An Economist Book of the Year, 2001. In the 18th century, a debate ensued over the French naturalist Buffon’s contention that the New World was in fact geologically new. Historians, naturalists, and philosophers clashed over Buffon’s view. This book maintains that the “dispute” was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the New World and its people. In addressing this question, the author offers a strikingly novel interpretation of the Enlightenment.

Ross Dunn's classic retelling of the travels of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim of the 14th century.

A history of the relationship between Great Britain and the United States ranges from the establishment of the first English colony in the New World to the present day, examining both nations in terms of what connected them and what drove them apart.

From an award-winning historian, a “vivid” (Wall Street Journal) account of the revolution that created the modern world The French Revolution’s principles of liberty and equality still shape our ideas of a just society—even if, after more than two hundred years, their meaning is more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the reader in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society. We meet Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton, in all their brilliance and vengefulness; we witness the failed escape and execution of Louis XVI; we see women demanding equal rights and Black slaves wresting freedom from revolutionaries who hesitated to act on their own principles; and we follow the rise of Napoleon out of the ashes of the Reign of Terror. Based on decades of scholarship, A New World Begins will stand as the definitive treatment of the French Revolution.

Florida Book Awards, Bronze Medal for General Nonfiction International Latino Book Awards, First Place, Best History Book (English) Scholarly and popular attention tends to focus heavily on Cuba’s recent history. Key to the New World is the first comprehensive history of early colonial Cuba written in English, and fills the gap in our knowledge of the island before 1700.

This eloquent, pathbreaking account follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century until they carved out a place in the American republic three centuries later. It is a story of Native agency, creativity, resilience, and endurance. Upon its original publication in 1989, James Merrell's definitive history of Catawbas and their neighbors in the southern piedmont helped signal a new direction in the study of Native Americans, serving as a model for their reintegration into American history. In an introduction written for this twentieth anniversary edition, Merrell recalls the book's origins and considers its place in the field of early American history in general and Native American history in particular, both at the time it was first published and two decades later.