English Revolution Historical

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'; so the recording begins and ends with some of Dickens's best-known words, and between those lines is every Briton's view of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, the audiobook tells the story of a French doctor who is imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille in Paris. Upon his release, he moves to London with his daughter, Lucie, whom he had never met.

Oxford, 1836. The city of dreaming spires. It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world. And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows. Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift. Until it became a prison. But can a student stand against an empire?

The Reign of Terror continues to fascinate scholars as one of the bloodiest periods in French history, when the Committee of Public Safety strove to defend the first Republic from its many enemies, creating a climate of fear and suspicion in revolutionary France. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative follows the Committee's deputies individually and collectively, recounting and assessing their tumultuous struggles in Paris and their repressive missions in the provinces.

Maine, 1789: When a man is found entombed in the frozen Kennebec River, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As the local midwife and healer, Martha is good at keeping secrets. Her diary is a record of every birth, death and debacle that unfolds in the town of Hallowell. In that diary she has also documented the details of an alleged rape committed by one of the town’s most esteemed gentlemen – the same man who has now been found dead in the ice.

Angelette, the recently widowed Comtesse d'Avignon, only invited Viscount Daventry to her country house party as a favor to her sister. When the handsome British lord arrives - two days late - he's full of unnerving tales of unrest and violence in Paris. Angelette assumes it's all exaggeration...until her chateau is attacked and her life threatened. Daventry rescues her, and the two are forced to run for their lives. But when danger closes in, will the viscount stand at her side or save himself?

When Ian Blackheath and Lucy have an altercation in Emily d'Autrecourt's millinery shop, the lovely Englishwoman is horrified at Blackheath's insensitivity toward his ward. Then Lucy steals a doll from Emily's shop-secreted inside the plaything is evidence of Emily's role as a spy. Accepting Ian's offer that she be Lucy's governess is dangerous, but how else can Emily search for the doll without arousing suspicion?

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In best-selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours. The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.

Twelve-year-old Ji-li Jiang has brains, friends, and a bright future. Then Mao Zedong launches China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. Soon school is suspended and students are getting caught up in the fervor of Mao’s extreme politics. When Ji-li’s family is accused of capitalist crimes, all of her beautiful dreams burst like soap bubbles. Because Ji-li’s grandfather was a landlord, her family is harassed and humiliated. Their home is searched, and they live in constant fear. Nonetheless, Ji-li remains loyal to her beloved Chairman Mao....

With the outbreak of the American revolution, Abigail Lovell's family is torn apart - while her schoolmaster father is an outspoken loyalist and prominent figurehead in the community, she and her two brothers engage in acts of espionage to undermine the British forces in Boston. Her sickly older brother, James, operates the patriots’ spy ring while Abigail acts as a courier, eluding increasingly aggressive British patrols. Meanwhile, her younger brother, Benjamin, slips out of Boston to fight alongside Abigail’s love, Ezra, in the battles at Lexington and Concord.

In the latest volume of his celebrated series of Time Traveller's Guides, Ian Mortimer turns to what is arguably the most loved period in British history: the Regency (a.k.a. Georgian England). Bookended by the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the death of George IV in 1830, this is the age of Jane Austen and the Romantic poets, the paintings of Constable and the gardens of Repton, the sartorial elegance of Brummell and the poetic licence of Byron, Britain's military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo and the threat of revolution and the Peterloo massacre.

In 1760, Deborah Samson is born to Puritan parents in Plympton, Massachusetts. When her father abandons the family and her mother is unable to support them, Deborah is bound out as an indentured servant. From that moment on, she yearns for a life of liberation and adventure. Twenty years later, as the American colonies begin to buckle in their battle for independence, Deborah, impassioned by the cause, disguises herself as a soldier and enlists in the Continental Army.

A gripping, fact-based story of how Daniel Morgan and his courageous riflemen played a crucial role in George Washington's victory in the American Revolution.... They wore hunting shirts, deer-skin leggins and moccasins. Each had a tomahawk and a scalping knife in their belts and carried "long rifles" in their hands. Every rifleman was a Patriot volunteer, a tracker, and a hunter. And they could kill a redcoat from 250 yards.

In this gripping biography, acclaimed author Harlow Giles Unger paints an intimate portrait of the heroic young French soldier who, at 19, renounced a life of luxury in Paris and Versailles to fight and bleed for liberty - at Brandywine, Valley Forge, and Yorktown. A major general in the Continental army, he quickly earned the love of his troops, his fellow commanders, and his commander in chief, George Washington, who called him his "adopted son".

Proud and talented, history now remembers this conflicted man solely through the lens of his last desperate act of treason. Yet the fall of Benedict Arnold remains one of the Revolutionary period's great puzzles. Why did a brilliant military commander, who repeatedly risked his life fighting the British, who was grievously injured in the line of duty, and fell into debt personally funding his own troops, ultimately became a traitor to the patriot cause?

The passionate Andre-Louis Moreau makes an unexpected entrance into the French Revolution when he vows to avenge his best friend's death. His target: Monsieur de La Tour d'Azyr, the aristocratic villain who killed his friend. Andre-Louis rallies the underclass to join him in his mission against the supreme power of the nobility. Soon the rebel leader must go underground, disguising himself as "Scaramouche" in a traveling group of actors. In the midst of his swashbuckling adventures and his country's revolution, he discovers the secret of his own identity.

Miriam Beckstein has said good-bye to her comfort zone. The transition from journalist to captive in an alternative time line was challenging, to say the least. As was discovering her long-lost family, the Clan, were world-skipping assassins. Now civil war rages in her adopted home, she's pregnant with the heir to their throne and a splinter group want her on their side of a desperate power struggle. But as a leader or figurehead?

The loss of America was a stunning and unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders in Britain must have been to blame, but were they? This intriguing audiobook makes a different argument. Weaving together the personal stories of ten prominent men historian Andrew O'Shaughnessy dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve victory.

Winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Who was the real Count of Monte Cristo? In this extraordinary biography, Tom Reiss traces the almost unbelievable life of the man who inspired not only Monte Cristo, but all three of the Musketeers: the novelist's own father. Born in St Dominigue in 1762, the son of a French nobleman and a sugar plantation slave, General Alexandre Dumas did not have an auspicious start in life.

In John Adams: A Life, Ferling offers a compelling portrait of one of the giants of the Revolutionary era. Drawing on extensive research, Ferling depicts a reluctant revolutionary, a leader who was deeply troubled by the warfare that he helped to make, and a fiercely independent statesman. Bringing to life an exciting time, an age in which Adams played an important political and intellectual role. this book is a singular biography of the man who succeeded George Washington in the presidency and shepherded the fragile new nation through the most dangerous of times.

With swordfights and romance, adventure and treachery set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, this is the book that made Sabatini famous. Andre-Louis Moreau has good prospects as a young lawyer, but an unfair duel with the ruthlessly cruel Count de La Tour d'Azyr leaves Andre-Louis' best friend dead and Andre-Louis himself a fugitive from the King's justice. While incognito, he becomes both a wildly popular actor and a firebrand of the Revolution.