19th Century

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....

Here is the enthralling story of the American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900....

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

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

Lincoln found the solace and tactics he needed to deal with the nation’s worst crisis in the “coping strategies” he had developed over a lifetime of persevering through depressive episodes and personal tragedies....

Everywhere hailed as a masterpiece of historical adventure, this enthralling narrative recounts the experiences of 12 American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815....

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

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....

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 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.

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....

A literally world-changing book, Darwin put forward the anti-religious and scientific idea that humans in fact evolved over millions of generations from animals....

“There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate,” he wrote. “When he can’t afford it and when he can.” The publishing company Twain owned was failing; his investment in a typesetting device was bleeding red ink....

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

In 1858, 14-year-old Narcisse Pelletier sailed from Marseilles in the French trader Saint-Paul. With a cargo of wine, they stopped in Bombay, then Hong Kong, and from there they set sail with more than 300 Chinese prospectors bound for the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo....

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....

In 1893 Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen set sail for the North Pole in the Fram, a ship specially designed to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and travel north with the sea's drift. Experts said that such a ship couldn't be built....

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....

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....

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 The Sum of the People, data scientist Andrew Whitby traces the remarkable history of the census, from ancient China and the Roman Empire, through revolutionary America and Nazi-occupied Europe, to the steps of the Supreme Court....

First colonized around 200 A.D. by intrepid Polynesian islanders, Hawaii existed for hundreds of years in splendid isolation. Foreigners did not visit the islands until 1788....

A top historian offers a new history of Paris’s Belle Époque, the luminous age of the Eiffel Tower and the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, but also of social unrest and violent clashes over what it meant to be French....

Benjamin Grierson’s Union cavalry thrusting through Mississippi is one of the most well-known operations of the Civil War. The Real Horse Soldiers captures the high drama and tension of the 1863 horse soldiers in a modern, comprehensive, academic study....