18th Century

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company....

By weaving together Washington’s harrowing wilderness adventures and a broader historical context, Young Washington offers new insights into the dramatic years that shaped the man who shaped a nation....

The Penguin Book of Pirates takes us behind the eye patches, the peg legs, and the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger and into the no-man’s-land of piracy that is rife with paradoxes and plot twists....

In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories....

Robert K. Massie returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure German princess who became Catherine the Great. Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into empress of Russia by sheer determination....

This magisterial history - sure to become the definitive work on the subject - recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness....

In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the listener in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society....

This Thomas Paine Classic Collection contains three of Thomas Paine's most notable books: Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and The Rights of Man....

From one of the truly preeminent historians of our time, this is a landmark book chronicling the French Revolution....

This is a story for our time: of a revolution that demanded universal human rights, of self-creation, of women empowering each other, and of transcendent glamor.

It is an era that redefined history. As the 1790s began, a fragile America teetered on the brink of oblivion, Russia towered as a vast imperial power, and France plunged into revolution....

General Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar—because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers....

Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day....

How do you solve a problem like James Madison? The fourth president is one of the most confounding figures in early American history; his political trajectory seems almost intentionally inconsistent....

The early settlement of the region around Pittsburgh was characterized by a messy collision of personal, provincial, national, and imperial interests....

Founding Father Benjamin Franklin came from humble beginnings to take his place in the annals of history as one of the most celebrated Americans ever to stand on the world stage. The Boston apprentice who ran away because of his brother's ill-treatment found his destiny in Philadelphia....

Villains of All Nations explores the "Golden Age" of Atlantic piracy (1716-1726) and the infamous generation whose images underlie our modern, romanticized view of pirates....

Relive the revolution that gave birth to the United States as it stands today....

From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a groundbreaking book - the first to look at the critical "long year" of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from December 1773 to mid-April 1775....

A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe....

Kensington Palace is now most famous as the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but the palace's glory days came between 1714 and 1760, during the reigns of George I and II....

One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world....

The Pirate King is the compelling true story of a Welshman who became one of the most ruthless and brutal buccaneers of the golden age of piracy....

El surgimiento de sociedades secretas ha sido siempre una de las facetas más fascinantes de la civilización, un fenómeno que ha estado presente desde el nacimiento de la humanidad....

Josephine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Terezia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Recamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt.

Spanning three centuries and eight thousand nautical miles, and compiled by a direct descendant of a sailor who waged war with pirates in the early nineteenth century, The Penguin Book of Pirates takes us behind the eye patches, the peg legs, and the skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger and into the no-man’s-land of piracy that is rife with paradoxes and plot twists.

The West looted millions of priceless relics from China during the colonial era. It's time to give them back. This book tells the story of when they were stolen, who stole them and where they are now. It also offers a way to give China back its treasures which should be acceptable to everyone.

In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark?

From the bestselling author of A Sense of the World comes this dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth.

In Britain in the 1750s, women had no power and no rights - all money and property belonged to their fathers or husbands. A brave group risked everything to think and live as they wished, despite the sneers of contemporaries who argued that books frazzled female brains and damaged their wombs. Bluestockings provides unexpected and inspiring stories of the forgotten heroines of Britain's very first women's movement.

Based on new archival research, Fort Ticonderoga, The Last Campaigns: The War in the North, 1777-1783 by distinguished historian Mark Edward Lender highlights the strategic importance of the fort as British, American, and regional forces fought for control of the northern front at a critical point in the war. The book tells the Ticonderoga story in all of its complexity and drama, correcting misconceptions embedded in many previous accounts, and sheds vital new light on this key chapter in America's struggle for independence.

Focusing on key characters from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Louis XIV and Charles I, Dark Brilliance is a fascinating and wide-ranging history that explores the human costs of imposing progress and modernity.

Although the ideology of judging a person for the color of their skin has infected much of the planet today, this series is focused on the origin, distribution, and perpetuity of this deceptive scourge. According to Margret Hunter of Mills College, her studies of Colorism in America and around the world is, “However, dark-skinned people of color are typically regarded as more ethnically authentic or legitimate than light-skinned people. Colorism is directly related to the larger system of racism in the USA and around the world.”

The Declaration of Independence identified “the pursuit of happiness” as one of our unalienable rights, along with life and liberty. Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, profiles six of the most influential founders—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—to show what pursuing happiness meant in their lives.