History - World

A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States."1619 Project" issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation's founding and construction-and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life.

For too long, Africa's history has been neglected. Dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, its past has been fragmented, overlooked and denied its rightful place in our global story.

Now, Zeinab Badawi guides us through Africa's spectacular history, from the origins of humanity, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires with powerful queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence.

Seeking out occluded histories from across the continent, meeting with countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, and travelling through more than thirty countries, Badawi weaves together a fascinating new account of Africa: an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.

In this major new work, Fareed Zakaria masterfully investigates eras that have shattered and shaped humanity. Four such periods hold profound lessons for today.

First, in seventeenth-century Netherlands a series of transformations made that tiny land the richest in thew world - and created modern politics as we know it today. Next, the French Revolution, a dramatic decade and a half that devoured its ideological children and left a bloody legacy that haunts us to this day. Finally, the mother of all revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, which catapulted Britain and the U.S. to global dominance and created the modern world.

Against these paradigm-shifting historical eras, Zakaria describes our current situation, unpacking the four revolutions we are living through now; in globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. Zakaria combines intellectual range, deep historical insight, and uncanny prescience to reframe and illuminate a turbulent present.

A narrative history of the Second World War from one of our finest historians. A book which depicts what the war was like to live through - whether you were a starving child in Leningrad, a soldier in North Africa, or a civilian in Dresden. Continued in Volume II (9442)

Following on from Volume I (9441), Max Hastings' study of the greatest and most terrible event in history continues in the second part of his epic book. There are vivid descriptions of the tragedies and triumphs of a host of ordinary people, in uniform and out of it, in an 'everyman's story'.

The distinguished military historian John Keegan unpicks the geography, leadership and strategic logic of the first modern war and takes us to the heart of the conflict. His captivating work promises to be the definitive history of the American Civil War.

On 16 December, 1944, Hitler launched his 'last gamble' in the snow-covered forests and gorges of the Ardennes. He believed he could split the Allies by driving all the way to Antwerp, then force the Canadians and the British out of the war. But the Ardennes was the battle which finally broke the back of the Wehrmacht.

In 2011, a 43-foot-high tsunami crashed into a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. In the following days, explosions would rip buildings apart, three reactors would go into nuclear meltdown, and the surrounding area would be swamped in radioactive water. It is now considered one of the costliest nuclear disasters ever. But Fukushima was not the first, and it was not the worst. . .

In Atoms and Ashes, acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy tells the tale of the six nuclear disasters that shook the world: Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Based on wide-ranging research and witness testimony, Plokhy traces the arc of each crisis, exploring in depth the confused decision-making on the ground and the panicked responses of governments to contain the crises and often cover up the scale of the catastrophe.

As the world increasingly looks to renewable and alternative sources of energy, Plokhy lucidly argues that the atomic risk must be understood in explicit terms, but also that these calamities reveal a fundamental truth about our relationship with nuclear technology: that the thirst for power and energy has always trumped safety and the cost for future generations.

A leading industrialist of the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie was one of America's most successful and generous businessmen. The autobiography tells of his rise to power, from humble beginnings in Scotland to controlling the biggest steel empire in the history of the United States. In The Gospel of Wealth he writes about his philanthropy, revealing the reasons that famously led him to donate over 350 million dollars during his lifetime.

Was Niccolò Machiavelli really the cynical schemer of legend - or was he a profound ethical thinker, who tried to save the democratic freedom of Renaissance Florence as it was threatened by ruthless dynasties? This revelatory biography shows us a man of fox-like dissimulation: a master of disguise in dangerous times.

The struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the presidency of Donald Trump, a president whose time in the White House represents the latest failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race.

For James Baldwin, a similar attempt to force a confrontation with the truth of America's racism came in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, and was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Between 1963 and 1972, Baldwin - the great creative artist, often referred to as 'the poet of the revolution' - became a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost.

Seamlessly combining biography with history, memoir and trenchant analysis of our moment, Begin Again bears witness to the difficult truth of race in America.

In 1586 Elizabeth I was named Weroanoza, Big Chief, by a tribe of North American Indians. This delighted Walter Raleigh, who established a colony in the New World, thus creating a riddle that took many years to solve.

Remaining unread in a Welsh castle, this is a story that has waited 200 years to be told. Married to Lord Edward Clive, son of Clive of India and Governor of Madras (1798-1803), the journals of Lady Henrietta Clive take us on a double journey, across war-torn southern India in the last decade of the 18th Century. This book is edited and annotated by the Texican anthropologist, Nancy Shields.

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts our society today, we must look at the unfinished way it ended. We celebrate the abolition of slavery - in Haiti after the revolution, in the British Empire in 1833, in the United States during the Civil War. Yet in Black Ghost of Empire, acclaimed historian Kris Manjapra reveals how during each of these supposed emancipations, Black people were in fact dispossessed by the moves that were meant to free them.

