front cover of Napoleon at Peace
Napoleon at Peace
How to End a Revolution
William Doyle
Reaktion Books, 2022
A cogent, comprehensive, and sweeping account of Napoleon’s dismantling of the French Revolution, giving new insight into this critical period of French history.
 
The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized revolutionary France: war, religion, and monarchy. Doyle shows how, as First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon resolved these issues: first by winning the war, then by forging peace with the Church, and finally by making himself a monarch. Napoleon at Peace ends by discussing Napoleon’s one great failure—his attempt to restore the colonial empire destroyed by war and slave rebellion. By the time this endeavor was abandoned, the fragile peace with Great Britain had broken down, and the Napoleonic wars had begun.
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Nashville
Music and Manners
Richard Schweid
Reaktion Books, 2021
Nashville is a city of sublime contrasts, an intellectual hub built on a devotion to God, country music, and the Devil’s pleasures. Refined and raucous, it has long represented both culture and downright fun, capable of embracing pre–Civil War mansions and manners, as well as honky-tonk bars and trailer parks. Nouvelle cuisine coexists with barbeque and cornbread; the Frist Museum of Contemporary Art is near the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Nashville has, in less than eighty years, transformed from a small, conservative, Bible-thumping city into a booming metropolis. Nashvillian Richard Schweid tells the history of how it all came to pass and colorfully describes contemporary Nashville and the changes and upheavals it has gone through to make it the South’s most exciting and thriving city.
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Nature Fast and Nature Slow
How Life Works, from Fractions of a Second to Billions of Years
Nicholas P. Money
Reaktion Books, 2021
This book is a vision of biology set within the entire timescale of the universe. It is about the timing of life, from microsecond movements to evolutionary changes over millions of years. Human consciousness is riveted to seconds, but a split-second time delay in perception means that we are unaware of anything until it has already happened. We live in the very recent past. Over longer timescales, this book examines the lifespans of the oldest organisms, prospects for human life extension, the evolution of whales and turtles, and the explosive beginning of life four billion years ago.

With its poetry, social commentary, and humor, this book will appeal to everyone interested in the natural world.
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Nature Over Again
The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay
John Dixon Hunt
Reaktion Books, 2008
Though Ian Hamilton Finlay’s (1925–2006) famous work, Little Sparta, was voted the most important work of Scottish art, his influence—and works—is found worldwide. Nature Over Again reveals the story behind Finlay’s renowned horticultural works, presenting the first study that examines all of his garden designs and “interventions.”

An accomplished Scottish poet, writer, artist, and gardener, Finlay infused his garden designs with his distinct aesthetic philosophy and poetic sensibility. John Dixon Hunt situates his analysis of Finlay’s gardens in the context of that broader philosophy and poetic work, drawing on Finlay’s writings about the art and practice of garden design. From the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart to the University of California at San Diego campus, the book documents how Finlay built an oeuvre of international renown—ultimately arguing that Finlay’s innovations are best understood in the context of the long tradition of European gardens.
 
Copiously illustrated, Nature Over Again brings the work of this distinguished modernist to vivid life.
 
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Navies in Modern World History
Lawrence Sondhaus
Reaktion Books, 2004
Navies in Modern World History traces the role of navies in history from the early nineteenth century, through both World Wars, to the dawn of the twenty-first century and beyond.

In a series of case studies Lawrence Sondhaus examines the national fleets of Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Chile and the Soviet Union, and demonstrates the variety of ways in which each country has made decisive use of naval power. In each case the author argues that the navy in question helped change the course of modern world history; he also systematically analyses the challenges navies faced in assembling matériel, training personnel and performing their mission.

This book discusses the leading role of navies and shipbuilders in key technological innovations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including advances in steam power, armor, artillery and torpedoes, and looks at aircraft carrier design and naval aviation in general in the second half of the twentieth century. It also explains how, today, technological breakthroughs are centered around naval stealth and maritime propulsion systems. Special attention is devoted to the evolving state of naval technology, and the book shows how the relative industrial capabilities of seafaring countries have been reflected in their maritime building programs, providing an important link between the evolution of modern national fleets and the broader history of the period.
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Navigations
The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance
Malyn Newitt
Reaktion Books, 2023
A critical reassessment of world-shaping Portuguese voyages of discovery that places these quests in historical context.
 
