If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, which side would you want to win?
When the last British governor of Virginia declared that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the king would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves fled from farms, plantations, and cities to try to reach the British camp. A military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in U.S. history. With powerfully vivid storytelling, Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of...
If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, which side would you want to win?
In this "readable and humane book" (Los Angeles Times Book Review), the late historian Roy Porter traces the course of man's philosophical journey from the superstitious, spiritually obsessed Dark Ages to our modern perspective, based on reason and grounded in the body. He demonstrates how the explosion of rational thought and scientific innovation during the Enlightenment began to change our understanding of the flesh and its relation to the soul. No longer simply a "mortal coil," the body eventually became the location, and source, of our conscious selves. Porter examines this...
In this "readable and humane book" (Los Angeles Times Book Review), the late historian Roy Porter traces the course of man's philosophical...
Written by a team of noted historians, these essays explore how ten 20th-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to adapt such familiar Victorian values as civilisation, domesticity, conscience and improvement to modern conditions of democracy, feminism and mass culture. Covering such figures as J.M. Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lord Reith of the BBC, these interdisciplinary studies scrutinize the children of the Victorians at a time when their private assumptions and public positions were under increasing strain in a rapidly changing world.
Written by a team of noted historians, these essays explore how ten 20th-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to adapt such familiar Vict...
Lucie Manette had been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris's most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes's fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay, and the dissolute lawyer, Carton. Their story, which encompasses violence, revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the French Revolution. A Tale of Two Cities begins on a muddy English road in an atmosphere charged with mystery and drama, and it ends in the...
Lucie Manette had been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris's most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunit...
The author of the bestselling Citizens reconstructs--and at times reinvents--the death of General James Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759 and the 1849 murder of the Boston brahmin George Parkman, whose nephew would become Wolfe's biographer. What Schama achieves is a mind-teasing delight.--The New York Times Book Review. Photographs.
The author of the bestselling Citizens reconstructs--and at times reinvents--the death of General James Wolfe at the battle of Quebec in 1759 and the ...
Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of the Dutch nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in constant dread of being corrupted by happiness. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama re-creates in precise detail a nation's mental state. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators. He tells us how the Dutch celebrated themselves and how they were slandered by their enemies....
Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of the Dutch nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluenc...
Simon Schama's extraordinary novel in a new stage adaptation by Caryl Philips. As the American War of Independence reaches its climax, a plantation slave and a British Naval Officer embark on an epic journey in search of freedom. Divided by barriers of race but united in their ambitions for equality, their convictions will change attitudes towards slavery forever. Sweeping from the deep south of America to the scorched earth of West Africa, Rough Crossings is a compelling true story that marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. Rough...
Simon Schama's extraordinary novel in a new stage adaptation by Caryl Philips. As the American War of Independence reaches its climax, a planta...
"With eloquence, wit, passion, and irony, The American Future traces the history of an idea: that of our national destiny....A book of beautiful writing, peppered with wisecracks, slashed with rapier thrusts." --Philadelphia Inquirer A De Tocqueville for the 21st century, Simon Schama, NBCC Award winning author of Rough Crossings offers an essential, historical, long view analysis of the American character in The American Future. Shama examines four themes--war, race and faith, immigration, and custodianship of the land--through the prism...
"With eloquence, wit, passion, and irony, The American Future traces the history of an idea: that of our national destiny....A book of beauti...
"With eloquence, wit, passion, and irony, The American Future traces the history of an idea: that of our national destiny....A book of beautiful writing, peppered with wisecracks, slashed with rapier thrusts." --Philadelphia Inquirer A De Tocqueville for the 21st century, Simon Schama, NBCC Award winning author of Rough Crossings offers an essential, historical, long view analysis of the American character in The American Future. Shama examines four themes--war, race and faith, immigration, and custodianship of the land--through the prism...
"With eloquence, wit, passion, and irony, The American Future traces the history of an idea: that of our national destiny....A book of beauti...