Ranging across the Americas, Europe and Africa, Manjapra unearths the uncomfortable truths about the Age of Emancipations, 1780-1880. In Britain, reparations were given to wealthy slaveowners, not the enslaved, in vast sums that were only paid off in 2015. In Jamaica, Black people were freed only to enter into an apprenticeship period harsher than slavery itself. In the American South, the formerly enslaved were 'freed' into a system of white supremacy and racial terror. Across Africa, emancipation served as an alibi for colonization. As Manjapra argues, none of these emancipations involved atonement by the enslavers and their governments for wrongs committed, or reparative justice for the formerly enslaved.

Timely, original and courageous, Black Ghost of Empire shines a light into the enigma of racial slavery's supposed death, and its afterlives.

In 1791, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, the slaves of San Domingo rose in revolt. Despite invasion by a series of British, Spanish and Napoleonic armies, their twelve-year struggle led to the creation of Haiti, the first independent black republic outside Africa. Only three years later, the British and Americans ended the Atlantic slave trade.

The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's Black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life he confronted some of the dominant forces of his age - slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. Here, in all its drama, is the epic story of the world's first Black superhero.

This unflinching history of the darkest days of the Second World War covers the entire world stage, from the Battle of the Atlantic to Pearl Harbor. Rooted in the personal accounts of the soldiers themselves, Blood, Tears and Folly is a sweeping, moving account of the political machinations, the strategy and tactics, the weapons and the men on both sides who created a world of devastation.

In 1989, the literary world was rocked by an unprecedented event: Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Revolutionary Iran, issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie's book was considered by many Muslims to be blasphemy for its depiction of Mohammed, and Khomeini had just ordered Rushdie's death.

The book was banned in several countries and led to attacks against those involved in its publication. Hanif Kureishi called the fatwa "one of the most significant events in postwar literary history".

In Fatwa, Chloe Hadjimatheou and Mobeen Azhar tell the hidden story of the fatwa - the forces which led to the death sentence and the consequences for all of us. Covers a 20-year period from 1979 to 1999, they speak to extraordinary voices from often overlooked British communities to explore race relations in Britain, identity, free speech and the connection between the fatwa and contemporary violent jihad. Also included is an interview with Salman Rushdie three years after the fatwa, Life after The Satanic Verses, in which the author talks about his life and work with Christopher Bigsby.

Finally in The Book Burners: Salman Rushdie, Mike Wooldridge hears from Muslims who protested against The Satanic Verses twenty years after the fatwa - what do they think it achieved?

From the earliest forays of peoples in hand-hewn canoes through uncharted waters to the routes now taken daily by supertankers in their thousands, maritime networks form a continuum of interaction and interconnection across the globe: 90 per cent of global trade is still conducted by sea. This is history of the grandest scale and scope, and from a bracingly different perspective - not, as in most global histories, from the land but from the boundless seas.

Who were the three men the Soviet and American superpowers exchanged on Berlin's Glienicke Bridge on February 10, 1962? They had been drawn into the Cold War by duty and curiosity, rescued against daunting odds by fate and by their families, and then all but forgotten. This is the true story of those men.

The Atlantic has borne witness to major historic events that have drastically shaped humanity with each crossing of its path. In this broad and readable book, Jeremy Black takes the reader through its evolution to becoming one of the most important oceans in the world.

Black discusses the importance of the Atlantic in relation to world history as well as addressing topics such as those bravest to attempt to cross the ocean before Columbus, the beginnings of slavery from 1400-1600, the struggle for control between empires in the 1600s, the way technology adapted with steamships to telegraph cables, the battle of the Falkland, and the Cold War.

Black also touches on the Atlantic we know today, and the struggles it faces due to urgent global issues including climate change, pollution, and the trials of the economic rise in the Indo-Pacific world.

This is the captivating account of the doomed quest, led by Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills, to be the first Europeans to cross the harsh Australian continent in 1860. Only one man survived the expedition, yet despite their tragic fates, the names Burke and Wills remain synonymous with perseverance and bravery in the face of overwhelming odds.

Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams's landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism, and has influenced generations of historians ever since.

Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how it laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, and how racism arose as a means of rationalising an economic decision. Most significantly, he showed how slavery was only abolished when it ceased to become financially viable, exploding the myth of emancipation as a mark of Britain's moral progress.

On the 26 April 1986 Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine, which put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. In the end, less than five percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout. This poignant, fast paced account of the drama of heroes, perpetrators, and victims is the definitive history of the world's worst nuclear disaster.

Twenty audio portraits telling the story of China through key personalities - plus a bonus edition of In Our Time

Award-winning author and historian Professor Rana Mitter introduces us to some of the remarkable individuals who have shaped the arc of Chinese history. Selecting men and women from ancient times to the modern era - some rich and powerful, others poor and unknown - he explores their sensational life stories, from Mongol emperors to 19th-century factory girls.

Here is China's only female emperor, Wu Zetian, whose path to the top was littered with elite corpses; Mao Zedong, the man who revolutionised China, but at the cost of millions of lives; and Deng Xiaoping, who enabled China's economic miracle, but crushed protests with ferocity in 1989. Alongside them are numerous other extraordinary characters, including celebrated philosopher Confucius, Muslim sailor Zheng He, Jesuit mathematician Matteo Ricci, global film star Bruce Lee - and a pioneering TV documentary series, River Elegy, that started a national debate about regeneration and democracy.

