19th Century

The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights....

In 1873 the people of Labette County, Kansas made a grisly discovery. Buried by a trailside cabin beneath an orchard of young apple trees were the remains of countless bodies. Below the cabin itself was a cellar stained with blood....

As one of the most potent turning points in the country's modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today's China seeks to put behind it....

In 1864, Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of Auckland Island....

For decades, the myth has persisted that the statue was a grand gift from France, but now Liberty's Torch reveals how she was in fact the pet project of one quixotic and visionary French sculptor....

In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation....

Historian Rachel Chrastil presents a definitive new history of the war that toppled the French Empire, unified Germany, and set Europe on the path to World War I....

From the New York Times best-selling, celebrated, and award-winning author of Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell comes the spellbinding, epic account of the dramatic conclusion of the Civil War....

Acclaimed historian Mary McAuliffe vividly recaptures the Paris of Napoleon III, Claude Monet, and Victor Hugo. Paris, City of Dreams traces the transformation of the City of Light during Napoleon III’s Second Empire into the beloved city of today....

From New York Times best-selling historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in 19th-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy....

The Race to the Future sets the drivers' derring-do against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological race to the future. Bestselling historian Kassia St. Clair shows how the Peking-to-Paris provided an impetus for profound social, cultural, and industrial change.

As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the facts from the very beginning, and for good reason....

All the splendours and horrors of Victorian life will be vividly recalled....

The terrible conflict that dominated the mid-19th century, the Crimean War, killed at least 800,000 men and pitted Russia against a formidable coalition of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire....

In January 1889, Louisa Collins, a mother of 10 children, became the first woman hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol and the last woman hanged in New South Wales. Both of Louisa's husbands had died suddenly and the Crown, convinced that Louisa poisoned them with arsenic, put her on trial....

Bernard Cornwell combines his storytelling skills with a meticulously researched history to give a riveting chronicle of every dramatic moment from Napoleon's daring escape from Elba....

The Husband Hunters is a deliciously told historical audiobook about the young, rich, American heiresses who married impoverished, British gentry at the turn of the 20th century - the real women who inspired Downton Abbey....

The Victorians invented mass entertainment. As the 19th century's growing industrialized class acquired the funds and the free time to pursue leisure activities, their every whim was satisfied by entrepreneurs building new venues for popular amusement....

In the 1860s, Napoleon III, intent on curbing the rise of American imperialism, persuaded a young Austrian archduke and a Belgian princess to leave Europe and become the emperor and empress of Mexico....

The bloodiest battle of the Civil War was also its turning point. From this point onwards, the Confederate forces would never gain a hold in the North again....

E. P. Thompson's magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class defined early twentieth-century English social and economic history, leading many to consider him Britain's greatest postwar historian....

July 1, 1863, had gone poorly for the Union army’s XI Corps. Shattered in battle north of the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, the battered and embarrassed unit ended the day hunkered at the crest of a cemetery-topped hill south of the village.

The explosive and bloody true history of Texas Rangers Company F, hard men who risked their lives to bring justice to a lawless frontier....

The Colonization and Establishment of Liberia looks at how the colony grew, the ideals behind it, what life was like there, and how a tenuous democracy lasted in the colony for over 100 years....

At the Vatican Council of 1869-1870, the church made a dramatic effort to set things right by defining the doctrine of papal infallibility. Author John W. O'Malley draws us into the bitter controversies over papal infallibility that at one point seemed destined to rend the church in two....