18th Century

President of the National Constitution Center Jeffrey Rosen examines what “the pursuit of happiness” meant to our nation’s Founders and how that famous phrase defined their lives and became the foundation of our democracy....

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....

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.

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 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....

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

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....

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....

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 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....

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....

France's iconic queen, Marie Antoinette, wrongly accused of uttering the infamous "Let them eat cake", was alternately revered and reviled during her lifetime....

Historian Rory Muir weaves together the stories of many obscure and well-known young men of good family but small fortune, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Regency society....

Revealing the democratic and economic forces propelling history's most colorful criminals, The Invisible Hook establishes pirates' trailblazing relevance to the contemporary world....

From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world....

For more than three and a half years, from 1779 to 1783, the tiny territory of Gibraltar was besieged and blockaded, on land and at sea, by the overwhelming forces of Spain and France....

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....

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....

An easy-to-listen-to audiobook about the American Revolution - one of the most important events of Western history - in DK's inimitable style, narrated by William Roberts....

Like its popular and acclaimed predecessor, Restoration London, this book is the result of the author's passionate interest in the practical details of the everyday life of our ancestors....

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

In 1791, General Arthur St. Clair led the United States Army in a campaign to destroy a complex of Indian villages at the Miami River in northwestern Ohio....

From one of the truly preeminent historians of our time, this is a landmark book chronicling the French Revolution. Simon Schama deftly refutes the contemporary notion that the French Revolution represented an uprising of the oppressed poor against a decadent aristocracy and corrupt court....

Thomas Jefferson's opposition to tyranny and his advocacy of freedom have inspired generations to believe that the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right....

In the 18th century, the Catholics of England lacked many basic freedoms under the law: they could not serve in political office, buy or inherit land, or be married by the rites of their own religion....

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.

When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions?

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.