In this Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I.

This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of kings and kaisers and czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed—and how horrible it became.

Tuchman masterfully portrays this transition from the nineteenth

...

Examines the history of fourteenth century Europe as background to the life of Enguerrand de Coucy VII, one of the most prominent French knights of that time.

Following in the footsteps of the greatest Spanish adventurers, Michael Wood retraces the path of the conquistadors from Amazonia to Lake Titicaca, and from the deserts of North Mexico to the heights of Machu Picchu. As he travels the same routes as Hernán Cortés, Francisco, and Gonzalo Pizarro, Wood describes the dramatic events that accompanied the epic sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires. He also follows parts of...

Set amid the growing tyranny of Germany's Third Reich, here is the riveting and emotional tale of Gunther Goldschmidt and Rosemarie Gumpert, two courageous Jewish musicians who struggled to perform under unimaginable circumstances-and found themselves falling in love in a country bent on destroying them. In the spring of 1933, as the full weight of Germany's National Socialism was brought to bear against Germany's Jews, more than 8,000 Jewish musicians,...

Captain William Bligh recounts his experiences in 1789 when his ship "Bounty" was taken over in a mutiny and he and a crew of eighteen men were set adrift in an open boat in the southern Pacific Ocean.

Tells the story of how modernity emerged on the shores of the North Sea, uncovering a lost history of a thousand years rife with saints, spies, pirates, philosophers, artists, and intellectuals.

This second volume of Gibbon's masterpiece, covering 395 AD to 1185 AD, recounts desperate attempts against barbarians, palace revolutions and assassinations, theological controversy, and lecheries and betrayals, all in a magnificent setting.

A sweeping account of how the Crusades really worked, and a revolutionary attempt to rethink how we understand the Middle Ages.