17th Century

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world....

January, 1649. After seven years of fighting in the bloodiest war in Britain’s history, Parliament faced a problem: what to do with a defeated king, a king who refused to surrender....

This audiobook examines the meteoric rise of Sweden as the pre-eminent military power in Europe during the Thirty Years War during the 1600s....

Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the 200-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day....

Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal....

London, 1991: Alex Johns, trainee art intern at the Courtauld, believes a hidden secret lies within Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas—one of the most written about paintings of all time....

Clare Jackson's dazzling original account of English history's most turbulent and radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis....

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than 300 daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island....

Events moved fast in the 1650s. Something cataclysmic happened every year, something that would thrust the newly formed republic, its people, and its eventual 'Lord Protector' Oliver Cromwell, in an entirely new direction.

During the long 18th century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. Author Jürgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East....

Once valued at close to seven trillion dollars by today’s standards, the Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, became the world’s first multinational corporation....

Now an esoteric of legal and criminal history, A Hangman's Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Franz Schmidt's executions, which included hangings, beheadings, and other methods, as well as details of each capital crime and the reason for the punishment....

From poverty to pets, from medicine to magic, from slang to sex, from wallpaper to women's rights....

In 1642, King Charles I and the elected Parliament of England went to war over the future of the Stuart kingdom. Over the next nine years, three civil wars would be fought, devastating the populations of England, Scotland, and Ireland....

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer....

This biography brings Sarah Churchill's own voice, passionate and intelligent, back to life and casts a critical eye over images of the Duchess handed down through art, history and literature....

Discover the lives of the men that forever changed the course of history! This book contains the fundamental history, influences, life-changing events, and lasting impact of historical figures....

A medieval historian examines what we really know about the man who was "Merlin the Magician" and his impact on Britain....

In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast....

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....

The story of the Mayflower is one of adventure, courage, and destiny. Leaving England in September of 1620, the ship carried 102 English Separatists to a new life, one that came with the freedom to practice their religious beliefs as they saw fit....

Digging the Past offers fine-grained case studies of projects heralded as innovations both in the 17th century and in our own time: composting and soil amendment, local food, natural wine, and hedgerows....

One of the most controversial figures in British history, Oliver Cromwell entered as an insignificant member of the English gentry and left it as the all-powerful Lord Protector....

The history of China as a single nation began more than 2,000 years ago, when Qin Shi Huangdi first united a group of warring kingdoms into a single empire....

Why did England's one experiment in republican rule fail? In this fascinating history, Henry Reece explores the full story of the English republic's downfall.