The lasting impact of historic Portuguese voyages of discovery is unquestionable. The slave trade, the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews, and the intercontinental spread of plants and animals all make clear these voyages’ long-term global significance. Navigations reexamines these Portuguese quests by placing them in their medieval and Renaissance settings. It shows how these voyages grew out of a crusading ethos, as well as long-distance trade with Asia and Africa and developments in map-making and ship design. Malyn Newitt also narrates these voyages of discovery in the framework of Portuguese politics, describing the role of the Portuguese ruling dynasty—including its female members—in the flowering of the Portuguese Renaissance, the creation of the Renaissance state with its distinctive ideology, and in the cultural changes that took place within a wider European context.
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The Nazi, the Painter and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road
G. H. Bennett
Reaktion Books, 2012

In 2006 a long-forgotten canister of film was discovered in a church in Devon, a county located in the southwestern corner of the United Kingdom. No one knew how it had gotten there, but its contents were tantalizing—the grainy black and white footage showed members of the German SS and police building a road in Ukraine and Crimea in 1943. The BBC caused a sensation when it aired the footage, but the film gave few clues to the protagonists or their task.

World War II historian G. H. Bennett pieces together the story of the film and its principal characters in The Nazi, the Painter and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road. In his search for answers, Bennett unearthed an overlooked chapter of the Holocaust: a wartime German road-building project led by Walter Gieseke, the Nazi policeman who ended up running the SS task force, that served the dual purpose of exterminating Jewish and other lives while laying the infrastructure for a utopian Nazi haven in the Ukraine. Bennett tells the story of the road and its builders through the experiences of Arnold Daghani, a Romanian artist who was one of the few Jewish laborers to survive the project. Daghani describes the brutal treatment he endured, as well as the beating, torture, and murder of his fellow laborers by the Nazis, and his postwar efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice.
 
Recovering an important but lost episode in the history of World War II and the Holocaust, The Nazi, the Painter and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road is a moving and at times horrifying chronicle of suffering, deprivation, and survival.
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Neil Young
American Traveller
Martin Halliwell
Reaktion Books, 2015
When Neil Young left Canada in 1966 to move to California, it was the beginning of an extraordinary musical journal that would leave song after song resonating across the landscapes of North America. From “Ohio” to “Albuquerque,” Young’s fascination with America’s many places profoundly influenced his eclectic style and helped shape the restless sensibility of his generation. In this book, Martin Halliwell shows how place has loomed large in Young’s prodigious catalog of songs, which are themselves a testament to his storied career as a musician playing with bands such as Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse, and, of course, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
           
Moving from the Canadian prairies to Young’s adopted Pacific home, Halliwell explores how place and travel spurred one of the most prolific creative outputs in music history. Placing Young in the shifting musical milieus of the past decades—comprised of artists such as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, the Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Devo, and Pearl Jam—he traces the ways Young’s personal journeys have intertwined with that of American music and how both capture the power of America’s great landscapes.
           
Spanning Young’s career as a singer-songwriter—from his many bands to his work on films—Neil Young will appeal not just to his many fans worldwide but to anyone interested in the extraordinary ways American music has engaged the places from which it comes. 
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Nether World
Crime and the Police Courts in Victorian London
Drew D. Gray
Reaktion Books
A new account of urban Victorian life told through the dubious day-to-day of London’s police courts.
 
Nether World presents a rich, often humorous glimpse into everyday life in Victorian London through a revealing account of nineteenth-century police courts. People of all classes brought complaints to this court about those who had hurt, abused, or stolen from them—drunks, pickpockets, wife-beaters, and fraudsters—who were each in their turn judged by magistrates wielding broad summary powers. Delving into underexamined court records and the pages of a fast-developing newspaper industry, Drew D. Gray offers a fresh description of a vibrant, ever-changing metropolis and considers ongoing issues such as poverty, homelessness, violence, substance abuse, prostitution, and—of course—crime.
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New Museology
Edited by Peter Vergo
Reaktion Books, 1989
With essays by Charles Saumarez Smith, Ludmilla Jordanova, Paul Greenhalgh, Colin Sorensen, Nick Merriman, Stephen Bann, Philip Wright, Norman Palmer and Peter Vergo.

