The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain

The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain PDF Author: Stephen Oppenheimer
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 1780337671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
'British prehistory will never look the same again.' Professor Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge Stephen Oppenheimer's extraordinary scientific detective story combining genetics, linguistics, archaeology and historical record shatters the myths we have come to live by. It demonstrates that the Anglo-Saxon invasions contributed just a tiny fraction (5%) to the English gene pool. Two-thirds of the English people reveal an unbroken line of genetic descent from south-western Europeans arriving long before the first farmers. The bulk of the remaining third arrived between 7,000 and 3,000 years ago as part of long-term north-west European trade and immigration, especially from Scandinavia - and may have brought with them the earliest forms of English language. As for the Celts - the Irish, Scots and Welsh - history has traditionally placed their origins in Iron Age Central Europe. Oppenheimer's genetic synthesis tells a different story. There is indeed a deep divide between the English and the rest of the British. But as this book reveals the division is many thousands of years older than previously thought. 'Be prepared to have all your cherished notions of English history and Britishness swept away' - Clive Gamble

The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain

The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain PDF Author: Stephen Oppenheimer
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 1780337671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
'British prehistory will never look the same again.' Professor Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge Stephen Oppenheimer's extraordinary scientific detective story combining genetics, linguistics, archaeology and historical record shatters the myths we have come to live by. It demonstrates that the Anglo-Saxon invasions contributed just a tiny fraction (5%) to the English gene pool. Two-thirds of the English people reveal an unbroken line of genetic descent from south-western Europeans arriving long before the first farmers. The bulk of the remaining third arrived between 7,000 and 3,000 years ago as part of long-term north-west European trade and immigration, especially from Scandinavia - and may have brought with them the earliest forms of English language. As for the Celts - the Irish, Scots and Welsh - history has traditionally placed their origins in Iron Age Central Europe. Oppenheimer's genetic synthesis tells a different story. There is indeed a deep divide between the English and the rest of the British. But as this book reveals the division is many thousands of years older than previously thought. 'Be prepared to have all your cherished notions of English history and Britishness swept away' - Clive Gamble

A History of Britain

A History of Britain PDF Author: E. H. Carter
Publisher: Stacey International Publishers
ISBN: 9781906768461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
British & Irish history.

A History of the Modern British Isles, 1529-1603

A History of the Modern British Isles, 1529-1603 PDF Author: Mark Nicholls
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631193340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This volume examines the development of two sovereign nations over seventy-four momentous years.

Early Britain

Early Britain PDF Author: James Harrison
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9780753414750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
This series provides a fact-filled introduction to British history, from the end of the last Ice Age to the 1990s. In 'Early Britain', discover when Stonehenge was built, why the Romans came and where the Vikings settled.

Imperial Intimacies

Imperial Intimacies PDF Author: Hazel V. Carby
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735110
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

Unfinished Empire

Unfinished Empire PDF Author: John Darwin
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 1846146712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 574

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Book Description
A both controversial and comprehensive historical analysis of how the British Empire worked, from Wolfson Prize-winning author and historian John Darwin The British Empire shaped the world in countless ways: repopulating continents, carving out nations, imposing its own language, technology and values. For perhaps two centuries its expansion and final collapse were the single largest determinant of historical events, and it remains surrounded by myth, misconception and controversy today. John Darwin's provocative and richly enjoyable book shows how diverse, contradictory and in many ways chaotic the British Empire really was, controlled by interests that were often at loggerheads, and as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength.

From Plunder to Preservation

From Plunder to Preservation PDF Author: Astrid Swenson
Publisher: OUP/British Academy
ISBN: 9780197265413
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book looks at the effect of the British Empire on the cultures and civilisations of the peoples it ruled by considering the impact of empire on the idea of 'heritage'. Case studies and illustrations show how our understanding of the diverse heritages of world history was forged in the crucible of the British Empire.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation PDF Author: David Edgerton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781846147753
Category : 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
It is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth sequence of administrations, a story of building a welfare state and coping with decline. But what if Britain's history was approached from a different angle? What if we wrote about it with as we might write the history of Germany, say, or the Soviet Union, as a story of power, and of transformation? David Edgerton's major new book breaks out of the confines of traditional British national history to reveal an unfamiliar place, subject to radical discontinuities. Out of a liberal, capitalist, genuinely global power of a unique kind, there arose from the 1940s a distinct British nation. This was committed to internal change, making it much more like the great continental powers. From the 1970s it became bound up both with the European Union and with foreign capital in new ways. Such a perspective produces new and refreshed understanding of everything from the nature of British politics to the performance of British industry. Packed with surprising examples and arguments, The Rise and Fall of the British Nationgives us a grown-up, unsentimental history, one which is crucial at a moment of serious reconsideration for the country and its future.

British History Puzzle Book

British History Puzzle Book PDF Author: P. Parker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780712354400
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Illustrated with beautiful images from the British Library's collection, The British History Puzzle Book will provide hours of entertainment and delight readers with questions for history novices to experts alike. It also spans British history from the first Stone Age settlers to today's post-industrial country. A spectacular, puzzle-fueled, myth-busting journey through the hidden history of Britain in 500 questions. Britain's history is one of the richest and most complex in Europe. From the first Stone Age settlers, through the Roman occupation, the waves of Germanic and Viking invaders, the wars of the Middle Ages, the consolidation of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, the two World Wars and today's post- industrial country, its development is filled with well-known highpoints and lesser-known byways. The British History Puzzle Book poses fascinating and fiendish questions which will test your knowledge of the nation's history to the limit and reveal a treasure trove of astonishing facts. So if you've ever wondered where cricket was invented, how many husbands the reigning queens of England have had, or who the first recorded tourist to visit Britain was, then The British History Puzzle Book will provide all the answers.

A History of Britain

A History of Britain PDF Author: Simon Schama
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1847920136
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
'Great Britain? What was that?' asks Simon Schama at the start of this, the second book of his epic three-volume journey into Britain's past. The answer emerges in The British Wars, a compelling chronicle of the changes that transformed every strand and stratum of British life, faith and thought from 1603 to 1776. Travelling up and down the country and across three continents, Schama explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change - transforming outlooks, allegiances and boundaries. 'The British wars began on the morning on July 23 1637, and the first missiles launched were stools. They flew down the nave of St Giles's Cathedral in Edinburgh and their targets were the Dean and the Bishop...' The first round of the wars had been fired, and fired on grounds of faith. Over the next 200 years, other battles would rage on other battlegrounds - both at home and abroad, on sea and on land, up and down the length of burgeoning Britain, across Europe, America and India. Most would be wars of faith - waged on wide-ranging grounds of political or religious conviction. But as wars of religious passions gave way to campaigns for profit, the British people did come together in the imperial enterprise of 'Britannia Incorporated'. The story of that great alteration is a story of revolution and reaction, inspiration and disenchantment, of progress and catastrophe, and Schama's evocative narrative brings it vividly to life. 'Great Britain? What was that?' Whatever it was, it was a place of dynamic and dramatic change, the shifting patterns of which are skilfully captured on Schama's rich and teeming tapestry of The British Wars.