What can Ding Ling's lustful literary creation, Sophie, teach us about 1920s China? What role would kidnapped monk Kumarajiva play in the future of Chinese chanting? And how did Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Meiling become Asia's first power couple? Rana Mitter reveals the answers in this engrossing series, which ranges across time and geography to zoom in on the people and ideas that have made China what it is today. Insightful, stimulating and superbly researched, it shows the astonishing diversity and complexity of Chinese society, painting a multi-dimensional picture of the world's most populous nation.

Also included is an episode of In Our Time, in which Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss China's Warring States period of 400 BC-200 AD, examining how this turbulent epoch sparked a Golden Age of intellectual and cultural productivity and laid the foundations for the first Chinese Empire.

Walter Reid, the author of several acclaimed works on 20th-century military history, brings together the result of recent research to create a powerful narrative which reveals how much time and energy Churchill devoted to fighting the war that was excluded from his official accounts - the war with the allies.

The Cold War is one of the furthest-reaching and longest-lasting conflicts in modern history. In this meticulously researched account, Bridget Kendall explores the Cold War through the eyes of those who experienced it first-hand. Drawing on exclusive interviews with individuals who lived through the conflict's key events, she offers a variety of perspectives that reveal how the Cold War was experienced by ordinary people.

When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I's first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified 'Great Britain' under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world.

In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. A major debut that explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, Courting India reveals Thomas Roe's time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history - and offers a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire.

In this Sony Award-winning investigative history series, BBC international correspondent Mike Thomson and guest presenters pore over private papers, public records and primary sources, uncovering the hidden truth about historical events. As they follow the documentary trail, they talk to key participants, contemporary commentators and academic experts, and explore shocking stories of cover-ups, covert operations and collusion.

Here are the extraordinary tales of the 1956 French offer to merge the UK and France; the Wall Street plot to overthrow Franklin D Roosevelt; and the journalist's notebook that came perilously close to revealing one of Britain's greatest Cold War secrets. Plus, Gordon Corera travels to Stockholm to investigate the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, David Loyn investigates how a lost document is helping Afghanistan come to terms with its painful past, Heather Jones asks why an intelligence warning given seven weeks before Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland was ignored, and Sanchia Berg traces the career of an MI5 agent left out in the cold...

In 1940, at the French port of Dunkirk, more than 300,000 trapped Allied troops were heroically rescued from destruction at the hands of Nazi Germany by an extraordinary seaborne evacuation. This is a dramatic account of a defeat that paved the way to ultimate victory and preserved liberty for generations to come.

Abducted by slave traders from her home in Ruthenia – modern-day Ukraine – around 1515, Roxelana was brought to Istanbul as a concubine for Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman Empire and one of the world’s most powerful men. Until now Roxelana has been seen by historians as a seductress who brought ruin to the empire, but historian Leslie Peirce reveals the compelling story of an elusive woman who transformed the Ottoman harem into an institution of imperial rule.

In September 2014 the wreck of a sailing vessel was discovered at the bottom of the sea in the Canadian Arctic. Its whereabouts had been a mystery for over a century. Its name was HMS Erebus. Here, Michael Palin travels to various locations across the world – Tasmania, the Falklands, the Canadian Arctic – to search for local information, and to experience at first hand the terrain and the conditions that would have confronted the Erebus and her crew.

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter was presented with the findings of scientists who had been investigating whether human activities might change the climate in harmful ways. "A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late," their report said. They were right -- but no one was listening. Four decades later, we are haunted by the consequences of this inattention, and the years of complacency, obfuscation and denialism that followed. Today, the staggering scale and scope of what we have done to the planet is impossible to ignore: the seasons of fire and flood have crossed into plain view.

Fire and Flood is a comprehensive, compulsively readable history of climate change from veteran environmental journalist Eugene Linden. Linden retells the story of the modern climate change era decade by decade, tracking the progress of four ticking clocks: first, the reality of climate change itself; second, advances in scientific understanding; third, the spread of public awareness; and fourth, the business and finance response. Like no previous writer, Linden has drawn together the elements of the biggest story in the world, in a book that it is gripping as history, as economic investigation, and as scientific thriller.

From the late 19th century, when the Raj was at its height, many of Britain's best and brightest young men went out to India to work. Countless young women, suffering at the lack of eligible men, followed in their wake. The women were known as 'the fishing fleet', and this is their story.

Epic in scope, intimate in detail and heartbreaking in its human drama, this book recounts the history of the nobility caught up in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin's Russia.

Four Hundred Souls is an epoch-defining history of African America, the first to appear in a generation, told by ninety leading Black voices. The story begins with the arrival of twenty Ndongo people on the shores of the first British colony in mainland America in 1619, the year before the arrival of the Mayflower. In eighty chronological chapters, each by a different author and spanning five years, the book charts the four-hundred-year journey of African Americans to the present - a journey defined by inhuman oppression, visionary struggles and stunning achievements - in a choral work of exceptional power and beauty.