Social and cultural history Books

Book SynopsisAn extraordinary account - from firsthand sources - of upper class women and the active part they took in the WarPre-war debutantes were members of the most protected, not to say isolated, stratum of 20th-century society: the young (17-20) unmarried daughters of the British upper classes. For most of them, the war changed all that for ever. It meant independence and the shock of the new, and daily exposure to customs and attitudes that must have seemed completely alien to them. For many, the almost military regime of an upper class childhood meant they were well suited for the no-nonsense approach needed in wartime. This book records the extraordinary diversity of challenges, shocks and responsibilities they faced - as chauffeurs, couriers, ambulance-drivers, nurses, pilots, spies, decoders, factory workers, farmers, land girls, as well as in the Women''s Services. How much did class barriers really come down? Did they stick with their own sort? And what aboutTrade ReviewA wonderful slice of social history, and Anne de Courcy is a skilled interviewer with a sure eye for the telling quotation or the stand-out detail * MAIL ON SUNDAY *Produces some memorable cameos. Among the most memorable are those of a young girl delivering local post from her grandmother's Scottish estate with a 4.10 rifle slung over her shoulder, ready to fire at German planes, oddest of all, perhaps, is an account from one of Lord Rothermere's daughters, of tea being served on the terrace by a butler in white gloves while a dogfight raged overhead -- Miranda SeymourDespite their odd upbringing and closeted lives, the young gels of upper-class England rose to the challenge of the Second World War with grit and gumption * DAILY TELEGRAPH *This book records the extraordinary diversity of challenges, shocks and responsibilities they faced - as chauffeurs, couriers, ambulance-drivers, nurses, pilots, spies, decoders, factory workers, farmers, land girls, as well as in the Women's Services. * EVENING STANDARD *She captures within one book a vivid impression of those years, a short history of the women's services, a closely focused view of an exotic corner of social history, and a lot of human interest. It all makes riveting reading * LITERARY REVIEW *A tale of derring-do, make do and make-up... De Courcy reveals the innocence and bravery of these young women. * EXPRESS *DEBS AT WAR covers a quirky and original subject and tells some cracking human interest stories. * HAM & HIGH *an irresistible account of high spirits, derring-do and real old-fashioned bravery * EVENING STANDARD *

Read more less

Book SynopsisIs Latinidad a racial or an ethnic designation? Both? Neither? The increasing recognition of diversity within Latinx communities and the well-known story of shifting census designations have cast doubt on the idea that Latinidad is a race, akin to white or Black. And the mainstream media constantly cover the browning of the United States, as though the racial character of Latinidad were self-evident. Many scholars have argued that the uncertainty surrounding Latinidad is emancipatory: by queering race-by upsetting assumptions about categories of human difference-Latinidad destabilizes the architecture of oppression. But Laura Grappo is less sanguine. She draws on case studies including the San Antonio Four (Latinas who were wrongfully accused of child sex abuse); the football star Aaron Hernandez's incarceration and suicide; Lorena Bobbitt, the headline-grabbing Ecuadorian domestic-abuse survivor; and controversies over the racial identities of public Latinx figures to show how mediaTrade Review[Conjured Bodies] provides an accessible and significant exploration of the construct of race in the U.S. Grappo’s book provides an insightful and engaging discussion of the importance of understanding both the value and danger of malleability...Grappo’s book provides thought provoking and gripping arguments about the possible consequences, harms, and issues of conjured identities, images, and bodies that is well positioned in current explorations of intersectionality...a necessary read for any serious student and scholar of Latinidad. * Ethnic and Racial Studies *Conjured Bodies expands the understanding of the politics of race and sexuality within Latinidad—the notion of a shared Latin American identity—by introducing readers to the concepts of Latinx ambiguity and queer racialization...Conjured Bodies is a vital addition to mainstream media research within Latinx studies, media studies, queer studies, and critical ethnic studies…Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Conjured Bodies is an impactful study that opens conversations on spectrality and racial categorizations, allowing scholars in Latinx studies, gender studies, LGBTQ+ studies, media studies, carceral studies, and hauntology to build on the author’s interdisciplinary research. * Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies *Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. “The browning of America”: Conjured Bodies and Queer Racialization Chapter 1. “This could be Satanic-related”: Fantasies of Innocence and Criminalization in the Case of the San Antonio Four Chapter 2. “A life is worth more than a penis”: Lorena (Gallo) Bobbitt and the Domestication of Abuse Chapter 3. “A troubled, battered mind”: The Queer Lives and Deaths of Aaron Hernandez, 1989–2017 Chapter 4. “Who’s going to tell Sammy Sosa he is Afro-Latino?”: Transraciality and Panethnic Latinx Authenticity Conclusion. “Feeling brown”: Conjuring Latinidad, Here and Now Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requTrade Review“Offering a new way of thinking about black soundwork as an understanding of text, Anthony Reed makes a deep theoretical intervention in black studies by opening up the role of recordings in the black aesthetic avant-garde. The beauty and appeal of Soundworks lies in Reed's fresh focus on the records that allow us to hear the more ephemeral and unrecordable situation of blackness.” -- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of * Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics *“Anthony Reed adds his instrument to the slowly swelling chorus of intently listening, jazzed readers and critics. We've gone from the veritable whisper to a scream, and now is the time to consider the black media concept we have been inhabiting. Reed argues for an ‘overhearing,’ a phonographic mode of what he terms disalienation. Baraka called it ‘word-music’ form. Whatever we term it, it remains Black soundwork. Give it a listen.” -- Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of * Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation *"Reed’s work . . . clears needed space to think through Black creative production on its own terms, and likewise, to see its revolutionary and radical ambitions as immanent expressions of Black soundwork. Overall, Soundworks offers a rich and nuanced account of media and materiality that will aid scholars in rethinking the conceptual tools and labor with which we approach Black music." -- Celeste Day Moore * Journal of Musicological Research *"[T]his book is a vital addition to the growing secondary literature about the jazz-poetry interface. . . . Reed is certainly qualified to address this topic, because in addition to being an established scholar he writes poetry and is a musician. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- B. Wallenstein * Choice *"The most satisfying aspects of Soundworks are found in Reed’s analysis of the recordings and performances he examines. Moreover, it is these sections that contain Reed’s best writing. He seems able to match the tone of his analysis and description of the musical and poetic personalities of these artists, and his enthusiasm for their art is evident." -- Duncan Heining * Popular Music *"A critical contribution to music, jazz, and Black studies in particular. . . . A richly poetic text, whose depth and subtlety rewards patient, repeated engagement." -- Dan DiPiero * Journal of Popular Music Studies *“It is significant that Reed describes this work as recreation, and that he highlights the significance of remediation in Black soundwork. One of this book’s key innovations is that it is a media history of poetry, and an examination of poetry’s work as mediation.” -- Sarah Dowling * Poetics *"The conceptualization of soundwork as both a textual and auditory practice is perhaps the most revelatory contribution made by Reed’s book, for it is a concept whose salience extends beyond phonographic poetry or black radical performance. . . . Across the book, Reed balances heady theoretical imaginings of contingent practices of freedom with attentive close listening to mediated forms of black sound." -- Jessica E. Teague * Contemporary Literature *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. Black Sonic: Textuality 1 1. Voice Prints: Toward a Black Media Concept 23 2. Communities in Transition: A Poetics of Black Communism 61 3. Tomorrow is the Question! Amiri Baraka's Poetics for a Post-Revolutionary Age 103 4. Body/Language: The Semiotics and Poetics of Improvisation and Black Embodiment 143 Coda. No Simple Explanations 181 Notes 195 Bibliography 235 Index 251

