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What is history? In his 2001 book In Defence of History, British historian Richard J. Evans debates the very nature of the subject. Certain thinkers known as postmodernists consider history to be not very far removed from a work of fiction, something based on a scholar's own interpretation of the past. Evans, however, argues that historians do not have free reign. Rather, they are constrained and enabled by the nature of the surviving evidence.

Published in 1980, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Strategy went against the accepted wisdom of the time that said firms should focus on expanding their market share. Porter claimed they should, in fact, analyze the five forces that mold the environment in which they compete: new entrants, substitute products, buyers, suppliers, and industry rivals. Then they could rationally choose one of three "generic strategies" - lowering cost, differentiating their product, or catering to a niche market.

English naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The idea of evolution and that all earth's species have descended from a common ancestor had already been around for some time. What was new about Darwin's work was that it found a way to explain evolution using a theory called natural selection. This claimed that species change in small ways, gradually, over long periods of time; the individuals who happen to be best suited to their environment survive.

Politics as a Vocation examines what makes good political leaders and explores the effects of political action on modern societies. On one level it summarizes the political scholarship of one of the founding fathers of social science. On another it reflects a leading German academic and political activist's practical concerns about the future at a time of great volatility following defeat in World War I.

In The Age of Revolution, renowned British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm focuses on the historical period from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th. He concludes that the "dual revolutions" of the time - the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution - changed the way the whole world thought about politics and power, and fundamentally shaped the modern era.

American lawyer-turned-sociologist David Riesman published his first book, The Lonely Crowd, in 1950. Aimed at academics, it nonetheless gained a large popular audience. In it, Riesman explores the links between social character - the ways in which members of a society are similar to one another - and social structures. Riesman's work popularized sociology, helping to establish it as an academic discipline, and today it provides a fascinating window into the 1950s American psyche.

Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a key text in the development of what we now know as feminism. Written in the atmosphere created by the French Revolution, which made radical change seem possible, Wollstonecraft's work challenges the idea that society's oppression of women is entirely natural. While her male contemporaries happily argued for the fundamental freedoms of all men, few were interested in extending these revolutionary rights to women.

Having witnessed some negative effects of democratic revolutions in his native France, Tocqueville visited America in 1831 to see what a functioning republic looked like. His main concerns were that democracy could make people too dependent on the state and that minority voices might not be heard - a problem he termed "the Tyranny of the Majority". By examining America thoroughly, Tocqueville hoped to show how a democratic system could avoid these pitfalls.

World Order draws together Henry Kissinger's thinking on how we make sense of the world politically. Kissinger identifies four principal competing methods by which order has been and is still sought. Those four conceptions are European, Chinese, Islamic, and American. None of these has been accepted as dominant. Kissinger asks whether a new, universal world order can be developed today.

In her 1958 work, political theorist Hannah Arendt asks two fundamental questions: "Under what conditions do politics emerge?" and "Under what conditions can politics be eliminated?" In searching for answers she turns some long-established thinking on its head. Ancient political philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle believed that a life spent thinking was more important than an active life of labor, work, and action. But Arendt argues that political action is every bit as important as political thinking.

In his 1807 work Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel introduced the world to his philosophical system. His most influential work - and the culmination of the German Idealist movement begun in the late 18th century as a response to the works of Immanuel Kant - the book remains one of the undisputed classics of Western thought.

Its arguments would go on to shape global economics and influence world leaders in the late 20th century, but Capitalism and Freedom was largely ignored when it was first published in 1962. The first work written for the general public by American economist Milton Friedman, the book argues that a free market with little government interference is the best way to run society.

Competitors have always existed in business, but what if it were possible to render your competition irrelevant? This is the critical question posed in W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's book Blue Ocean Strategy. According to Kim and Mauborgne, the path to success of any company does not lie in taking on potential competitors but in the creation of "blue oceans" in uncontested market space. The authors offer analytical frameworks and tools to help businesses identify and capitalize on these new opportunities.

William worked on The Principles of Psychology throughout the 1880s, while teaching psychology and philosophy at Harvard University. He drew together various styles of science to create a unified whole, and to establish psychology as a valid discipline. Not only did he achieve this, but he also created concepts - such as thought being a "stream of consciousness" - that have found their way into both the arts, and popular conversation.

In the 1960s, researchers into human memory began to understand memory as operating under two systems. The first was a short-term system handling information for mere seconds. The second was a long-term system capable of managing information indefinitely. They also discovered, however, that short-term memory was not simply a filing cabinet, but was actively working on cognitive - or mental - tasks. This is how the phrase "working memory" developed.

First published in 1651, Leviathan drove important discussions about where kings get their authority to rule and what those kings must, in turn, do for their people. This is known as the "social contract". Thomas Hobbes wrote the book while exiled from his native England following the English Civil War that unseated King Charles I. In the face of England's radical - if temporary - rejection of its monarchy, Hobbes wanted to explain why it was important to have a strong central government, which in his time meant having a sovereign at its head.

Published in 1974, Roll Jordan, Roll is American historian Eugene Genovese's epic study of slavery in the United States in the late 18th and 19th centuries. It provides a nuanced understanding of the relationship between master and slave. Slave owners saw it as their duty to limit slaves' freedoms for their own good, as a father might deal with his children. But Genovese looked beyond this notion of paternalism to suggest the relationship was more complex.

A self-educated man, Eric Hoffer was most likely born in 1898. He wrote in his spare time after doing shifts on the San Francisco docks, where he continued to work, even after becoming a successful author. Hoffer began writing The True Believer in the 1940s, as Nazism and fascism spread across Europe. Most analysts who were trying to work out how these movements became so powerful focused on their leaders and the ideas they trumpeted.

Do people always act rationally and in their own best interests? US economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein did not believe so, and were convinced that psychological factors often stopped people from making the best decisions. Their 2008 work Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness argues that governments should "nudge" citizens to make better choices in all sorts of areas, from eating habits, to health, to financial planning.

In 1999's Everyday Stalinism, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick rejects the common practice of simplistically treating the Soviet Union as a totalitarian government that tightly controlled its citizens. She takes advantage of vast archives that were released after the Cold War to examine Soviet society "from below" - looking at how ordinary citizens coped with shortages and the general sense of fear created by the state.