19th Century

The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights....

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.

The Napoleonic Wars saw fighting on an unprecedented scale in Europe and the Americas. It took the wealth of the British Empire, combined with the might of the continental armies, almost two decades to bring down one of the world's greatest military leaders and the empire he had created....

In 1864, Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of Auckland Island....

Here is the enthralling story of the American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900....

Richard J. Evans's gripping narrative ranges across a century of social and national conflicts, from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 to the unification of both Germany and Italy....

A comprehensive look at the brutal wilderness war that secured America's independence....

In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation....

Unflinching in depicting the evidence, Coogan presents a vivid and horrifying picture of a catastrophe that shook the 19th century and finally calls to account those responsible....

In this vivid 50-year history of Germany from 1871-1918 - which inspired events that forever changed the European continent - is the story of the Second Reich from its violent beginnings and rise to power to its calamitous defeat in the First World War....

Everywhere hailed as a masterpiece of historical adventure, this enthralling narrative recounts the experiences of 12 American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815....

In January 1889, Louisa Collins, a mother of 10 children, became the first woman hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol and the last woman hanged in New South Wales. Both of Louisa's husbands had died suddenly and the Crown, convinced that Louisa poisoned them with arsenic, put her on trial....

Historian Rachel Chrastil presents a definitive new history of the war that toppled the French Empire, unified Germany, and set Europe on the path to World War I....

In the 1860s, Napoleon III, intent on curbing the rise of American imperialism, persuaded a young Austrian archduke and a Belgian princess to leave Europe and become the emperor and empress of Mexico....

Southern Africa was once regarded as a worthless jumble of British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world....

As one of the most potent turning points in the country's modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today's China seeks to put behind it....

Lincoln found the solace and tactics he needed to deal with the nation’s worst crisis in the “coping strategies” he had developed over a lifetime of persevering through depressive episodes and personal tragedies....

E. P. Thompson's magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class defined early twentieth-century English social and economic history, leading many to consider him Britain's greatest postwar historian....

The gripping true story of one of the 19th century's bloodiest mutinies....

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born in a southern plantation. He was a son of a black slave woman and unknown white man. His mother worked as...

The fascinating true story of how a group of visionary attorneys helped make American business synonymous with big business and Wall Street the center of the financial world....

As Under Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1907, Winston S. Churchill toured Britain's territories in East Africa....

Bernard Cornwell combines his storytelling skills with a meticulously researched history to give a riveting chronicle of every dramatic moment from Napoleon's daring escape from Elba....

It was the most influential marriage of the 19th Century - and one of history’s most enduring love stories. Traditional biographies tell us that Queen Victoria inherited the throne as a naïve teenager, when the British Empire was at the height of its power....

Here is the enthralling story of the American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900....