Showing titles in 17th Century

During the long 18th century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. In this panoramic book, author Jürgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East, from the Ottoman Empire and India to China and Japan. A momentous work by one of Europe's most eminent historians, Unfabling the East takes listeners on a thrilling voyage to the farthest shores, bringing back vital insights for our own multicultural age.

Discover the lives of the men that forever changed the course of history! This book contains the fundamental history, early influences, life-changing events, and lasting impact of historical figures such as Moses, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, and many others! For each of these great men, you will learn who they were, where they came from, who influenced them, the fundamental turning points in their lives, and their lasting contributions to the world.

In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment - generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion - were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the "darker" pursuits of the esoteric and the occult.

In 1621, 57 women undertook a three-month journey to Jamestown after responding to an advert placed by the Virginia Company, looking for wives for its tobacco planters in the New Colony. They travelled of their own free will, but the Company was effectively selling them at a profit, having set a bride price of 150lbs of tobacco for each woman. But what did the women want? Why did they make the perilous Atlantic crossing to a dangerous land, where six out of seven European settlers died within a few years?

Shortlisted for the BSHS Hughes Prize What if Isaac Newton had never lived? Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, whose place in history has been overshadowed by the giant figure of Newton, were pioneering scientists within their own right, and instrumental in establishing the Royal Society. Whilst...

This audiobook examines the meteoric rise of Sweden as the pre-eminent military power in Europe during the Thirty Years War during the 1600s, and then follows its line of warrior kings into the next century until the Swedes finally meet their demise, in an overreach into the vastness of Russia. A small Scandinavian nation, with at most one and a half million people and scant internal resources of its own, there was small logic to how Sweden could become the dominant power on the Continent.

The illegal underground movement of Protestant separatists from Elizabeth I's Church of England is a story of subterfuge and danger, arrests and interrogations, prison and executions. It starts with Queen Mary's attempts to burn Protestantism out of England, which created a Protestant underground. Later, when Elizabeth's Protestant reformation didn't go far enough, radicals recreated that underground, meeting illegally throughout England, facing prison and death for their crimes. They went into exile in the Netherlands, where they lived in poverty - and finally the New World. 

The essential history of the extraordinary year in which American democracy and American slavery emerged hand in hand in Virginia “If anyone today knows colonial Virginia, it is James Horn.” —Wall Street Journal Along the banks of the James River, during an oppressively hot spell in the...

The novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte have captivated readers around the world and earned him a reputation as “the master of the intellectual thriller.” (Chicago Tribune) His books have been published in fifty countries. Now, beginning with Captain Alatriste, comes Pérez-Reverte’s most...

Lady Bette, the 14-year-old heiress to the vast Northumberland estates, becomes the victim of a plot by her grandmother, the Countess Howard, to marry her to the dissident fortune-hunter Thomas Thynn, a man three times her age with an evil reputation. Revolted by her new husband, Lady Bette flees to Holland. Within weeks, Thynn is gunned down in the street by three hired assassins. Who is behind the contract killing? Is it the Swedish Count Coningsmark, young and glamorous with blond hair down to his waist?

London was a tinderbox waiting to ignite. An unusually hot and dry summer had drained the city’s water supplies, and without an organized firefighting force, its citizens were left to fend for themselves. The stage was set for catastrophe, and in the early hours of Sunday, September 2, 1666, the spark was struck. 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.

At one point or another, just about everyone has heard of the dodo bird, which is almost universally described as a cuddly, whimsical creature renowned for its alleged stupidity. This prehistoric avian had been known for hundreds of years, before it was made popular around the world in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

In this intimate history of the extraordinary Black Plague pandemic that swept through the British Isles in 1665, Evelyn Lord focuses on the plague's effects on smaller towns, where every death was a singular blow affecting the entire community. Lord's fascinating reconstruction of life during plague times presents the personal experiences of a wide range of individuals, from historical notables to common folk. The Great Plague brings this dark era to vivid life through stories of loss and survival from those who grieved, those who fled, and those who hid to await their fate.

Imagine a fervently militaristic state with a feared professional army that included some of the only all-female military units ever seen. Imagine that same state with its own unique and sophisticated culture, religion, language, art, and society. Such a state did exist—not in the ancient past but as recently as the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he encountered Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s canny director general.

1659. Lord General George Monck has set up camp on the Scottish border with his loyal army. He has plans to retire, to spend the rest of his years on his estates with his wife, Anne, and son, Kit. But the changing political climate forces him to march his army south to the capital. In the Rump of the Long Parliament, the case is being made for an end to the Commonwealth and for the Restoration of the Monarchy. When the Monarchy is restored, there is never a quiet moment for Monck.

Pirates dominate movie box-office profits, they are theme park entertainment, and they occupy a place in popular culture that has outlasted the era when they originally ruled the seas. Contemporary audiences who are safe from the pistols and cutlasses of the men who sailed the Caribbean, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans to prey upon ships and claim their cargo may find it hard to reconcile the perceived glamour of Captain Jack Sparrow with the authentic bloodlust and greed of the real pirates who killed without conscience, and ravaged, bribed, and robbed their way into legend.

Distinguished British historian Geoffrey Parker spent 15 years writing this ambitious history of the tumultuous 17th century, when nations were in the grip of what was known as the General Crisis. First published in 2013, Global Crisis reveals that freak weather was a key reason why the people of the 1600s lurched between droughts, famines, and countless wars.

Building on and connecting histories of food and work, literary criticism of the pastoral and georgic, histories of elite and vernacular science, and histories of reading and writing practices, among other areas of inquiry, Digging the Past offers fine-grained case studies of projects heralded as innovations both in the 17th century and in our own time: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows.

17 febbraio 1600: il filosofo Giordano Bruno, condannato per eresia dall'Inquisizione romana, brucia, spogliato nudo, legato a un palo e imbavagliato, in Piazza Campo de' Fiori. Ad ardere sul rogo non è un cristiano qualunque, come Roma non è solo la capitale dello Stato della Chiesa ma anche il centro della cristianità. Bruno è un personaggio cosmopolita, amico di principi e ambasciatori, una figura europea di grande fama e livello intellettuale, noto ovunque.