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The lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Henry VIII, and Queen Victoria fill bookshelves and fascinate scholars all over the world. But little attention is given to the ferret who posed for the Renaissance master, the servant who oversaw the Tudor’s toilet time, or the famous horse who thrilled the miserable old monarch. These supporting cast members have been waiting in the wings for too long, and Adrian Bliss thinks it’s high time they join their glory-hogging contemporaries in the spotlight. Fortunately, now they can.

The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates in gorgeous prose, and on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.

What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose—and why we need them. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share.

Zen, haiku, martial arts, sushi, anime, manga, film, video games . . . Japanese culture has long enriched our Western way of life. Yet from a Western perspective, Japan remains a remote island country that has long had a complicated relationship with the outside world. Japan—an archipelago strung like a necklace around the Asian mainland—is considerably farther from Asia than Britain is from Europe. The sea has provided an effective barrier against invasion and enabled the culture to develop in unique ways.

雑学の森 日本史本日はこちら「高杉晋作と「奇兵隊」の誕生」高杉晋作（たかすぎ しんさく）は、幕末期に活躍した長州藩士であり、日本の近代化に大きな影響を与えた人物です。彼の最も有名な業績の一つは、武士だけでなく、庶民や農民、商人などの多様な身分の人々を集めて編成した「奇兵隊（きへいたい）」の結成です。当時、長州藩は幕府との戦いで苦境に立たされていました。これに対抗するため、従来の藩士だけではなく、広く...

Adventurers from every corner of the globe search for the unknown and try to understand it, remaking the world and themselves in the process. Exploration is for everyone who sets off into the unknown. It is the inheritance of all.

Themes of unspoiled paradise tamed by progress can be seen in stories about pioneer history across the US, especially in Florida. Selling Vero Beach explores how settlers from northern states created myths about the Indian River area on Florida's Atlantic Coast, importing ideas about the region's Indigenous peoples and marketing the land as an idyllic, fertile place of possibilities.

In 1827 the Royal Navy purchased a Baltimore clipper and renamed her the Black Joke. Assigned to the Preventative Squadron, she patrolled the west coast of Africa and freed 3,692 captives from enslavement. Beloved by seafarers and celebrated by the public, the Black Joke would become the most famous weapon in the campaign for abolition. But in her previous life as the Henriqueta, the Black Joke had been a slave ship. Through the experiences of slavers and abolitionists, captives and crew, Stephen Taylor charts the vessel's extraordinary double life.

TikTok sensation Katie Kennedy, aka @TheHistoryGossip, serves up a delicious blend of fascinating, witty and salacious history tea for every day of the year. With infectious wit and historical insight, The History Gossip brings you the mad, bad and dangerous tales from around the world. With entries for every day of the year, this is history … but not as you know it.

In 1945, post-fascist Italy was devastated by war, and its reputation in the international arena was nil. Yet by December 1955, when Italy was admitted to the United Nations, the nation had contested three acrimonious but free general elections, had a flourishing press, and was a leader in the rebuilding of Europe.

Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed.

Marcus Rediker, one of the leading scholars of maritime history, puts his command of archival research on full display in this luminous portrait of the Atlantic waterfront as a place of conspiracy, mutiny, and liberation. Freedom Ship is essential listening for anyone looking to understand the complete story of one of North America's most significant historical moments.

In late 31 AD, after the Roman senators murdered Lucius Sejanus, the Roman Emperor Tiberius's closest confidant, the Empire was forever changed. If Sejanus had not been murdered, Jesus would never have been crucified. This profound connection between the lives of Sejanus and Jesus is the first of many revelations in this startling reexamination of the Roman world in which Jesus walked. With new evidence and meticulous research, Dr. James Lacey weaves a majestic and accurate description of who Jesus was.

This is the definitive account of the Western world’s most powerful—but least known—intelligence alliance, which remains central to the defense of the free world in a dangerously uncertain time.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does―and about human folly.

Only a few hundred vessels have ever transited the Northwest Passage, stretching through Canada’s north from Maine to Alaska—and substantially fewer have completed the treacherous journey in a fiberglass-hulled boat like Polar Sun. But Mark Synnott was determined to add his name to the list, and in doing so, also investigate a 175-year-old mystery, that of what happened to the legendary captain Sir John Franklin and his crew aboard the legendary HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

In this comprehensive guide to the most widespread conflict in contemporary history, Vladislav Zubok traces the origins of the Cold War in post-war Europe, through the tumultuous decades of confrontation, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. Drawing on years of research and informed by Zubok’s three decades in the USSR followed by three decades in the West, The Cold War paints a striking portrait of a world on the brink.

Contrary to the teachings of the church today, in the first several centuries of Christianity’s existence, there was no consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered. Instead, there were many different Christs. One had a twin brother and traveled to India; another consorted with dragons. One particularly terrifying Christ scorned his parents and killed those who opposed him. Why do we know so little about these early versions of Jesus? Because the orthodox form of Christianity that had become preeminent set about systematically wiping out every other variation.

In recent years, as companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com have made genetic testing available across the globe, it has become relatively simple to find out where your ancestors came from. But acclaimed geneticist Pierre Zalloua believes that these test results have led to a dangerous oversimplification of what one’s genetic heritage means. People have conflated genetic ancestry with other ways of defining themselves such as “origin,” “ethnicity,” and even “race” but give no attention to the complexities that underlie these concepts.

Understanding the origins of civil wars and their trajectories therefore demands some appreciation of the economic, political, social, cultural, and geographic order of societies. If there is one factor that best predicts why a civil war erupts, it is a prior civil war. That is why knowledge of a country's history of political violence, and associated narratives about who is to blame and why, are critical to understanding where a civil war might next occur.