Offers an understanding of Vermeer's paintings and of the era they portray.

The untold story of how British-French rivalry drew the battle-lines of the modern Middle East

A magnet for trade and travellers from all over the world, stylish, cosmopolitan Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and legendary beauty, but also of civil wars, bloody religious purges, and the tragedy of Anne Frank.

The Prince (Italian: Il Principe) is a political treatise by the Italian diplomat, historian and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. From correspondence a version appears to have been distributed in 1513, using a Latin title, De Principatibus (About Principalities). But the printed version was not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death. This was done with the permission of the Medici pope Clement VII, but "long before then, in fact since the first appearance of the Pr...

Ten zuidwesten van Hoek van Holland, waar niet lang geleden nog meeuwen foerageerden boven het water van de Noordzee, ligt nu nieuw land, met spoor- en waterwegen en twee hypermoderne containerterminals. Dit nieuwe land is Maasvlakte 2, een project waar meer dan vijftien jaar van besluitvorming aan voorafging. Maasvlakte 2 is een voortzetting van eerdere havenuitbreidingen die Rotterdam na de Tweede Wereldoorlog tot de grootste haven ter wereld maakten. Lobby for Land beschrijft hoe het polit...

Tannenberg; looking back, this town and battle symbolise an atypicalepisode in the First World War: the war of movement. In reality thewar quickly turned into a trench war, such as we knew it in the West.With the battle at Tannenberg and the ones that followed, which all hada quite positive outcome for Germany, Ludendorff had left his mark. is untimately brought the duo Von Hindenburg - Ludendorff to theabsolute military top of Germany. As from 1917 they, together with theemperor, dictated th...

When the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands began in 1942, the occupying forces used the refugee camp near Westerbork in the east as a transit camp, without modifications. The Westerbork camp was established and paid for by the Dutch-Jewish community in the 1930s to house the increasing number of Jewish refugees from Germany.

In two years, more than 100,000 Jews were deported from this camp, also known as the “Dutch gateway to hell”.

Because a well-functioning camp organization was al...

"Being a slave" brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. This volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well ...