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The New World (A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Vol. Two)
The New World - A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Vol. Two Author:Winston S. Churchill A History of the English-Speaking Peoples is a four-volume history of Britain and her former colonies and possessions throughout the world, written by Winston Churchill, covering the period from Caesar's invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the beginning of the First World War (1914). It started in 1937 and was finally published 1956?58, delayed seve... more »ral times due to war and his work on other texts. The volumes have been abridged into a single-volume, concise edition.
Churchill, who excelled in history as a child and was himself half-American on his maternal side, had a firm belief in a so-called "special relationship" between the people of Britain with the Commonwealth of Nations united under the Crown (New Zealand, Canada, Australia, South Africa etc.) and the people of the United States who had broken with the Crown and gone their own way. His book thus dealt with the resulting two divisions of the "English-speaking peoples".
At the instance of publisher Newman Flower, Churchill began the history during the 1930s, during the period that his official biographer Martin Gilbert termed the "wilderness years" when he was not in government. Work was interrupted in 1939 when the Second World War broke out and then when Churchill was appointed Prime Minister. After the war finished in 1945, Churchill was busy, first writing his history of that conflict and then as Prime Minister again between 1951 and 1955, and so it was not until the late 1950s, when Churchill was in his early eighties, that he was able to finish the work.
The books were bestsellers and reviewed favorably on both sides of the Atlantic. In the Daily Telegraph, J.H. Plumb wrote: "This history will endure; not only because Sir Winston has written it, but also because of its own inherent virtues ? its narrative power, its fine judgment of war and politics, of soldiers and statesmen, and even more because it reflects a tradition of what Englishmen in the hey-day of their empire thought and felt about their country's past."