17th Century

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world....

Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal....

In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today....

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than 300 daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island....

In 1819, a girl was born to the fourth son of King George III. No one could have expected such an unassuming, overprotected girl to be an effective ruler....

As a brilliant art critic and historian, Laura Cumming has explored the importance of art in life and can give us a perspective on the time and place in which the artist worked....

In 1642, King Charles I and the elected Parliament of England went to war over the future of the Stuart kingdom. Over the next nine years, three civil wars would be fought, devastating the populations of England, Scotland, and Ireland....

Over 350,000 intrepid English men, women, and children migrated to America in the 17th century, leaving behind their homeland for an uncertain future on distant shores....

Along the banks of the James River, Virginia, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course of history....

In his first book of history, Away Off Shore, New York Times best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals the people and the stories behind what was once the whaling capital of the world....

In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel....

Most pirates had a short life before they were captured and executed. Nonetheless, those tales of swashbuckling adventure continue to mesmerize. Listen to more about the reality of the golden age of piracy to find out whether or not Hollywood’s version can possibly compare with the truth....

One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world....

Robert Goodwin delves into previously unrecorded sources to bring a tumultuous and exciting period to life. Spain is a revealing portrait of an empire at the height of its power and a world at the dawn of a new age....

One of the most controversial figures in British history, Oliver Cromwell entered as an insignificant member of the English gentry and left it as the all-powerful Lord Protector....

Captain Alatriste is the story of a fictional 17th-century Spanish soldier who, after being wounded in battle during the Thirty Years' War, is forced to retire from the army....

A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl....

A seemingly inconsequential fire ignited in a baker’s shop on Pudding Lane. Unchecked and underestimated, it would grow to become one of the most devastating disasters London had ever faced....

When John Snare, a 19th-century provincial bookseller, traveled to a liquidation auction, he stumbled on a vivid portrait of King Charles I that defied any explanation....

Clare Jackson's dazzling original account of English history's most turbulent and radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis....

One of the earliest known autobiographies by a woman, this is the extraordinary tale of Catalina de Erauso, who in 1599 escaped from a Basque convent dressed as a man and went on to live one of the most wildly fantastic lives of any woman in history....

Once valued at close to seven trillion dollars by today’s standards, the Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, became the world’s first multinational corporation....

From poverty to pets, from medicine to magic, from slang to sex, from wallpaper to women's rights....

During the long 18th century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. Author Jürgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East....

Founded at the dawn of the 17th century as European nations were establishing global empires, the English East India Company would become a vital part of burgeoning British supremacy....