Professor Simon Schama CBE

Synopsis

In November 2008 the United States will elect a new President. But the imminent collapse of twenty years of Republican conservativism means the country is already conducting an intense self-examination about the trajectory of its history; how it came to find itself in multiple crises and how an America that began as 'the last, best hope of earth' came to be so suspected and vilified around much of the world. "The American Future: A History", written by an author who has spent half his life there, takes the long view of how the United States has come to this anguished moment of truth about its own identity as a nation and its place in the world.In each of the chapters devoted to the most compelling issues facing Americans now - the projection of power ("American war"); race, immigration and the problematic promise of e pluribus unum ("American skin"); the intensity of religious conviction in public life ("American fervour"); the mystique of American land and its battles with the imperatives of profit ('American Plenty'- Schama traces the deep history of the present crisis. Cumulatively the chapters build into a history of American exceptionalism - the 'American difference' that means so much to its people but which has led it into calamities as well as triumphs. "The American Future: A History" argues that if you want to know what is truly at stake, you need to absorb these stories and understand this history - for understanding is the condition of hope. 

"Simon Schama's book is a brilliant antidote to anti-Americanism...it is a searchlight sweeping the horizon of American history". Sunday Times.

"A more inspiring evocation of the spirit of liberal America - past, present and future - does not exist." Financial Times.

Synopsis
Analysis of eight works of art and chronicle of the defining moments of their creation.

Synopsis
Set against the backdrop of the American Revolution and its aftermath, Rough Crossings is the gripping, astonishing epic of the struggle for freedom by tens of thousands of slaves who believed that their future as free men and women was bound up with staying British, not becoming American. The decision to offer slaves who defected to the British their liberty began in military strategy, but it unleashed the greatest mass uprising in American history by tens of thousands of slaves - Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom even when they knew that the English were far from being saints when it came to slavery. With powerfully vivid story-telling, often spoken through the voices of the blacks themselves, as well as the white abolitionists who became their emancipators and protectors, Schama follows the odyssey of the escaped blacks into the fires of the war, the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, and into inhospitable Nova Scotia where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed in their promises to receive land. Along the way, Rough Crossings keeps company with a cast of extraordinary characters: Granville Sharp, the flute-playing father-figure of slave freedom; David George, runaway slave and Baptist preacher; Thomas Peters, sergeant in the British Black Pioneers and the first true African-American politician. Most compelling of all, there is Lieutenant John Clarkson, young, passionate, resourceful and high-strung, the Moses of this, one of the great Exoduses in British history. Clarksons journal of the ingathering in Nova Scotia, the ocean crossing and the harrowing experience of the first year in Sierra Leone is one of the most powerful documents of the history of liberty. Although the extraordinary story that unfolds in Rough Crossings would ultimately prove to be bitterly tragic, it was not without its moments of redemption, promises kept as well as betrayed. If there is heartbreak waiting in its pages there is also rejoicing. No one who reads it will ever feel the same way again about what it means to be British, American - and black.

Synopsis
Pre-eminent author and art historian Simon Schama has written widely on art for many years to great acclaim. In HANG-UPS, a personal selection of his articles from, amongst others, the NEW YORKER, appears in Britain for the first time.

Synopsis
To understand what Britain has become we need to know what it has been before. What exactly is it to be British? Simon Schama, one of the most original and exciting historians in the English-speaking world today, attempts to answer this question in his two-volume A History of Britain. The first volume, At the Edge of the World 3000BC-AD1603, tells the story of Britain from the earliest settlements, found in the Orkneys, to the death of Elizabeth.

Synopsis
For Rembrandt, as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing, the wardrobe and face-paint, the full repertoire and gesture and grimace, the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes, the belly-laugh and the half-stifled sob.

Synopsis
On 13 September 1759, General James Wolfe, having led the British troops up the St Lawrence to victory in the Battle of Quebec, died on the Heights of Abraham. Schama examines this death, and how Wolfe was made to die again - through the spectacular painting by Benjamin West, and through the writings of the 19th-century historian Francis Parkman. Schama's second death concerns Parkman's uncle, George Parkman of Harvard Medical College, who disappeared in 1849 in mysterious circumstances and who was rumoured to have been murdered by a colleague.

Synopsis

How does environment influence history? How are events and personalities, wars and nationalities shaped by their surroundings, by the very rise and fall of earth, water and forest? This work attempts to answer these questions and gives a portrait of the world around us and how it shapes us.

Winner of the W H Smith Literary Award 1995.

Synopsis

Schama paints a portrait of the Dutch nation at the point of its collapse, as grandeur sinks towards catastrophe - an incapable ruler, chaos in government, famine and poverty spreading across the land, an army and fleet pathetically inadequate to safeguard the Republic's independence.

Wolfson Prize for History

Synopsis

At the heart of this account is the story of the transformation of "subjects" to "citizens". The author aims to show a France infatuated with novelty and technology in the midst of dramatic economic change. The darkening of the original euphoric vision of liberty into a scenario of hunger, anger, terror and death is the author's theme, as he draws on available material of social and cultural history.

NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction 1990

Synopsis
This social and cultural study traces how in the 17th century a modest assortment of farming, fishing and shipping communities, without shared language, religion or government, transformed itself into a formidable world empire, the Dutch Republic.