Simon Schama

Details the story of the Jewish experience, tracing it across three millennia, from their beginnings as an ancient tribal people to the opening of the New World in 1492 to the modern day. A tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews.

From one of the truly preeminent historians of our time, this is a landmark book chronicling the French Revolution. Simon Schama deftly refutes the contemporary notion that the French Revolution represented an uprising of the oppressed poor against a decadent aristocracy and corrupt court. He argues instead that the revolution was born of a rift among the elite over the speed of progress toward modernity and science, social and economic change.

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Collects more than thirty previously published essays on a diverse range of topics, including food habits, art, politics, history, and travel.

Rough Crossings turns on a single huge question: if you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves -- Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom -- escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British...

An exploration of the artworks of The Frick Collection by a group of contemporary writers, artists and other cultural figures, from George Condo, Lydia Davis and Lena Dunham to Abbi Jacobson and Edmund White. Includes 61 reflections, with the contributors writing about an artwork that has personal significance, sharing how it has moved, challenged, puzzled or inspired them. Each text is accompanied by an illustration of the artwork.