General and world history Books

'For the first time, fish became our companions and a corner of many a Victorian parlour was given over to housing tiny fragments of their world enclosed in glass.'The experience of seeing a fish swimming in a glass tank is one we take...

Recording Kastom brings readers into the heart of colonial Torres Strait and New Guinea through the journals of zoologist and anthropologist Alfred Haddon, who visited the islands in 1888 and 1898.Haddon's published reports of these trips were hugely...

Obaysch: A Hippopotamus in Victorian London is the story of Obaysch the hippopotamus, the first 'star' animal to be exhibited in the London Zoo. In 1850, a baby hippopotamus arrived on English shores, allegedly the first in Europe since the...

The natural resources of New Guinea and nearby islands have attracted outsiders for at least 5000 years: spices, aromatic woods and barks, resins, plumes, sea slugs, shells and pearls all brought traders from distant markets. Among the most sought-after...

Though there exist many biographical dictionaries of the achievements of Chinese people throughout history, few women feature. Since the mid-1980s, researchers from the University of Sydney's Department of Chinese Studies have been collecting the life...

Over the course of the 19th century a remarkable array of types appeared in Australian literature: the swagman, the larrikin, the colonial detective, the bushranger, the "currency lass", the squatter, and more. Some had a powerful influence on the...

Christina Stead set five of her novels in the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with uncanny sharpness. Yet her relationship with place and nation remains difficult to pin down: she resisted the label 'expatriate' and her books defy...

Throughout the 19th century, animals were integrated into staged scenarios of confrontation, ranging from lion acts in small cages to large-scale re-enactments of war. Initially presenting a handful of exotic animals, travelling menageries grew to...

In Every Mother's Son is Guilty, Chris Owen provides a compelling account of policing in the Kimberley district from 1882, when police were established in the district, until 1905 when Dr. Walter Roth's controversial Royal Commission into the treatment...

…Well dear Jim it breaks my heart to write this letter. Our dear [brother] was killed yesterday morning at 5.30. The bullet killed him instantly and he never spoke a word. I had just left him and gone down the trench to see the other lads when I was...

An awe-inspiring deep-dive into the treasures found on the sea floor and what they reveal about our past.A shipwreck is a time capsule. When a maritime archaeologist picks up an item from the seabed, there is a direct connection with history...

A riveting and illuminating exploration of the transatlantic slave trade by an intrepid team of divers seeking to reclaim the stories of their ancestors.“For me, Enslaved is an attempt to give a voice to the millions whose voices were...

The history books are full of heroes and villains … but what about all the idiots? Comedian and armchair historian Mikey Robins tells the astonishing story of human stupidity, one idiot at a time.Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity,...

'Edward Brooke-Hitching's delightful book is a collection of curiosities. From a 19th-century lonely hearts ad to a nuptial blessing of the bride’s buttocks, an entertaining history of love over the millennia that proves when it comes to the heart,...

Rollicking and informative, Reprehensible: Polite Histories of Bad Behaviour is your guide through some of the most shameful behaviour indulged in by humanity’s most celebrated figures, as told by Mikey Robins, one of Australia’s most loved comedians.It...

Uncover the mysteries of the past with this exciting, comprehensive guide on world history.History books are often filled with long descriptions, complex facts, and stories that can bore even the most enthusiastic history buffs. In World History 101...

Far below, through the moonlit wood, the lake was visible again and the Island in it. Dim, like a phantom ship, it lay in the silver waters and from the nearer end of it shone a narrow rectangle of light... so dull and red and smoky looking that it...

A Pygmalion-style story told with von Arnim's characteristic wit and charm, this novel introduces us to Salvatia (known as Sally), a much longed-for child to humble shopkeepers. Sally grows up to be an extremely beautiful girl, attracting the attentions...

Miss Cullen finds herself in a dreadful predicament. Four years from retirement, she can no longer meet the educational standards expected nor control her pupils at Besley High School for girls. She knows that no other school will hire her now, but if...

She got up, without meeting his eyes, and went into the bedroom to dress. That was life all over; you wanted to make a good exit, and you remembered you were still in your housecoat.Single girl Liza leaps into an exciting new sexual relationship with...

'There was no one in the room. Blinds and curtains were closed; the light of the skies, if any, was shut out. ... Only the fire was alive, consuming its life-for what? Then the door opened and as Claudia came with hurried steps into the fire's glow, two...

'Joanna sat with her cheek against her [Libby's] shining hair. She had hardly thought of Steven since he slammed his way out of the house, but now, welling up within her and pouring out over her love for Libby, came an intolerable flood of envy.' Widowed...

"May I ask your daughter's age?" "Nan is thirty-three.""A dangerous age."Rose Macaulay takes a lively and perceptive look at three generations of women within the same family and the 'dangers' faced at each of those stages in life. The book opens with...

She had saved her. But at what a cost! Her position, her name, her character she had given them all, but Clarissa was hers. Upon the death of her mother, Agatha Bodenham finds herself alone for the first time in her life. Solitary and socially awkward by...

"I shall turn this into a tea-house, with lunches if requested, and shall serve pleasant meals in the orchard," announced David, "and with my penchant for cooking I ought to make a fortune." "Oh dear!" said Germayne.David Tompkins thinks it is a splendid...

Julia Almond believes she is special and dreams of a more exciting and glamorous life away from the drab suburbia of her upbringing. Her work in a fashionable boutique in the West End gives her the personal freedom that she craves but escape from her...

'Sometimes I think that was the happiest day of my life, those hours of heat and silence and colour, along with David high up on the moor. But then I remember that I have said that of many other days, so I cannot be sure.'A female narrator looks back on...

My Husband Simon tells the story of the married life of Nevis Falconer, a young woman novelist, and Simon Quinn. Temperamentally unsuited, they are only kept together by a mutual physical attraction, in spite of innumerable quarrels. They live this...

When her bohemian life in Paris falls flat at the beginning of the First World War, Sally Lunton returns to the care of her guardian in Little Crampton to find a husband. With some encouragement from the local busybody, she makes a play for Mr Bingley,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

What is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? What role is played by its members and partners? Does the largest military alliance ever to exist serve the cause of peace or the causes of weapons sales and war mongering? Published to coincide with...

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...

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 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...

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...

Openings & Outings brings together over forty pieces from the long and distinguished career of the writer and commentator David Pryce-Jones. Taking us from a meeting with Rudolf Hess's widow, to the slums of Tangier, to the front lines of the...

Over the last three decades the historian Gabriel Kolko has redefined the way we look at modern warfare and its social and political effects. Century of War gives us a masterly synthesis of the effects of war on civilian populations and the political...

Republican passions demonstrates the crucial role of family and friendship networks in the creation of the French Third Republic. Based on the family archives of Lon Laurent-Pichat, journalist, Deputy and Life Senator, this study paints a rich picture of...

This book uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing...