How the most powerful country in the UK was forged by invasion and conquest, and is fractured by its north-south divide. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read. England—begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, star of beloved period dramas, and home of the House of Windsor—is not quite the stalwart island fortress that many of us imagine. Riven by an ancient fault line that predates even the Romans, its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbors; and for the past millennia, it has harbored a class system like nowhere else on Earth. This bracing tour of the most powerful country in the United Kingdom reveals an England repeatedly invaded and constantly reinvented—yet always fractured by its very own Mason-Dixon Line. It carries us swiftly through centuries of conflict between Crown and Parliament (starring the Magna Carta), America’s War of Independence, the rise and fall of empire, two World Wars, and England’s break from the EU. We discover: why the American colonists of 1776 believed that they were the true Anglo-Saxons how the British Empire was undermined from within why Winston Churchill said the UK could only be saved by splitting up England itself and how populism spawned Brexit and its “new elite.” The Shortest History of England brings all this and more to prescient life—offering the most direct, compelling route to understanding the country behind today’s headlines.

"The last great work of the age of reason, the final instance when all human knowledge could be presented with a single point of view ... Unabashed optimism, and unabashed racism, pervades many entries in the 11th, and provide its defining characteristics ... Despite its occasional ugliness, the reputation of the 11th persists today because of the staggering depth of knowledge contained with its volumes. It is especially strong in its biographical entries. These delve deeply into the history of men and women prominent in their eras who have since been largely forgotten - except by the historians, scholars"-- The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2012/apr/10/encyclopedia-britannica-11th-edition.

The struggle between Islam and the Crusaders comprised a dialogue of cultures on a broad geographic scale and a wide expanse of time, a perennial seesaw of conquest in the West as in the East. Father Burns' pioneering work on Valencia has demonstrated that the inner reality of this sustained confrontation lies as much in the colonial interims as in the battles. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.