Great Feuds in History: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever - Hardcover

In Great Feuds in History, bestselling author Colin Evans puts us in the middle of ten of history’s most significant struggles–high-stakes personal conflicts that had a lasting impact on the societies around them and on the generations that followed. Evans offers us an in-depth look at the personalities involved in the conflicts and the behind-the-scenes circumstances that caused these rivalries to take hold and fester. He asks, for instance, what was at the heart of the bitter, years-long feud between Queen Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots? Was it a religious battle between the Protestant monarch and Mary’s pious Catholicism, as on the surface it seemed–or something more personal between the ambitious Virgin Queen and her wild and sexually impetuous counterpart?

Evans takes us to colonial America to find out how two of the new nation’s most intelligent and influential founding fathers–Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton–wound up dueling to the death like common hooligans. And he follows the bloody trail of Stalin as he ruthlessly pursues the one man who stands between him and ultimate power over Russia’s millions–Lenin’s favorite, the brilliant, idealistic, and fatally flawed Trotsky.

Vividly re-creating the drama of these clashes, Great Feuds in History discloses the darker side of history’s grandest figures and the compulsions that drove them with such single-minded fury–sometimes to the point of destruction. Spanning five hundred years of political rivalry, spiritual conflict, and ancestral discord, here are ten fascinating true tales of ambition, jealousy, fear, and pride that are as gripping and meaningful today as they were in their own turbulent times.

• Queen Elizabeth I versus Mary, Queen of Scots
• English parliament versus King Charles I
• Aaron Burr versus Alexander Hamilton
• The Hatfields versus the McCoys
• Joseph Stalin versus Leon Trotsky
• Roald Amundsen versus Robert Scott
• The Duchess of Windsor versus the Queen Mother
• Bernard Law Montgomery versus George Patton
• Lyndon B. Johnson versus Robert F. Kennedy
• J. Edgar Hoover versus Martin Luther King Jr.