Written by one of the world's most distinguished historians of early modern history, A Freeborn People is a provocative exploration of the ways in which the political cultures of the elite and of the common people intersected during the seventeenth century. David Underdown shows that the two worlds were not as separate as historians have often thought them to be; English men and women of all social levels had similar expectations about good government and about the traditional liberties available to them under the "Ancient Constitution". Throughout the century, both levels of politics were also powerfully influenced by prevailing assumptions about gender roles, and, especially in the years before the civil wars, by fears that the country was threatened by evil forces of satanic inversion. This dramatic reinterpretation of the Stuart period, based on the author's acclaimed 1992 Ford Lectures, begins a new chapter in the continuing debate over the historical meaning of Britain's seventeenth-century revolutions.

In the mage realms of Elaria, those born with magic rule and those without serve at their mercy. Magic manifests in the form of specific abilities, affording mages the ability to wield fire or ice or gifting others clairvoyance or the ability to heal. Since magic is passed down genetically, those strong in magic are more likely to produce heirs similarly gifted. Because of this, noble houses throughout the ages have wed their heirs to those who possess strong magical abilities, thus strengthening their houses.In this world ruled by magic, Ethanos Blagen is the first person born immune to its power, whether to his benefit or harm, rendering him immune to those who wield it. Ethan is also gifted with great strength, an ability to self-heal, and an ability to rapidly learn and master most crafts, skills, or languages. With these abilities and his immunity to magic, Ethan's mere existence quickly becomes a threat to the social order of Elaria.Ethan is the firstborn son of the king of Astaria, Bronus Blagen, who himself is a lightning lord, the first mage born in five hundred years with the ability to cast lightning. Such a power sets King Bronus far above his contemporaries.Though born the heir to Astaria, Ethan hates kneeling and having others kneel to him and wants nothing to do with the throne, wishing only for his freedom and to choose his own path. His desire for freedom causes contention with his overbearing father, which leads to a series of adventures, once his grandfather uncovers a portal into a different world. Ethan is only drawn back to Elaria when war comes to his father's realm.At its heart, Free Born is about Ethan's desire to follow his free spirit, ignoring and often mocking the social mores that separate people into higher and lower castes, based solely on their ability to use magic. Though Ethan is free because he is free from magic and free from harm, it is his desire to be free from his duties as heir of Astaria that drives him. Ethan's great-grandfather revealed to him when he was a child of a prophecy called the Free Born, a prophetic figure that would bring ultimate freedom to all the people of Elaria. Ethan ignored the prophecy, believing one could not be truly free if one was bound to destiny.During his travels, he encounters a Vellesian mage healer named Allie. They are instantly drawn to one another by a power neither can fully comprehend. Allie harbors a dark secret that reveals an alternate destiny from his great-grandfather's vision, calling into question if he is truly Free Born or something far more foreboding.Will his destiny free the world or enslave it forever?

The Leveller movement of the 1640s campaigned for religious toleration and a radical remaking of politics in post-civil war England. This book, the first full-length study of the Levellers for fifty years, offers a fresh analysis of the originality and character of Leveller thought. Challenging received ideas about the Levellers as social contract theorists and Leveller thought as a mere radicalisation of parliamentarian thought, Foxley shows that the Levellers’ originality lay in their subtle and unexpected combination of different strands within parliamentarianism. The book takes full account of recent scholarship, and contributes to historical debates on the development of radical and republican politics in the civil war period, the nature of tolerationist thought, the significance of the Leveller movement and the extent of the Levellers’ influence in the ranks of the New Model Army.

Throughout his life, Jasper Nall was transfixed by the stories his mother and grandmother told - stories of the family's origins and plantation life in Alabama and the Carolinas. These he recorded with his own recollections in this series of dictated memoirs transcribed by his daughter Maude in 1936.

Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age. Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion. Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.