A unique lens through which to view the modern world: 28 insider accounts of national histories, now available in B-format paperback.

The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. This book shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.

The extraordinary adventure-filled story of how England came to own Manhattan in the seventeenth century

They gave us democracy, philosophy, poetry, rational science, the joke. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. But who were the ancient Greeks? And what was it that enabled them to achieve so much? This title offers a revelatory way of viewing this geographically scattered people, and more.

In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation.