18th Century

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

The untold story of a heroic band of Caribbean pirates whose defiance of imperial rule inspired revolt in colonial outposts across the world....

Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day....

Mutiny on the Spanish Main tells the dramatic story of HMS Hermione, a British frigate which, in 1797, was the site of the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history, which saw the death of her captain and many of her officers....

Everyone from young adults to grandparents will be fascinated by the answers uncovered in James West Davidson's vividly told A Little History of the United States....

For over three and a half years, from 1779 to 1783, the tiny territory of Gibraltar was besieged and blockaded, on land and at sea, by the overwhelming forces of Spain and France....

Between 1500 and 1800, the North Sea region overtook the Mediterranean as the most dynamic part of the world. At its core, the Anglo-Dutch relationship intertwined close alliance and fierce antagonism to intense creative effect....

In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the listener in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society....

Like its popular and acclaimed predecessor, Restoration London, this book is the result of the author's passionate interest in the practical details of the everyday life of our ancestors....

Frederick the Great is one of history's most important leaders. Famed for his military successes and domestic reforms, his campaigns were a watershed in the history of Europe, securing Prussia's place as a continental power and inaugurating a new pattern of total war....

Robert K. Massie returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure German princess who became Catherine the Great. Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into empress of Russia by sheer determination....

On April 18, 1775, a riot over the price of flour broke out in the French city of Dijon. That night, across the Atlantic, Paul Revere mounted a horse and kicked it into a gallop....

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" - spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s - when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond....

The day of 9 Thermidor is universally acknowledged as a major turning-point in the history of the French Revolution. At midnight, Maximilien Robespierre was planning to destroy one of the most dangerous plots that the Revolution had faced....

As he explodes many accepted pirate myths (i.e. "walking the plank" is pure fiction), Cordingly replaces them with a truth that is more complex and often bloodier....

The Battle of Culloden in 1746 has gone down in history as the last major battle fought on British soil....

One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world....

Historian Rory Muir weaves together the stories of many obscure and well-known young men of good family but small fortune, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Regency society....

The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colony in the 18th-century Atlantic world....

It is an era that redefined history. As the 1790s began, a fragile America teetered on the brink of oblivion, Russia towered as a vast imperial power, and France plunged into revolution....