Tying into the official theme for the 2009 Inauguration, 'A New Birth of Freedom' from Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address, Penguin presents a keepsake edition commemorating the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama with words of the two great thinkers and writers who have helped shape him politically, and personally: Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson, complementing Obama's own inaugural address.

Having Lincoln and Emerson's most influential, memorable, and eloquent words along with Obama's much-anticipated historical inaugural address will be a gift of inspiration and a memento for generations.

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, Cundill History Prize, Fage and Oliver Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award

Winner of the Historical Writers' Association Non-Fiction Crown 2020
Winner of the American Historical Association's Jerry Bentley Prize in World History 2020
Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019

An Observer and Wall Street Journal Book of the Year 2019

A groundbreaking history that will transform our view of West Africa

By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and Islamic world since around 1000, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies - most importantly shells: the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil.

Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. It reconstructs the world of kingdoms whose existence (like those of Europe) revolved around warfare, taxation, trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, royal display and extravagance, and the production of art.

Over time, the relationship between Africa and Europe revolved ever more around the trade in slaves, damaging Africa's relative political and economic power as the terms of monetary exchange shifted drastically in Europe's favour. In spite of these growing capital imbalances, longstanding contacts ensured remarkable connections between the Age of Revolution in Europe and America and the birth of a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa.

A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters, and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions.

'Astonishing, staggering' Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph

The definitive modern biography of the great slave leader, military genius and revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture

The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life he confronted some of the dominant forces of his age - slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. Treacherously seized by Napoleon's invading army in 1802, this charismatic figure ended his days, in Wordsworth's phrase, 'the most unhappy man of men', imprisoned in a fortress in France.

Black Spartacus draws on a wealth of archival material, much of it overlooked by previous biographers, to follow every step of Louverture's singular journey, from his triumphs against French, Spanish and British troops to his skilful regional diplomacy, his Machiavellian dealings with successive French colonial administrators and his bold promulgation of an autonomous Constitution. Sudhir Hazareesingh shows that Louverture developed his unique vision and leadership not solely in response to imported Enlightenment ideals and revolutionary events in Europe and the Americas, but through a hybrid heritage of fraternal slave organisations, Caribbean mysticism and African political traditions. Above all, Hazareesingh retrieves Louverture's rousing voice and force of personality, making this the most engaging, as well as the most complete, biography to date.

After his death in the French fortress, Louverture became a figure of legend, a beacon for slaves across the Atlantic and for generations of European republicans and progressive figures in the Americas. He inspired the anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass, the most eminent nineteenth-century African-American; his emancipatory struggle was hailed by those who defied imperial and colonial rule well into the twentieth. In the modern era, his life informed the French poet Aimé Césaire's seminal idea of négritude and has been celebrated in a remarkable range of plays, songs, novels and statues. Here, in all its drama, is the epic story of the world's first black superhero.

Bestselling guide to all 1,007 UNESCO World Heritage sites. Fully updated to include the latest sites added to the World Heritage List in June 2014. The List is managed by the World Heritage Committee and each site is judged under strict criteria - only the world's most spectacular and extraordinary sites make it on to the List.

UNESCO World Heritage sites include some of the most famous places in the world, such as the ancient Nabatean city of Petra in Jordan, the legendary Acropolis in Athens, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and Machu Picchu, the 'Lost City of the Incas', in Peru.

26 sites were added to the List by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in June 2014. These included the 1000th site, Okavango Delta in Botswana, and Myanmar's first property, Pyu Ancient Cities. Other sites included Historic Jeddah, the Gate to Makkah (Saudi Arabia), Grand Canal (China) and the Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont (Italy).

• Descriptions of all 1007 UNESCO World Heritage sites
• Location map for every site
• Over 700 colour photographs

Background
The World Heritage List includes properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value. In 1972 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the Convention concerning the Protection of the World's Cultural and Natural Heritage. Since then, 1007 sites in 161 countries have been inscribed onto the list, 779 of which are cultural, 197 natural and 31 mixed properties.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) seeks to encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.