Showing titles in 19th Century

Beginning with the birth of the nation, slavery divided and caused conflict for the United States of America, worsening during the country's early decades as the practice became more economically vital. Finally, in 1861, the American Civil War erupted after the election of President Abraham Lincoln. Never acknowledging the South’s right to secede, Lincoln and the North fought the South through four long, bloody, destructive years; much longer than anyone thought the war would last.

The Industrial Revolution, which took place in Great Britain between the middle of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th, transformed British industry and society and made Great Britain the most powerful nation in the world. The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen due to one, single factor but rather to a number of separate, yet, related developments which interacted to change the world profoundly and completely. Improvements in the production of iron allowed the construction of efficient, reliable steam engines.

The Beloved Vision links the music history of this singular epoch to the ideas that lay behind Romanticism in all its manifestations. In this account, we come to understand the phase in music history that has become the mainstay of the twentieth and twenty-first century concert and operatic repertoire.

Russell Martin, author of Beethoven's Hair, and his wife, Lydia Nibley, tell the story of how a lock of Ludwig von Beethoven's hair, clipped from the composer's head on his deathbed in Germany in 1827, ended up in Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943 and was later sold at auction in London in 1994. Learn about this incredible journey through history and the mysteries revealed about Beethoven's deafness and death. Correspondence, research, and forensics further inform this fascinating story.

This volume focuses on the two important delaying actions conducted by mounted Union soldiers at Reed’s and Alexander’s bridges on the first day of Chickamauga. A cavalry brigade under Col. Robert H. G. Minty and Col. John T. Wilder’s legendary “Lightning Brigade” of mounted infantry made stout stands at a pair of chokepoints crossing Chickamauga Creek.

The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismark, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together, to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war.

History for busy people. The American Civil War was fought between the Confederates and the Union from 1861 to 1865. This is a concise history of this tumultuous period.The American Civil War started when eleven southern ‘slave’ states declared their independence from the United States of America. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican government were strongly against slavery and fought to abolish it and keep the country united.

A deeply engaging and completely original book about nineteenth-century Britain’s fascination with good quality murder. Murder in nineteenth-century Britain was ubiquitous – not necessarily in quantity but in quality. This was the era of penny-bloods, early crime fiction and melodramas for the masses.

Van Gogh is a vivid portrait of the great Impressionist painter that traces his life from the Netherlands, where he was born into a family of art dealers, through his years in England, the Hague, and Paris, to his final home in Arles, where he discovered the luminous style of his late paintings before his suicide at the age of thirty-seven.

Rifleman Harris was a soldier in the elite 95th Rifles, one of Britains most prestigous infantry units during the Napoleonic wars. In this memoir, Harris relates his experiences in Denmark, the Peninsular, and at Walcheren. This is no history of grand plans and movements controlled by the lofty generals. Rather this relates the tale of a front line soldier who's concerns run much more with keeping shoes on his feet, a shirt on his back and, most importantly, food in his belly. Among other details, this book relates the horrors of the retreat to Corruna and the even more disasterous Walcheren expedition where an entire army was struck down by pestilence.

On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, historian Lucy Worsley leads us into the world in which our best-loved novelist lived. This new telling of the story of Jane's life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her and the way in which home is used in her novels to mean both a place of pleasure and a prison. It wasn't all country houses and ballrooms; in fact her life was often a painful struggle.

In The Habsburgs, Martyn Rady tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built - and then lost - over nearly a millennium. From modest origins, the Habsburgs grew in power to gain control of the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century. Then, in just a few decades, their possessions rapidly expanded to take in a large part of Europe stretching from Hungary to Spain and from the Far East to the New World. The family continued to dominate Central Europe until the catastrophe of the First World War.

In the early 19th century, a series of murders took place in and around London that shocked the whole of England. The appalling nature of the crimes - a brutal slaying in the gambling netherworld, the slaughter of two entire households, and the first of the modern lust-murders - was magnified not only by the lurid atmosphere of an age in which candlelight gave way to gaslight but also by the efforts of some of the keenest minds of the period to uncover the most gruesome details of the killings.

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. Contrary to their reputation as dour, buttoned-up prudes, the Victorians reveled in these newly created "palaces of pleasure".

Ici se nouent les derniers actes du fabuleux destin de Napoléon. Le 24 juin 1812, il entre en Russie à la tête de la Grande Armée. Alors chaque jour, chaque page de ce livre, et jusqu'à la mort de l'empereur le 5 mai 1821, devient une scène inoubliable. C'est l'océan de feu qui détruit Moscou et c'est le passage de la Bérézina au terme de la retraite de Russie. C'est Leipzig et c'est Montmirail, la campagne d'Allemagne et la campagne de France en 1813 et 1814.

The world is filled with mysteries, and even in the modern age, much of the planet remains unexplored. The depths of the oceans and the intricate and extensive cave systems that honeycomb some parts of the Earth are still largely unknown. Thus, it should come as no surprise that when it comes to this terra incognita, people have projected all sorts of ideas.

Jules Verne and the Invention of the Future has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

This remarkable book recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.

In the spring of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated. Having overseen an empire spanning half the European continent and governed the lives of some eighty million people, he suddenly found himself exiled to Elba, less than 100 square miles of territory. This would have been the end of him, if Europe's rulers had had their way. But soon enough Napoleon imposed his preternatural charisma and historic ambition on both his captors and the very island itself, plotting his return to France and to power.

Meet the Luddites, a 19th-century brotherhood of rebels who vowed to annihilate every last one of the newfangled spinning machines that cost thousands their jobs. The Luddites' riots are indefensible, at least from the standpoint of violence, but they beg the question of whether the protests were nonsensical acts of rage carried out by thugs who sought to exploit imagined fears or desperate measures taken by those who felt neglected by the government. The Luddites chronicles the revolution and the negative reaction to it.