Witty and caustic, Candide has ranked as one of the world's great satires since its first publication in 1759. In the story of the trials and travails of the youthful Candide, his mentor Dr. Pangloss, and a host of other characters, Voltaire mercilessly satirizes and exposes rom…
James Boswell's relish for life, unflinching honesty and wide social contacts make him one of the raciest and most entertaining of all diarists. This is a one-volume edition of the journals he kept while making his living as an advocate in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Hugh Miln…
"Periodicals were an essential medium during eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The era's growing number of newspapers and journals made possible a fast and vast dissemination of ideas and debates. Journals were a particularly important means of transmitting ideas, genres, texts,…
Mount Vernon researcher Mary Thompson endeavors to get beyond the current preoccupation with whether Washington and other founders were or were not evangelical Christians to ask what place religion had in their lives. Thompson follows Washington and his family over several gener…
This is George Washington in the surprising role of political strategist. T.H. Breen introduces us to a George Washington we rarely meet. During his first term as president, he decided that the only way to fulfill the Revolution was to take the new federal government directly t…
Islam first arrived in China more than 1,200 years ago, but for more than a millennium it was perceived as a foreign presence. The restoration of native Chinese rule by the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), after nearly a century of Mongol domination, helped transform Chinese intellectu…
In his book War Finance and Logistics in Late Imperial China, Ulrich Theobald analyzes how the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911) laid the organizational base for the spectacular expansion of its territory.
Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesc…
A new study of the place of Enlightenment thought in intellectual history and of its continued relevance. Offers original readings of a range of key texts, which highlight the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers enacted in their writing - and reflected on - the interplay of int…
"The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain examines the involvement of Italian opera in British partisan politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw Sir Robert Walpole's rise to power and George Frideric Handel's greatest period of opera production. McGeary a…
"Three Peoples, One King explores the contributions and conjoined fates of Loyalists, Indians, and slaves who stood with the British Empire in the Deep South colonies during the American Revolution. Challenging the traditional view that British efforts to regain control of the s…
Cultures in Conflict addresses the broad pattern of events that framed this conflict's causes, the intercultural dynamics of its conduct, and its profound impact on subsequent events-most notably the American Revolution and a protracted Anglo-Indian struggle for continental cont…