"A lively and controversial symposium ... thought-provoking"—The Sunday Times (Paperbacks of the Year, 1989)

"The essays are all distinguished by their topicality and lucidity."—MuseumNews

"A welcome addition to the library of Museology"—Art Monthly

"The New Museology is essential reading for all those seeking to understand the current debate in museum ideologies."—International Journal of Museum Management and Scholarship
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A New Philosophy of History
Edited by Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner
Reaktion Books, 1995
What is history? From Thucydides to Toynbee historians and nonhistorians alike have wondered how to answer this question. A New Philosophy of History reflects on developments over the last two decades in historical writing, not least the renewed interest in the status of narrative itself and the presence of the authorial "voice." Subjects include the problems of Grand Narrative, multiple voices and the personal presence of the historian in his text, the ambitions of the French Annales school and the so-called "Grand Chronicler," and the relevance of non-literary models—museum presentations and picturings—regarding historical discourse.

The range of approaches found in A New Philosophy of History ensures that this book will establish itself as required reading not only for historians, but for everyone interested in literary theory, philosophy, or cultural studies.

This volume presents essays by Hans Kellner, Nancy F. Partner, Richard T. Vann, Arthur C. Danto, Linda Orr, Philippe Carrard, Ann Rigney, Allan Megill, Robert Berkhofer, Stephen Bann, and Frank Ankersmit.
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New York
Elizabeth L. Bradley
Reaktion Books, 2015
From the Big Apple to the City that Never Sleeps, New York has many identities. It is a melting pot of peoples and cultures, a capital of finance and commerce, and a mecca of fashion, art, and entertainment. It is home to the United Nations Headquarters and Wall Street, and it is the destination for millions of tourists each year. But outside of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, where does one even start? In this concise and witty guide from a native New Yorker, Elizabeth L. Bradley mixes history with high and low culture to make sense of this city for visitors and armchair travelers alike.
           
Tracing the development of New York City from a Dutch trading post to the cultural capital of the world, Bradley provides brief histories of each of the five boroughs and introduces the city’s most important—and colorful—personalities. In addition to a rich account of the city’s past, she offers a series of ruminations on themes germane to New York today, describing its natural landmarks, unnatural gin joints, immigrant enclaves, and even its many noises. All along she includes thoughtful, eclectic lists of where to eat, drink, and shop, as well as what to see and do.
           
Exploring the features that make New York both inimitable and extraordinary, this generously illustrated guide is a lively and engaging look at this ever-shifting archipelago.
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The Newsmongers
A History of Tabloid Journalism
Terry Kirby
Reaktion Books, 2024
Vivid and racy, a deep-dive into tabloids from their sixteenth-century beginnings to the National Inquirer and beyond.
 
The Newsmongers unfolds the seedy history of tabloid journalism, from the first printed “Strange Newes” sheets of the sixteenth century to the sensationalism of today’s digital age. The narrative weaves from Regency gossip writers through New York’s “yellow journalism” battles to the “sex and sleaze” Sun of the 1970s; and from the Brexit-backing populism of the Daily Mail to the celebrity-obsessed Mail Online of the 2000s. Colorful figures such as Daniel Defoe, Lord Northcliffe, Hugh Cudlipp, Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Maxwell are brought to vivid life.
 
From scandalous confessions to the Leveson Inquiry into the behavior of the British press, the book explores journalists’ unscrupulous methods, taking in phone hacking, privacy breaches, and bribery. And now, in the digital era, The Newsmongers shows how popular journalism has succumbed to so-called churnalism while a certain royal is seeking revenge on the tabloids today.
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Nick Drake
Dreaming England
Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
Reaktion Books, 2013
 Since his death in 1974 at the age of twenty-six, singer-songwriter Nick Drake has gained a huge international audience and come to be thought of as the epitome of English romanticism. But while his small body of work has evoked poetic comparisons with Blake and Keats, closer inspection of Drake’s music reveals many global and cosmopolitan influences that confound his status as an archetypal English troubadour. In this book, Nathan Wiseman-Trowse unravels the myths surrounding Drake and his work and explores how ideas of Englishness have come to be intimately associated with the cult musician.
 
Probing deeply into Drake’s music for clues, Wiseman-Trowse finds hints of the English landscape that Drake would have wandered through during his lifetime, but he also uncovers traces of blues, jazz, and eastern mysticism that hint at a broader conception of English national identity in the late 1960s, one far removed from parochial nostalgia. Wiseman-Trowse then looks at how Drake’s music has been framed since his death, showing how Drake has been situated as a particular kind of English artist that integrates American counterculture, the English class system, and a nostalgic reimagining of the hippie era. An appealing story of folk music and English national identity, this book is essential reading for any fan of Nick Drake.
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Nightingale
Bethan Roberts
Reaktion Books, 2021
A melodious paean to the natural history and symbolic meaning of the most prized, poetized, and mythologized of songbirds.
 
