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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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Sarah Foot, Veiled Women (2000)
Sarah Foot left the Department to become the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford in 2007. This book she wrote whilst teaching in the Department: it is widely acknowledged as the definitive study of female religious groups in Anglo-Saxon England.
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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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Simon Walker, The Lancastrian affinity, 1361-1399 (1990)
Simon Walker, who joined the Department in 1984, died tragically young in 2004. This was his first book, completed while teaching here: a thorough and penetrating study of late medieval English society and politics.
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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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Colin Holmes, John Bull’s island: immigration and British society, 1871-1971 (1988)
Immigration is a topic that tends always to be seen as something that is somehow ‘new’. This book showed that the question has a long history behind it, and benefits from being considered in a properly historical context.
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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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Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: the industrialization of Europe (1981)
Against notions prevalent at the time that industrialisation was a process that could be easily copied in different places at different times, Pollard showed in this book that in reality, every country in Europe had its own, specific kind of industrialisation, never identical to any other.
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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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Clyde Binfield, So down to prayers: studies in English non-conformity, 1780-1920 (1977)
This book was an important defence of Nonconformity, which Binfield argued represented an answer to the problems of a newly industrialised society.
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Edith Mary Johnston, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1974)
Johnston was a pioneer in the history of Ireland in this period: this book synthesised some of this work, bringing it to a wider audience.
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Edmund King, Peterborough Abbey (1973)
Edmund King’s later work turned to King Stephen, the subject of his Special Subject teaching in Sheffield for many years, and on whom recently published a monograph.
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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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William Carr, A History of Germany, 1815-1990 (1969)
Noted for its remarkable capacity to explain the notorious Schleswig-Holstein question, Carr argued in this book that Germany was much less conservative in 1914 than historians had generally thought.
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David Luscombe, The school of Peter Abelard (1969)
This was the first book published on Abelard, the great radical thinker of the twelfth century, by David Luscombe, marking out his mastery of a field that he would continue to explore in Sheffield over a series of later publications.
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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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TS Ashton, Economic History of England: the 18th century (1955)
This book argued that the importance of the 18th century in England’s economic history had been overstated, and rather gloomily emphasised the limits of what could be known about why things changed. Ashton ended his career at the LSE, but taught in Sheffield from 1912-1919.
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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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Margery Perham (with J.Simmons), African Discovery (1948)
Margery Perham was a famous writer on African affairs. Her love of the continent was inspired by a visit to Somaliland whilst teaching in the Department of History, which led her to offer a course on imperial history here. This book was the first publication arising from this shift in her interests.
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J.E.Tyler, The struggle for imperial unity (1938)
This book was the first to argue that ‘imperial unity’ was an important theme in British history from at least as early as 1868.
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