Revolution History

The Russian Revolution in 1917 was a moment in time when the will of the people put an end to a system of government that had been in place for centuries. The story of Russia’s transition from Imperial reign to eventual Communist dictatorship is a tale rooted in the ranks of the common people and the men who rose to lead them.

It's time to step back into history and learn about the American Revolution. In this new and captivating book, you’ll discover what made the American Revolution so special and how it still influences us today.

The loss of America was a stunning and unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders in Britain must have been to blame, but were they? This intriguing audiobook makes a different argument. Weaving together the personal stories of ten prominent men historian Andrew O'Shaughnessy dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve victory.

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were - and still are. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book.

The Industrial Revolution, which took place in Great Britain between the middle of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th, transformed British industry and society and made Great Britain the most powerful nation in the world. The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen due to one, single factor but rather to a number of separate, yet, related developments which interacted to change the world profoundly and completely. Improvements in the production of iron allowed the construction of efficient, reliable steam engines.

In August 1776, a little over a month after the Continental Congress had formally declared independence from Britain, the revolution was on the verge of a sudden and disastrous end. General George Washington found his troops outmanned and outmaneuvered at the Battle of Brooklyn, and it looked like there was no escape. But thanks to a series of desperate rear-guard attacks by a single heroic regiment, famously known as the Immortal 400, Washington was able to evacuate his men, and the nascent Continental Army lived to fight another day.

Douglas Brinkley takes us on the incredible journey of the United States - a nation formed from a vast countryside on whose fringes 13 small British colonies fought for their freedom, then established a democratic nation that spanned the continent and went on to become a world power. This book will be treasured by anyone interested in the story of America.

The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the 15 years before 1776.

No single invention epitomizes the Victorian era more than the black cast-iron range. Aware that the 21st-century has reduced it to a quaint relic, Ruth Goodman was determined to prove that the hot coal stove provided so much more than morning tea: It might even have kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Wielding the wit and passion seen in How to Be a Victorian, Goodman traces the tectonic shift from wood to coal in the mid-16th century - from sooty trials and errors during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to the totally smog-clouded reign of Queen Victoria.

Following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, after a bloody civil war, Mao hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City, and the world watched as the Communist revolution began to wash away the old order. Due to the secrecy surrounding the country's records, little has been known before now about the eight years that followed, preceding the massive famine and Great Leap Forward. The Tragedy of Liberation bears witness to a shocking, largely untold history.

Few Americans know that the Revolutionary War did not begin with the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, but over a year earlier, in April 1775. Now historian Derek Beck draws on previously unpublished documents to tell the full story of the war before American independence - from both sides. Spanning the years 1773 to 1776, this audiobook sweeps listeners from the Boston Tea Party to the halls of Parliament - where Ben Franklin was almost run out of England for pleading on behalf of the colonies.

In this third volume of Michael Logusz's epic study of the Wilderness War of 1777, a sizable British military force, augmented with German and loyalist soldiers, attacks the Northern Army's southern front in the fall of 1777 in hopes of assisting a much larger British Army that is threatened to the north of New York City in the wilderness region of Saratoga.

The dramatic real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China's 1949 Communist revolution. Benny must decide either to escape to Hong Kong or navigate the intricacies of a newly Communist China. Annuo, forced to flee with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation from the US in order to continue his studies while his family struggles at home. Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America.

Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the West and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the repercussions of European colonialism in Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

Hardly were the last shots fired at the Alamo before the Texas Revolution entered the realm of myth and controversy. French visitor Frederic Gaillardet called it a "Texian Iliad" in 1839, while American Theodore Sedgwick pronounced the war and its resulting legends "almost burlesque."

This magisterial volume follows the death of ancient traditions, the triumph of new classes, and the emergence of new technologies, sciences, and ideologies, with vast intellectual daring and aphoristic elegance. Part of Eric Hobsbawm's epic four-volume history of the modern world, along with The Age of Capitalism, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes.

The Russian Revolution may be the most misunderstood and misrepresented event in modern history, its history told in a mix of legends and anecdotes. In A People's History of the Russian Revolution, Neil Faulkner sets out to debunk the myths and pry fact from fiction, putting at the heart of the story the Russian people who are the true heroes of this tumultuous tale.

The American Revolution was at once a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war, fought by neighbors on American farms and between global powers an ocean or more away. Historian Geoffrey C. Ward ably steers us through the international forces at play, telling the story not from the top down but from the bottom up—and through the eyes of not only our “Founding Fathers” but also those of ordinary soldiers, as well as underrepresented populations, asking who exactly was entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magon, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers—and American dissidents—to their cause. Determined to oust Mexico's dictator, Porfirio Diaz, the rebels had to outrun and outsmart the swarm of US authorities vested in protecting the Diaz regime.

In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than 50 years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays America's famous frontier hero while illuminating the American hero-making process itself. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Boone's own hand, and a treasure trove of reminiscences gathered by nineteenth-century antiquarians, Faragher uses the methods of new social history to create a portrait of the man and the times he helped shape.