History & Archaeology Books

The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl...

The legendary Renaissance math duel that ushered in the modern age of algebraThe Secret Formula tells the story of two Renaissance mathematicians whose jealousies, intrigues, and contentious debates led to the discovery of a formula for the solution of...

A vivid and accessible new translation of Cicero's influential writings on the Stoic idea of the divine Most ancient Romans were deeply religious and their world was overflowing with gods - from Jupiter, Minerva, and Mars to countless local...

The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life-and even invented real automated machines The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT...

To what extent was Machiavelli a "Machiavellian"? Was he an amoral adviser of tyranny or a stalwart partisan of liberty? A neutral technician of power politics or a devout Italian patriot? A reviver of pagan virtue or initiator of modern nihilism?...

Thoroughly up-to-date, skillfully written, and strikingly illustrated, Weimar Germany brings to life an era of unmatched creativity in the twentieth century-one whose influence and inspiration still resonate today. Eric Weitz has written the...

The first complete biography of an influential historian whose dramatic life intersected with many great events and thinkers of the twentieth centuryThis is the first complete biography of Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963), an influential German-American...

Zen and Japanese Culture is a classic that has influenced generations of readers and played a major role in shaping conceptions of Zen's influence on Japanese traditional arts. In simple and poetic language, Daisetz Suzuki describes Zen and its...

This concise edition of the biography of Walatta-Petros (1672) tells the story of an Ethiopian saint who lived from 1592 to 1642 and led a successful nonviolent movement to preserve African Christian beliefs in the face of European protocolonialism. This...

The Spectre of Warlooks at a subject we thought we knew - the roots of the Second World War - and upends our assumptions with a masterful new interpretation. Looking beyond traditional explanations based on diplomatic failures or military might, Jonathan...

How four American cities shaped Poe's life and writingsEdgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) changed residences about once a year throughout his life. Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American...

A sweeping cultural and economic history of porcelain, from the eighteenth century to the present Porcelain was invented in medieval China - but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king...

The unknown history of deportation and of the fear that shapes immigrants' livesConstant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first...

An original and engaging account of the Obama years from a group of leading political historiansBarack Obama's election as the first African American president seemed to usher in a new era, and he took office in 2009 with great expectations. But by his...

Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local...

From the author of the national bestseller The Sleepwalkers, a book about how the exercise of power is shaped by different concepts of timeThis groundbreaking book presents new perspectives on how the exercise of power is shaped by different notions of...

Andrea Carandini's archaeological discoveries and controversial theories about ancient Rome have made international headlines over the past few decades. In this book, he presents his most important findings and ideas, including the argument that there...

A radical reexamination of the textual and archaeological evidence about Augustus and the PalatineCaesar Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), who is usually thought of as the first Roman emperor, lived on the Palatine Hill, the place from which the word "palace"...

The fascinating untold story of digital cash and its creators-from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrenciesBitcoin may appear to be a revolutionary form of digital cash without precedent or prehistory. In fact, it is...

In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally...

The racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedom.The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of...

A fascinating history of marginalized identities in the medieval worldWhile the term "intersectionality" was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating,...

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgmentWhen buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment-and its concern...

An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraperIn the early years of the Cold War, the skyline of Moscow was forever transformed by a citywide skyscraper building project. As the steel girders of the monumental towers went up, the centuries-old...

One of BBC History Magazine's Best Books of 2020Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much...

A groundbreaking history that puts early and medieval West Africa in a global context Pick up almost any book on early and medieval world history and empire, and where do you find West Africa? On the periphery. This pioneering book, the first on this...

On the fortieth anniversary of the Camp David Accords, a groundbreaking new history that shows how Egyptian-Israeli peace ensured lasting Palestinian statelessnessFor seventy years Israel has existed as a state, and for forty years it has honored a peace...

Physics Today, Notable Books of 2020 A finely drawn portrait of Einstein's sixteen months in Prague In the spring of 1911, Albert Einstein moved with his wife and two sons to Prague, the capital of Bohemia, where he accepted a post as a...

How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent ageThis pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low...

From the acclaimed author of The Gunpowder Age, a book that casts new light on the history of China and the West at the turn of the nineteenth century.George Macartney's disastrous 1793 mission to China plays a central role in the prevailing...

Europe's long sixteenth century--a period spanning the years roughly from the voyages of Columbus in the 1490s to the English Civil War in the 1640s--was an era of power struggles between avaricious and unscrupulous princes, inquisitions and torture...

From Greek and Roman times to the digital era, the library has remained central to knowledge, scholarship, and the imagination. The Meaning of the Library is a generously illustrated examination of this key institution of Western culture. Tracing what...

Edmund Burke (1730-97) lived during one of the most extraordinary periods of world history. He grappled with the significance of the British Empire in India, fought for reconciliation with the American colonies, and was a vocal critic of national policy...

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, a definitive political picture of the Islamic RepublicWhen Iranians overthrew their monarchy, rejecting a pro-Western shah in favor of an Islamic regime, many observers predicted that...

How silver influenced two hundred years of world history, and why it matters todayThis is the story of silver's transformation from soft money during the nineteenth century to hard asset today, and how manipulations of the white metal by American...

The shocking untold story of how the FBI partnered with white evangelicals to champion a vision of America as a white Christian nation.On a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI...

The most pervasive gods in ancient Rome had no traditional mythology attached to them, nor was their worship organized by elites. Throughout the Roman world, neighborhood street corners, farm boundaries, and household hearths featured small shrines to...

A book that finally demystifies Newton's experiments in alchemyWhen Isaac Newton's alchemical papers surfaced at a Sotheby's auction in 1936, the quantity and seeming incoherence of the manuscripts were shocking. No longer the exemplar of Enlightenment...

The definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the MuqaddimaIbn Khaldun (1332-1406) is generally regarded as the greatest intellectual ever to have appeared in the Arab world--a genius who ranks as one of the world's...

An innovative look at how families in Ming dynasty China negotiated military and political obligations to the state How did ordinary people in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) deal with the demands of the state? In The Art of Being Governed, Michael Szonyi...

It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India's greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A...

In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and...

Most classical authors and modern historians depict the ancient Greek world as essentially stable and even static, once the so-called colonization movement came to an end. But Robert Garland argues that the Greeks were highly mobile, that their movement...

This sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow...

Lord Byron described Greece as great, fallen, and immortal, a characterization more apt than he knew. Through most of its long history, Greece was poor. But in the classical era, Greece was densely populated and highly urbanized. Many surprisingly...

Political Islam has often been compared to ideological movements of the past such as fascism or Christian theocracy. But are such analogies valid? How should the Western world today respond to the challenges of political Islam? Taking an original...

A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral rather than material lens What's wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted...

Turkish republicanism is commonly thought to have originated with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, and understood exclusively in terms of Kemalist ideals, characterized by the principles of secularism, nationalism,...