The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, a Concise History: Volume I: To 1740
10 best books like The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, a Concise History: Volume I: To 1740 (Lynn Hunt): Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Scotch Whisky: A Liquid History, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral, Moorish Spain, Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800, When the World Spoke French, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit
| Author | Lisa Jardine |
| ISBN | 0385720017 |
In this fascinating look at the European scientific advances of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, historian Lisa Jardine demonstrates that the pursuit of knowledge occurs not in isolation, but rather in the lively interplay and frequently cutthroat competition between creative...
| Author | Charles MacLean |
| ISBN | 1844034011 |
New in Paper
Whisky is widely considered the finest spirit in the world--and this is the definitive history of the "water of life." Written by the editor of Whisky magazine, and Scotland's leading writer on the subject, it's the perfect blend of anecdotes and pioneering research. Superb illustrations...
Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor
| Author | David Abulafia |
| ISBN | 0195080408 |
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, King of Jerusalem, has, since his death in 1250, enjoyed a reputation as one of the most remarkable monarchs in the history of Europe. His wide cultural tastes, his apparent tolerance of Jews and Muslims, his defiance of the papacy, and...
Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral
| Author | Philip Ball |
| ISBN | 0061154296 |
Chartres Cathedral, south of Paris, is revered as one of the most beautiful and profound works of art in the Western canon. But what did it mean to those who constructed it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? And why, during this period, did Europeans begin to build churches in a new style, at such...
| Author | Richard Fletcher |
| ISBN | 0520248406 |
Beginning in the year 711 and continuing for nearly a thousand years, the Islamic presence survived in Spain, at times flourishing, and at other times dwindling into warring fiefdoms. But the culture and science thereby brought to Spain, including long-buried knowledge from Greece, largely forgotten...
| Author | Stephen O'Shea |
| ISBN | 0802714986 |
The long, shared history of Christianity and Islam began, shortly after Islam emerged in the early seventh century A.D., with a question: Who would inherit the Greco-Roman world of the Mediterranean? Sprung from the same source--Abraham and the Revelation given to the Jews--the two faiths played...
The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800
In the acclaimed first volume of his history of the world's most popular literary form, Steven Moore unearthed and told the stories of remarkable works of fiction that have been neglected in conventional histories of the novel. The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800 picks up the story, beginning...
When the World Spoke French
| Author | Marc Fumaroli |
| ISBN | 1590173759 |
“Conceived as ‘a portrait gallery of foreigners conquered by Enlightenment France,’ Fumaroli’s book provides biographical essays about diverse and fascinating cast of characters. He depicts them all as wonderfully distinct individuals—real people whose eclectic interests, messy...
| Author | Peter Gay |
| ISBN | 0393313026 |
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern age, when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world.
In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic...
| Author | Joyce E. Chaplin |
| ISBN | 1416596208 |
Highly acclaimed, this first full history of around-the-world travel by Joyce E. Chaplin brilliantly tells the story of circumnavigation. A witty, erudite, and colorful account of the outrageous ambitions that have inspired men and women to circle the entire planet.
In this first full...
Memory and the Mediterranean
| Author | Fernand Braudel |
| ISBN | 0375703993 |
A grand sweep of history by the late Fernand Braudel–one of the twentieth century’s most influential historians–Memory and the Mediterranean chronicles the Mediterranean’s immeasurably rich past during the foundational period from prehistory to classical antiquity, illuminating...
| Author | J. H. Elliott |
| ISBN | 0300114311 |
This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus’s arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on...
| Author | Lorraine Daston |
| ISBN | 0942299914 |
A rich exploration of how European naturalists used wonder and wonders (oddities and marvels) to envision and explain the natural world.
Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize"This book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and wonder,...
| Author | Julia Lovell |
| ISBN | 0802142974 |
Legendarily 2,200 years old and 4,300 miles long, the Great Wall of China seems to make an overwhelmingly confident physical statement about the country it spans: about China’s age-old sense of itself being an advanced civilization anxious to draw a clear line between itself and the “barbarians”...
| Author | Peter Burke |
| ISBN | 1859281028 |
This study examines the popular culture of pre-industrial Europe and describes the world of the professional entertainer - minstrels, fools, jugglers - and considers the songs, stories and plays performed by ordinary people. It shows how the attitudes and values of the otherwise inarticulate were...
| Author | Larry Wolff |
| ISBN | 0804727023 |
This is a wide-ranging intellectual history of how, in the 18th century, Europe came to be conceived as divided into "Western Europe" and "Eastern Europe". The author argues that this conceptual reorientation from the previously accepted "Northern" and "Southern" was a work of cultural construction...
| Author | Norman Davies |
| ISBN | 0199253390 |
This edition of Norman Davies' study of the history of Poland has been revised and fully updated with two new chapters to bring the story to the end of the 20th century. The writing of Polish history, like Poland itself, has frequently fallen prey to interested parties. Professor Norman Davies adopts...
| Author | Geoffrey Parker |
| ISBN | 0415128838 |
The first edition of The Thirty Years' War offered an unrivalled survey of a central period in European history. Drawing on a huge body of source material from different languages and countries throughout Europe, it provided a clear and comprehensive narrative and analytical account of the subject....
The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance
| Author | John Boswell |
| ISBN | 0226067122 |
In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell argues persuasively that child abandonment was a common and morally acceptable practice from antiquity until the Renaissance. Using a wide variety of sources, including drama and mythological-literary texts as well as demographics, Boswell examines...
| Author | Paul Hazard |
| ISBN | 1590176197 |
Paul Hazard was one of the master historians of the twentieth century, and The Crisis of the European Mind is by common consent his masterwork, an ambitious study in intellectual history whose breadth of learning and authority is widely acknowledged to this day.
The period from 1680 to 1715...
| Author | Iris Origo |
| ISBN | 0140172181 |
Francesco di Marco Datini, the 14th-century Tuscan merchant who forms the subject of the Marchesa Origo's study, has now probably become the most intimately accessible figure of the later-Middle Ages. In 1870 the whole astonishing cache, containing some 150,000 letters and great numbers of business...
Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of four rival modern nationalist ideologies from common medieval notions of citizenship. He presents the ideological innovations and ethnic cleansings that abetted the spread of modern nationalism but also examines recent statesmanship that has allowed national...
| Author | Juliet Barker |
| ISBN | 1408700832 |
In her best-selling Agincourt, Juliet Barker gave us the definitive narrative of Henry V’s extraordinary victory over the French. Now, in Conquest, she tells the equally remarkable, but largely forgotten, story of the dramatic years when England ruled France at the point of a sword.
Henry...
