This book 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.

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

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.

ISBN: 0 563 48709 7

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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.

Brilliantly and lucidly written by one of the most singular voices in contemporary non-fiction, this volume of provocative and often idiosyncratic essays makes hugely satisfying reading for lovers of both art and social history.

In contains pieces on artists as diverse as David Hockney, Rembrandt, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and on such subjects as "the unforgettable peculiarity" of Stanley Spencer.

From the author whose writing has been called "sublime" and whose ability to bring art and history vividly to life has earned him admiration worldwide, HANG-UPS is Schama's rallying cry for the art lover to look again at familiar works of art and their artists -- and embrace a new way of seeing.

ISBN: 0 563 52173 2

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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.

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.

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.

ISBN: 1 86207 135 7

W H Smith Literary Award 1995

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.

ISBN: 0 00 686348 5

Wolfson Prize for History

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.

ISBN: 0 00 686156 3

NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction 1990

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.

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.

ISBN: 0 00 686136 9