In the early hours of November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes, an English Catholic who had served with the Spanish army in Flanders, was discovered in a storeroom under the Palace of Westminster--and with him, thirty-six barrels of gunpowder earmarked to obliterate England's royal family, top officials, and members of Parliament gathered for Parliament's opening day. Had it succeeded, this Gunpowder Plot--a Catholic conspiracy against the recently crowned Protestant King James I and his government--English history would have been shaped by a terrorist act of unprecedented proportions.
Today Guy...
In the early hours of November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes, an English Catholic who had served with the Spanish army in Flanders, was discovered in a store...
When the BBC ran a poll in 2001 to name the greatest Briton, Alfred, a ninth-century monarch, was the only king to make the top 20. Also the only English sovereign to be called "the Great," Alfred used to be remembered as much through folklore as through his accomplishments.
Horspool sees Alfred as inextricably linked to the legends and stories that surround him, and rather than attempting to separate the myth from the "reality," he explores how both came together to provide a historical figure that was all things to all men. This book offers a vivid picture of Alfred's England, but...
When the BBC ran a poll in 2001 to name the greatest Briton, Alfred, a ninth-century monarch, was the only king to make the top 20. Also the only ...
Patterson explores how modern men and women respond to the threat of new warfare with new capacities for imagining aggression and death. This is an unflinching history of the locationless terror that so many people feel today.
Patterson explores how modern men and women respond to the threat of new warfare with new capacities for imagining aggression and death. This is an un...
When the American reporter Henry Morton Stanley stepped out of the jungle in 1871 and doffed his pith helmet to the Scottish missionary-explorer Dr. David Livingstone, his greeting was to take on mythological proportions. But do any of us really know what his words meant at the time--and what they have come to mean since?
Far from meeting in a remote thicket in "Darkest Africa," Stanley met Livingstone in the middle of a thriving Muslim community. The news of their encounter was transmitted around the globe, and Livingstone instantly became one of the world's first international...
When the American reporter Henry Morton Stanley stepped out of the jungle in 1871 and doffed his pith helmet to the Scottish missionary-explorer D...
There were heroic lives and deaths before and after, but none quite like Socrates'. He did not die by sword or spear, braving all to defend home and country, but as a condemned criminal, swallowing a painless dose of poison. And yet Socrates' death in 399 BCE has figured large in our world ever since, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom, the distance of intellectual life from daily activity--many of the key coordinates of Western culture. In this book Emily Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the...
There were heroic lives and deaths before and after, but none quite like Socrates'. He did not die by sword or spear, braving all to defend home a...
Why did Caesar have to die--and why did his death solve nothing? The plot was confused, the execution bungled, and within hours different versions of the event were circulating. It was the end of republican Rome and the beginning of the Roman Empire--and yet everything about it remains somewhat mysterious.
Beginning with this legendary political assassination, immortalized in art and literature through the ages, Greg Woolf delivers a remarkable meditation on Caesar's murder as it echoes down the corridors of history, affecting notions and acts of political...
Why did Caesar have to die--and why did his death solve nothing? The plot was confused, the execution bungled, and within hours different versions...
Since first reported to the world in 1780, the death of Captain Cook on a Hawaiian beach the previous year has been revered, celebrated, and shrouded in mystery. Simultaneously called a hero and an antihero, a ruthless invader, and a torchbearer of the Enlightenment, Cook s reputation grew as much out of the moving story of his death as out of his adventures while he lived.
In a style that is more detective story than conventional biography, Glyn Williams explores the multiple narratives of Cook s death. He reveals how the British Admiralty first attempted to censor accounts of Cook s...
Since first reported to the world in 1780, the death of Captain Cook on a Hawaiian beach the previous year has been revered, celebrated, and shrou...
On Easter Monday 1916, while much of Dublin holidayed at the seaside and placed bets at the horse races, a disciplined group of Irish Volunteers seized the city s General Post Office in what would become the defining act of rebellion against British rule and the most significant single event in modern Irish history. By week s end, the rebels had surrendered, and the siege had left the once magnificent GPO an empty shell and turned it into the most famous and deeply symbolic building in all of Ireland.
This book unravels the events in and around the GPO during the Easter Rising of...
On Easter Monday 1916, while much of Dublin holidayed at the seaside and placed bets at the horse races, a disciplined group of Irish Volunteers s...
