New Releases

“For the last hundred years, Western colonialism has had a bad name.” So began Professor Bruce Gilley’s watershed academic article, “The Case for Colonialism,” of 2017. The article sparked a global furor. Critics and defenders of Gilley’s argument battled it out in the court of public opinion. The Times of London described Gilley as “probably the academic most likely to be no-platformed in Britain.” The New York Times called him one of the “panicky white bros” who “proclaim ever more rowdily that the (white) West was, and is, best” and are “busy recyclers of Western supremacism.”

Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia–and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.

In Wonders in the Deep Mensun Bound, the renowned archaeologist who was the Director of Exploration on the team that discovered Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance, argues that the history of the world is as much about maritime exploration and trade as it is about what happens on land. Using the many treasures Bound has discovered at the bottom of the sea and working with journalist Mark Frary, he sets out to write a maritime history of the world from 3000 BC to the present.

A História do Século 20 para Quem Tem Pressa é um guia acessível para 100 anos de história moderna. Enormes avanços na ciência e na tecnologia — estimulados por exigências do comércio internacional e conflitos armados sem precedentes — resultaram no surgimento de aviões, automóveis e antibióticos que salvam vidas. Desde a queda do Império Britânico até a era nuclear, desde os avanços pioneiros nos direitos civis até a internet, o ritmo e o alcance do progresso e das mudanças foram extraordinários.

Zen, haiku, martial arts, sushi, anime, manga, film, video games . . . Japanese culture has long enriched our Western way of life. Yet from a Western perspective, Japan remains a remote island country that has long had a complicated relationship with the outside world. Japan—an archipelago strung like a necklace around the Asian mainland—is considerably farther from Asia than Britain is from Europe. The sea has provided an effective barrier against invasion and enabled the culture to develop in unique ways.

In 1827 the Royal Navy purchased a Baltimore clipper and renamed her the Black Joke. Assigned to the Preventative Squadron, she patrolled the west coast of Africa and freed 3,692 captives from enslavement. Beloved by seafarers and celebrated by the public, the Black Joke would become the most famous weapon in the campaign for abolition. But in her previous life as the Henriqueta, the Black Joke had been a slave ship. Through the experiences of slavers and abolitionists, captives and crew, Stephen Taylor charts the vessel's extraordinary double life.

Understanding the origins of civil wars and their trajectories therefore demands some appreciation of the economic, political, social, cultural, and geographic order of societies. If there is one factor that best predicts why a civil war erupts, it is a prior civil war. That is why knowledge of a country's history of political violence, and associated narratives about who is to blame and why, are critical to understanding where a civil war might next occur.

Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the ways in which the emancipated slaves' quest for economic autonomy and equal citizenship shaped the political agenda of Reconstruction; the remodeling of Southern society and the place of planters, merchants, and small farmers within it; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and committed.

2.500 anos de descobertas — os feitos dos grandes cientistas, desde os tempos antigos até a era moderna. Desde os tempos antigos, homens e mulheres de brilhante intelecto tentam entender o universo observando muito além da capacidade de ver ou mesmo tocar — de minúsculos átomos às mais distantes estrelas. A História da Ciência para Quem Tem Pressa é um guia essencial para o leitor que deseja conhecer os resultados de milhares de anos de atividades e esforços na área da ciência.

Aí você pergunta: quem foi o gênio por trás disso? O que essa gente tinha na cabeça?! Desde que Adão deu uma mordida no fruto proibido e foi expulso nu em pelo do Jardim do Éden, a humanidade tem tido uma ideia pior do que a outra. De líderes políticos obtusos e cientistas loucos a cantores pop que não cantam bulhufas. As 100 Piores Ideias da História é uma celebração das mancadas homéricas – e muitas vezes histéricas – que deram origem a guerras, afundaram países, arruinaram empresas, destruíram carreiras, causaram prejuízos de milhões e até, pasmem, ameaçaram a Terra.

This clearly written and engrossing book presents a global narrative of the origins of the modern world from 1400 to the present. Unlike most studies, which assume that the “rise of the West” is the story of the coming of the modern world, this history, drawing upon new scholarship on Asia, Africa, and the New World and upon the maturing field of environmental history, constructs a story in which those parts of the world play major roles, including their impacts on the environment.

Themes of unspoiled paradise tamed by progress can be seen in stories about pioneer history across the US, especially in Florida. Selling Vero Beach explores how settlers from northern states created myths about the Indian River area on Florida's Atlantic Coast, importing ideas about the region's Indigenous peoples and marketing the land as an idyllic, fertile place of possibilities.