to ABBA's landmark victory at the Eurovision Song Contest and the production of the very first Volkswagen Golf - a concise,...

Do you wonder if that family legend your grandparents told was true? Or have you never known much about your family history and would like to find out more?The Family History Book takes you through the steps of researching and building a family tree,...

Bonzer. Arvo. Tucker. Sickie. Pash. Illywhacker.There are plenty of words to choose from to tell the story of Australia from iconic Australianisms like mateship, fair dinkum, and bogan to drop bears, budgie smugglers, and bin chickens.And while you...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Embark on a captivating journey with Love & Whiskey. New York Times bestselling author Fawn Weaver unveils the hidden narrative behind one of America's most iconic whiskey brands. This book is a vibrant exploration...

A beautifully illustrated book on the Kennicott Bible, a remarkable example of Medieval Jewish book art.The Kennicott Bible is among the most celebrated Hebrew Bibles that survive from the Middle Ages. Originating from La Corua in northern Spain, it...

The best-known songs in the world are violent, sexist, and religious - so why do we celebrate national anthems when we should be rewriting them?The story begins in a London theatre in 1745, where the modern idea of anthems started out as triumphant...

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, millions of lives changed in an instant.Millions of people were suddenly on the move. In this great flow of people was a reporter from the north of Scotland. Jen Stout left Moscow abruptly, ending up on a border...

Japan's Showa era began in 1926 when Emperor Hirohito took the throne and ending on his death in 1989 was the formative age of modern Japan. No doubt the most momentous, calamitous, successful and glamorous period in Japan's...

A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk.A century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing convention to the wind, they headed across...

The first book to present the amazing swords and armour belonging to the most famous Samurai in Japanese history!In Japanese Swords and Armor, Samurai sword expert Paul Martin presents scores of magnificent blades, fittings and armor from the 12th to the...

How colour is used in the most famous works of Japanese art from the 16th century to the present.From the vibrant reds of traditional kimonos to the serene blues of tarashikomi riverscapes and woodblock prints, this book shows that colour itself is a...

Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Evita and Juan Peron, Augusto Pinochet, and Pablo EscobarSoccer has been the world's most popular sport for the last century and an irresistible game for political and social leaders seeking shortcuts to the hearts of...

One of the most glamorous and successful politicians in Canadian historyIn this masterful and engaging biography, acclaimed journalist Steve Paikin brings to life John Turner (1929-2020), one of the most glamorous and successful politicians in Canadian...

Was justice served?For three years during the Second World War, 12,000 Nazis were held in a prisoner-of-war camp at the edge of Medicine Hat, an isolated city of 12,000 people on the bald Canadian prairie. The camp and the townsfolk lived cheerfully...

From the author of Unsuitable for Females, shortlisted for The Sunday Times Football Book of the Year 2023.With the triumph of England's Lionesses at Euro 2022, the women's game has been in the spotlight like never before, enjoying...

Excerpts from her personal correspondence and passages from her published autobiography combine to produce a vivid first-person account revealing her interests, opinions and experiences, along with all the pleasures and frustrations of prolonged overseas...

The Chinese picture-scroll, a long painting or calligraphic work held within a horizontal scrolling mount, has been China's pre-eminent aesthetic format for the last two millennia. This first extended history of the picture-scroll explores its...

The never-before-told story of the extraordinary women behind a trailblazing British magazine. During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent...

This is the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth century's capital of modern culture. Across the 1910s and '20s, through provocative creative acts, shocking...

A fresh reading of Aldus Manutius, preeminent in the history of the printed book.Aldus Manutius is perhaps the greatest gure in the history of the printed book: in Venice, Europe's capital of printing, he invented the italic type and issued more rst...

The Globe tells the story of humanity's quest to discover the form of the world. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, and from there it spread to...

Blood, Sweat and Earth is a hard-hitting historical expos of the diamond industry, focusing on the exploitation of workers and the environment, and the monopolisation of uncut diamonds, and how little this has changed over time. It describes the use of...

Eighty years after the fall of Benito Mussolini, controversy remains about what his dictatorship represented. This reflects the different sides to the Duce's leadership: while adept at nurturing and enforcing his personal political power, Mussolini's...

The Middle East is experiencing the world's most prominent youth bulge. Yet many MENA economies' institutional designs, both formal and informal, favour the power of business elites, systematically discriminating against young people...

In this fascinating biography of the Indian revolutionary M. P. T. Acharya (18871954), Ole Birk Laursen uncovers the remarkable transnational networks, movements and activities of India's most important anticolonial anarchist in the twentieth century...

A common view is that the Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945. But fighting continued for over a decade in the Baltic states. Stuck between two totalitarian regimesStalin's USSR and Hitler's Reichthe populations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania...

Field marshal and statesman Gustaf Mannerheim (1867-1951) was the most acclaimed and the most hated Finn of the twentieth century. After three decades of loyal and distinguished service in the Russian Tsarist army, he returned to his homeland in 1917 to...

Over several centuries, England imposed itself by force and by treaty on the other three nations of the Hiberno-British Isles to form its own English Empire. For much of its life, the United Kingdom has only endured out of shared interest in overseas...

A landmark new history of the great English county of Lancashire, exploring its people's impact on Britain and beyond.This popular history explores the cultural heritage and identity of Lancashire, stretching from the Mersey to the Lake District. Paul...

Another India tells the story of the world's biggest religious minority. Weaving together vivid biographical portraits of a wide range of Indian Muslims - elite and subaltern, secular and clerical, activist and apolitical - it brings the experience of...

Ever since the humble potato arrived from Peru around 1730 it has been a key component of the Scottish diet. In this book Liz Ashworth introduces the heritage and history of the potato and the numerous varieties available, including information on...