A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities. And one that has a deeper history than you might think.

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums. Including the one in which he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford. Revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions. Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture. And how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past.

Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change. The book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Every Monument Will Fall : A Story of Remembering and Forgetting – Dan Hicks – 9781804950005

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Golden ages are marked by periods of spectacular cultural flourishing, scientific exploration, technological achievement and economic growth: Ancient Greece gave us democracy and the rule of the law; out of Abbasid Baghdad came algebra and modern medicine, and the Dutch Republic furnished us with Europe’s greatest artistic movements. As such, each has unique lessons to teach us about the world we live in today. But, all previous golden ages have proven finite, whether through external pressures or internal fracturing.

Peak Human : What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages – Johan Norberg – 9781838957315

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Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.

Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor. Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west.

Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen? In Proto, acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney sets off to find out. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the Silk Roads and the Hindu Kush.

We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings. The ancient peoples who spread these tongues far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists racing to recover this lost world. What they have discovered has vital lessons for our modern age, as people and their languages are on the move again.

Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.

Proto : How One Ancient Language Went Global – Laura Spinney – 9780008626563

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From ‘glorious defeat’ in 52 BCE at the hands of Julius Caesar to the somewhat unexpected triumph of the 2024 Paris Olympics, this book charts more than two millennia of eventful and surprising history.

Climate and the colonies, religion and the economy, intellectuals and immigrants, sans culottes and gilets jaunes… Colin Jones expertly navigates the territory, showing that the nation’s glories owe as much to its openness to outside influence as to any innate genius. This is a timely, accessible and eye-opening history of our nearest neighbour.

Retrouvez toutes la collection The Shortest History.

The Shortest History of France – Colin Jones – 9781917532273

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The United States and Iran have been locked in a decades-long standoff, fueled by missteps, misunderstandings, and clashing ambitions. In these pages a leading Iranian expert clarifies the dynamics driving a conflict that has devastated the Middle East and destabilized the world.

Behrooz Ghamari explores the history of US intervention in the region, focusing on the continuing sanctions imposed on Iran and, behind them, US policymakers’ persistent perception of the Islamic Republic as a major obstacle to American power. Despite the repressive policies of the Iranian state, he contends, Iranian society has remained vibrant with active intellectual, cultural, and social justice movements. The roots of US-Iranian rivalry lie elsewhere.

Challenging the conventional image of Iran as a monolithic totalitarian regime, this timely study calls for a more informed, nuanced approach to Middle East diplomacy.

The Long War on Iran : New Events, Old Questions – Behrooz Ghamari – 9781682196717

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‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…’ In the 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson’s unalienable rights have often been thwarted by slavery, war and depression. Today the USA may not always seem the shining city on a hill dreamed of by so many, but it is unquestionably the world’s most powerful nation – a source both of fear and wonder, inspiration and mockery.

With elegance and wit, Don Watson dissects the ignominies and triumphs of American history. He traces the course of liberty and justice alongside violence and oppression, showing how a country at war with itself in the 1860s became the leader of the free world less than a century later – and the unquiet, riven nation of today.

This is the concise, indispensable and fair-minded story of the world’s greatest superpower.

The Shortest History of the United States of America – Don Watson – 9781917532136

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With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated and US power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a ‘kinder, gentler America’. It didn’t work out that way. Instead, it was a period of punishing economic hardship, rising anger and domestic strife, setting the tone for the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

In this original and often hilarious book, John Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new kind of paranoid politics: how a group of con men and conspiracists declared a culture war on liberal elites, rejected ‘globalism’ and called for a ‘populist based presidency’. A rollicking exposé of the end of the post-World War II order, this book shows the advent of a new, more berserk America.

When the Clock Broke : Con Men, Conspiracists and the Origins of Trumpism – John Ganz – 9781405981699

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Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. People assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women – were true queer pioneers.

Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment.

Female Husbands – Jen Manion – 9781108718271

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A longtime educator explores how the study of Black history challenges our understanding of race, nation, and the stories we tell about who we are. Black history is under attack from powerful forces that seek to excise it from classrooms, libraries, and the popular imagination. Yet its opponents fail to understand a simple truth: the best education challenges our assumptions, helps us see larger forces at work, and gives us glimpses of alternate futures.

With warmth and immersive storytelling, Jones encourages us to delve deeper into our collective history, explores how curiosity about our world is essential—and reminds us that with stakes so high, the effort is worth it.

Black History Is for Everyone – Brian Jones – 9798888904473

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“A whistle-stop introduction to the great works and thinkers of each age, this is a clear and accessible primer.”—Laura Garmeson, Financial Times   What causes poverty? Are economic crises inevitable under capitalism? Is government intervention in an economy helpful, or harmful? While the answers to such basic economic questions matter to everyone, the unfamiliar language and math of economics can seem daunting. This clear, accessible, and even humorous book is ideal for young readers new to economic concepts, and for readers of all ages who want to better understand economic history and ideas.   Economic historian Niall Kishtainy organizes short chapters that center on big ideas and events.

He introduces us to some of the key thinkers—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and others—while examining topics ranging from the invention of money to the Great Depression, entrepreneurship, and behavioral economics. The result is an enjoyable book that succeeds in illuminating the economic ideas and forces that shape our world.

A Little History of Economics – Niall Kishtainy – 9780300234527

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