The nightingale has a unique place in cultural history: the most prized of songbirds, it has inspired more poems than any other creature, and it is also the most mythologized of birds. Nightingale juxtaposes the bird of poetry, music, myth, and lore with the living bird of wood and scrubland, unpicking the entangled relationship between them. Covering a huge range of poets, musicians, artists, nature writers, and natural historians—from Aristotle, Keats, and Vera Lynn to Bob Dylan—Nightingale charts our fascination through history with this nondescript yet melodious little brown bird. It also documents the nightingale’s disappearance from British breeding grounds and the implications this has for nightingale conservation.
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Nights in the Big City
Paris, Berlin, London 1840-1930
Joachim Schlör
Reaktion Books, 1998
This elegantly written book describes the changes in the perception and experience of the night in three great European cities: Paris, Berlin and London. The lighting up of the European city by gas and electricity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a new relationship with the night, in respect of both work and pleasure. Nights in the Big City explores this new awareness of the city in all its ramifications.

Joachim Schlör has spent his days sifting through countless police and church archives, and first-hand accounts, and his nights exploring the highways and byways of these three great capitals. Illustrated with haunting and evocative photographs by, among others, Brandt and Kertész, and filled with contemporary literary references, Nights in the Big City has already been acclaimed in the German press as a milestone in the cultural history of the city.

"[Schlör] is erudite, and his literary style is alluring."—Architect's Journal
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Nights in the Big City
Paris, Berlin, London 1840-1930 - Second Edition
Joachim Schlör
Reaktion Books, 2016
This elegantly written book describes the evolving perception and experience of the night in three great European cities: Paris, Berlin, and London. As Joachim Schlör shows, the lighting up of the European city by gas and electricity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about a new relationship with the night for both those who toiled at work and those who caroused in restaurants, pubs, and cafes. Nights in the Big City explores this change and offers a stirring portrait of the secrets and mysteries a city can hold when the sun goes down.

Sifting through countless police and church archives alongside first-hand accounts, Schlör sets out on his own explorations with a head full of histories, exploring the boulevards and side-streets of these three great capitals. Illustrated with haunting and evocative photographs by, among others, Bill Brandt and André Kertész, and filled with contemporary literary references, Nights in the Big City is a milestone in the cultural history of the city. 
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No Home for You Here
A Memoir of Class and Culture
Adam Theron-Lee Rensch
Reaktion Books, 2020
No Home for You Here is a memoir of a life lived in the shadow of Ronald Reagan. Raised in rural Ohio, Adam Theron-Lee Rensch tells the story of a millennial trying—and failing—to leave behind the shame of growing up poor in the middle of nowhere. Interweaving personal narrative and political criticism with recent social and political history, No Home for You Here shows how the interrelationship of class, culture, and identity stifles working-class solidarity by constructing an imagined cultural divide that those in power use to maintain the status quo. With one foot on each side of this division, Rensch moves between the flat horizon of the Midwest and the densely populated streets of the city, bearing witness to the tragic effects of a precarious free-market economy on family and friends. Rather than wallowing in despair, however, No Home for You Here is a timely, passionate call for class consciousness in an era of economic crisis and staggering inequality.
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Noam Chomsky
Wolfgang B. Sperlich
Reaktion Books, 2006
“The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.” This declaration by Noam Chomsky exemplifies the uncompromising radicalism that has long defined his life and work. A linguist, philosopher, prolific author, and political activist, Chomsky is one of the most influential Western intellectuals of the last half-century. Yet it is this very capaciousness that biographers and interpreters have struggled with, and as a result, there are very few readable accounts of Chomsky and his project. Wolfgang B. Sperlich surmounts this challenge with his succinct yet in-depth introduction to the thinker in Noam Chomsky, one of the new titles in the acclaimed Critical Lives series. 

Beginning with Chomsky’s formative years as a sixteen-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania, Sperlich traces his education in linguistics and politics in its rich historical context. He explores Chomsky’s main intellectual influences, particularly in language studies, and charts his strained relationship with mainstream American academia. Sperlich also offers an informed overview of Chomsky’s landmark linguistic contributions as a comprehensive introduction to his work, and he explains the latest developments in Chomskyan linguistics and how they influence research in fields as varied as neuroscience, biology, and evolution. Sperlich is equally attentive to Chomsky's political activism: through Sperlich’s account we follow Chomsky from his pacifist-anarchist lectures and writings of the 1950s and 1960s to his seminal 1988 treatise, Manufacturing Consent, and his relentless criticism of the American government over two decades. 

