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Mark Greengrass, Governing Passions: peace and reform in the French kingdom, 1576-1585 (2007)
France in the late sixteenth century was in turmoil, still reeling from the St Bartolomew's Day massacre. This book studies how the country set about reforms that would make France into the leading European power in the seventeenth century, before the relay was taken by a resurgent England.
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Dominic Sandbrook, Eugene McCarthy and the rise and fall of postwar American liberalism (2004)
Dominic Sandbrook's first book, based on his PhD research, was published while he was lecturing at the Department. It is a biography of an American politician, but also a history of a set of ideas that defined American politics for a generation.
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Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris
(1997)
The first of Sir Ian Kershaw's acclaimed two-part study of the dictator, Hubris studies how the man came to wield such power, from such unpromising beginnings. The book was written whilst Ian was head of department here in Sheffield (now retired, he remains the honorary president of the History Society)
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Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and politics in antebellum America (1997)
Today the evangelical voice in American politics is famously strong. This book examines how evangelicals first engaged in secular politics, giving American politics a religious aspect that it retains to this day.
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Patrick Collinson, The birthpangs of Protestant England: religious and cultural change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1988)
Patrick Collinson, who died in 2011, was a renowned historian of early modern England. This book, based on a lecture series he gave whilst teaching in Sheffield, looks at why - and how - England became a Protestant country.
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RI Moore, The formation of a persecuting society: power and deviance in western Europe, 950-1250 (1987)
In this bold and hugely influential book, written while RI Moore taught in Sheffield, the author argued that Europe became a society characterised by an intolerance of minorities in the twelfth century - and that it has remained so ever since.
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Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil war
(1985)
The English civil war was not inevitable: in fact, it came as a surprise to many at the time. This book re-examined precisely how a nation slipped into a terrible war, reshaping the field.
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Michael Bentley, Politics without Democracy: Great Britain 1815-1914 (1984)
How did Britain become a democratic country whilst avoiding the wars and internal conflicts that accompanied this transition elsewhere? This book explores this question. Published almost thirty years ago, it remains a classic exposition of an issue which still resonates today.
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John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump: Britain in the Great Depression (1977)
Republished as recently as 2009, this classic work reassessed the state of the economy in the 1930s, suggesting that contrary to the myths, living standards in fact rose during this period. Controversial at the time, but widely read even today.
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Ken Haley, The Dutch in the seventeenth century
(1972)
An influential book that brought the 'golden age' of the Netherlands, renowned for its painting, to an audience beyond the University – a kind of outreach that the Department continues to foster today.
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George Potter, The New Cambridge Modern History, vol.1: the Renaissance, 1493-1520 (1957)
George Potter was the Head of Department in the 1970s. He published extensively on the early modern period, and edited this book, which in its day was a widely-respected synthesis of the breakthroughs in our understanding of the Renaissance.
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Edward Miller, The Abbey and the bishopric of Ely: the social history of an ecclesiastical estate (1951)
The Abbey and the bishopric of Ely, republished by Cambridge in 1969 when Miller was teaching in Sheffield, is a classic work of medieval social history, using the rich documention from the fenland monastery to reconstruct what life was like in a wealthy part of England so long ago.
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