Showing titles in 18th 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.

Along with the volcanic destruction of Pompeii and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Lisbon quake of 1755 is one of the most destructive natural disasters ever recorded. After being jolted by a massive quake, Lisbon was then pounded by a succession of tidal waves and finally reduced to ash by a fire that raged for five straight days.

When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. Most historians account for the French Revolution by viewing it in retrospect as the outcome of underlying conditions such as a faltering economy, social tensions, or the influence of Enlightenment thought. But what did Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world? What were the motivations and aspirations that guided their actions?

In this sweeping consideration of Britain in the 18th century, Jeremy Black explores the interconnected roles of power and geography in the creation of a global empire. Geography was at the heart of Britain’s expansion into India, its response to uprisings in Scotland and America, and its revolutionary development of railways.

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World demonstrates that piracy is key to explaining the surprising longevity of Spain's Asian empire, which survived the Age of Revolutions and endured almost to the end of the nineteenth century. It offers important new insight into piracy's impact on the trajectory of globalization and European imperial expansion in maritime Asia.

As you begin to listen to this audiobook, you will undoubtedly feel that Queen Marie Antoinette and King Louise XVI led spoiled lives. You will be right in what you think; but you will also find out that with their parents arranging their marriages at a very young age, neither of them was ever able to experience the feelings of young love. You will see what horrors and terrors that Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, their children, and Louis’ sister had to suffer through for four years before their deaths.

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of John Dewey in just one hour. In early twentieth-century America John Dewey was regarded as the foremost philosopher of his age – no mean feat when his colleagues included the likes of Russell, Wittgenstein and Heidegger...

Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the “resurrectionists”–body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a cruel lot; men (almost always men and often medical students themselves) who would sneak into a cemetery under the cover of darkness, remove a body, and then sell it to a physician or anatomist–usually for around $100.

George Washington, the first president of the United States, is much more than a monument on Mount Rushmore. Who was Washington, the general, president, and husband? He was first and foremost a man of impeccable honor which, despite military adversity and political wrangling, never abandoned him. The Founding Fathers who squabbled and competed among themselves did agree on one thing: Only Washington could lead the country, first in the country’s military fight for freedom and then as the man charged with transforming 13 individual states into a united country.

In this remarkable book, historian Jack Rakove shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers - how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. Rakove shakes off accepted notions of these men as godlike visionaries, focusing instead on the evolution of their ideas and the crystallizing of their purpose.

This Thomas Paine Classic Collection contains three of Thomas Paine's most notable books: Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and The Rights of Man. Born during the Age of Enlightenment and one of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine wrote incredible works that continue to resonate with people in the modern world. Inside this collection, you’ll find some of Thomas Paine’s most famous and influential works, from his arguments against the Church to the nature of government and revolution.

Although today she is best known for her fifteen-year liaison with Voltaire, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet (1706-1749) was more than a great man's mistress. After marrying a marquis at the age of eighteen, she proceeded to fulfill the prescribed-and delightfully frivolous-role of a French noblewoman of her time. But she also challenged it, conducting a highly visible affair with Voltaire, disparaged as a commoner, writing philosophical works, and translating Newton's Principia while pregnant by a younger lover.

The American Revolution, which had its roots in 1765 with a rejection of British authority to tax the colonies without fair representation and ended with the British defeat at Yorktown, was one of the most momentous events in the history of the North American continent. In this audiobook, American Revolution, you will discover the history behind the conflict and why it came about.

This compelling book begins on the 2nd of August 1793, the day Marie Antoinette was torn from her family's arms and escorted from the Temple to the Conciergerie, a thick-walled fortress turned prison. It was also known as the "waiting room for the guillotine" because prisoners only spent a day or two here before their conviction and subsequent execution. The ex-queen surely knew her days were numbered, but she could never have known that two and a half months would pass before she would finally stand trial and be convicted.

Founding Father Benjamin Franklin came from humble beginnings to take his place in the annals of history as one of the most celebrated Americans ever to stand on the world stage. The Boston apprentice who ran away because of his brother's ill-treatment found his destiny in Philadelphia, where he became a printer, a scientist, an author, an inventor, a politician, and a citizen of the world. His inventions and his philosophies had the same ultimate goal - to make the world a better place - and Franklin achieved that goal.

Published in 1791, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man defended the French Revolution’s values of freedom, equality, and brotherhood. He argued that a government based on justice ought to support mankind’s civil rights relating to security and protection, as well as the natural rights to life, liberty, and freedom of conscience. He also proposed plans for universal education, pensions, poverty relief, and social welfare in this classic work that was widely read across the West.

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era.

Between the 18th and early 19th centuries, Britain experienced massive leaps in technological, scientific, and economical advancement. This powerful period has since been immortalized as the great Industrial Revolution, during which Britain became a formidable force that boasted unmatched economical growth, drastic changes in living conditions, and even the emergence of a neglected social class. Vast portions of rural lands were transformed into interconnected, complex, and multitasking cities.

A vibrant look at the American Revolution's first months, from the author of the bestseller The Admirals. When we reflect on our nation's history, the American Revolution can feel almost like a foregone conclusion. In reality, the first weeks and months of 1775 were very tenuous, and a fractured...

The eighteenth century was a time of major global transitions. Movements of religious and intellectual revival challenged established ideas, European colonies emerged in the Western hemisphere, global trade expanded, and political revolutions and revolts in America, France, Russia, and Haiti started to reshape political life. At the beginning of the century, power and wealth were roughly balanced among the major regions of the world.