A compact and rich biographical study, Noam Chomsky is a brilliant introduction to one of the most polarizing intellectuals of our time, a thinker whose words continue to pierce the heart of public discourse.
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The Nordic Model
Scandinavia since 1945
Mary Hilson
Reaktion Books, 2008
The political structures of the Scandinavian nations have long stood as models for government and public policy. This comprehensive study examines how that “Nordic model” of government developed, as well as its far-reaching influence.

            Respected Scandinavian historian Mary Hilson surveys the political bureaucracies of the five Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—and traces their historical influences and the ways they have changed, individually and as a group, over time. The book investigates issues such as economic development, foreign policy, politics, government, and the welfare state, and it also explores prevailing cultural perceptions of Scandinavia in the twentieth century. Hilson then turns to the future of the Nordic region as a unified whole within Europe as well as in the world, and considers the re-emergence of the Baltic Sea as a pivotal region on the global stage.

            The Nordic Model offers an incisive assessment of Scandinavia yesterday and today, making this an essential text for students and scholars of political science, European history, and Scandinavian studies.
 
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North Pole
Nature and Culture
Michael Bravo
Reaktion Books, 2019
The North Pole has long held surprising importance for many of the world’s cultures. Interweaving science and history, this book offers the first unified vision of how the North Pole has shaped everything from literature to the goals of political leaders—from Alexander the Great to neo-Hindu nationalists. Tracing the intersecting notions of poles, polarity, and the sacred from our most ancient civilizations to the present day, Michael Bravo explores how the idea of a North Pole has given rise to utopias, satires, fantasies, paradoxes, and nationalist ideologies across every era, from the Renaissance to the Third Reich.

The Victorian conceit of the polar regions as a vast empty wilderness—a bastion of adventurous white males battling against the elements—is far from the only polar vision. Bravo paints a variety of alternative pictures: of a habitable Arctic crisscrossed by densely connected networks of Inuit trade and travel routes, a world rich in indigenous cultural meanings; of a sacred paradise or lost Eden among both Western and Eastern cultures, a vision that curiously (and conveniently) dovetailed with the imperial aspirations of Europe and the United States; and as the setting for tales not only of conquest and redemption, but also of failure and catastrophe. And as we face warming temperatures, melting ice, and rising seas, Bravo argues, only an understanding of the North Pole’s deeper history, of our conception of it as both a sacred and living place, can help humanity face its twenty-first-century predicament.
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Nubia
Lost Civilizations
Sarah M. Schellinger
Reaktion Books, 2022
Drawing on the latest archaeological and textual discoveries, a revealing look at the rich and dynamic civilization of Nubia.
 
Nubia, the often-overlooked southern neighbor of Egypt, has been home to groups of vibrant and adaptive peoples for millennia. This book explores the Nubians’ religious, social, economic, and cultural histories, from their nomadic origins during the Stone Ages to their rise to power during the Napatan and Meroitic periods, and it concludes with the recent struggles for diplomacy in North Sudan. Situated among the ancient superpowers of Egypt, Aksum, and the Greco-Roman world, Nubia’s connections with these cultures shaped the region’s history through colonialism and cultural entanglement. Sarah M. Schellinger presents the Nubians through their archaeological and textual remains, reminding readers that they were a rich and dynamic civilization in their own right.
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Nuts
A Global History
Ken Albala
Reaktion Books, 2014
From almonds and pecans to pistachios, cashews, and macadamias, nuts are as basic as food gets—just pop them out of the shell and into your mouth. The original health food, the vitamin-packed nut is now used industrially, in confectionary, and in all sorts of cooking. The first book to tell the full story of how nuts came to be in almost everything, Nuts takes readers on a gastronomic, botanical, and cultural tour of the world.
 
Tracking these fruits and seeds through cultivation, harvesting, processing, and consumption—or non-consumption, in the case of those with nut allergies—award-winning food writer Ken Albala provides a fascinating account on how they have been cooked, prepared, and exploited. He reveals the social and cultural meaning of nuts during various periods in history, while also immersing us in their modern uses. Packing scrumptious recipes, surprising facts, and fascinating nuggets inside its hardcover shell, this entertaining and informative book will delight lovers of almonds, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and more.
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