The Hellenistic Age chronicles the years 336 to 30 BCE, a period that witnessed the overlap of two of antiquity's great civilizations, the Greek and the Roman. Peter Green's remarkably far-ranging study covers the prevalent themes and events of those centuries: the Hellenization, by Alexander's conquests, of an immense swath of the known world; the lengthy and chaotic partition of this empire by rival Macedonian bands; the decline of the city-state as the predominant political institution; and, finally, Rome's moment of transition from republican to imperial rule. It is a story of war...

Insightful, informed, and at times controversial in its conclusions, A Short History of Medicine offers an exceptional introduction to the major and many minor facets of its subject.
In this lively, learned, and wholly engrossing volume, F. Gonzalez-Crussi presents a brief yet authoritative five-hundred-year history of the science, the philosophy, and the controversies of modern medicine. While this illuminating work mainly explores Western medicine over the past five centuries, Gonzalez-Crussi also describes how modern medicine's roots extend to both Greco-Roman antiquity and...

In this cogent volume, historian Martin Marty gives readers of all faiths a brief yet sweeping account of Christianity and how it grew from a few believers two thousand years ago to become the world's largest religion. He depicts the life of Christ and his teachings and explains how the apostles set out to spread the Gospel. With a special emphasis on global Christianity, Marty shows how the religion emerged from its ancestral homeland in Africa, the Levant, and Asia Minor, was imported to Europe, and then expanded from there to the rest of the world. While giving a broad overview, Marty also...

In Prehistory, the award-winning archaeologist and renowned scholar Colin Renfrew covers human existence before the advent of written records the overwhelming majority of our time here on earth and gives an incisive, concise, and lively survey of the past, and of how scholars and scientists labor to bring it to light.
Renfrew begins by looking at prehistory as a discipline, detailing how breakthroughs such as radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis have helped us to define humankind s past how things have changed much more clearly than was possible just a half century ago. As for why things...

Acclaimed historian Margaret MacMillan explores here the many ways in which history affects us all. She shows how a deeper engagement with history, both as individuals and in the sphere of public debate, can help us understand ourselves and the world better. But she also warns that history can be misused and lead to misunderstanding. History is used to justify religious movements and political campaigns alike. Dictators may suppress history because it undermines their ideas, agendas, or claims to absolute authority. Nationalists may tell false, one-sided, or misleading stories about the past....

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history's most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded-and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies-East Germany, Romania, and Poland-to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of...

A splendidly pithy and provocative introduction to the culture of Romanticism. The Sunday Times

Tim Blanning is] in a particularly good position to speak of the arrival of Romanticism on the Euorpean scene, and he does so with a verve, a breadth, and an authority that exceed every expectation. National Review
From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment,...