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn No One''s Witness Syd Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“No one / bears witness for the / witness”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One''s Witness demonstrates the necessity of confronting the Nazi holocaust in relation to transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. Thinking along with black feminist theory''s notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One''s Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing, its dangerous perhaps. No One operates outside the bounds of the sovereign individual, hauntologically informed by the fleshly no-thingneTrade Review“Drawing on a powerful critical network of ideas and a refreshing juxtaposition of theorists, Syd Zolf rethinks the critical underpinnings of the examinations of race, history, society, culture, ontology, and ideas of witnessing. As a critical-theoretical intervention and a lyric prose artifact, No One’s Witness will appeal not only to theorists and critics, but also to poets, professors, and students.” -- John Keene, author of * Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas *“Renewing the poetics of survival and witnessing, Syd Zolf asks what it means to witness as No One, where No One is less a position than a form or mode of responsiveness that emerges in the continuing aftermath of annihilation. This No One is not one, yet it offers here a way of bearing witness in forms both monstrous and rife with possible futures. In this book poetics is the interruptive work of philosophy and poetry taken together. No One's Witness shows in brilliant and moving ways how language must change to come close to registering the living aftermath of destruction.” -- Judith Butler, author of * The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind *"A valuable resource for those interested in German literature or Black history and other examples of human-made violence. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- R. C. Conard * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Opening 1 1. No 21 2. [ ] 43 3. one(s) 54 4. No One 62 5. bear(s) 73 6. witness 81 7. for 101 8. the 113 9. witness(es) 121 Appendix 130 Notes 133 Bibliography 157 Index 171

Read more less

Book SynopsisMark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings by William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Ša to rethink and reframe contemporary debates around recognition, refusal, and resurgence for Indigenous peoples.Trade Review“Mark Rifkin examines important nineteenth-century Native literary figures' engagement with settler publics by laying out a nuanced introspection of their ‘portraits of peoplehood’ during tumultuous contexts and the costs of such representativity that foster tension in the present day. He resituates the discussion of recognition to this earlier period in order to detour from a settler stronghold on political definitions still used to impact the daily life of Indigenous peoples. Delving deep into the political spheres of violence and the nuanced political forms of Indigenous life that emerge, Rifkin gives us further grounds to explore the foundations and formations of slippery recognition politics.” -- Mishuana Goeman, Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, University of California, Los Angeles“Presenting new, insightful, nuanced, and persuasive readings of four key figures in nineteenth-century Native American literature, Speaking for the People is both timely and poised to become a classic study in Native and Indigenous studies, anthropology, and American literary studies. An interdisciplinary tour de force.” -- Birgit Brander Rasmussen, author of * Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature *"Speaking for the People is as useful for scholars and students of contemporary indigenous studies as it is for those pursuing the study of 19th-century literature, politics, and indigenous peoples. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- J. J. Donahue * Choice *"In Speaking for the People Mark Rifkin contributes to the ongoing critical conversation regarding Indigenous recognition. In richly historicized chapters he questions the process of how Indigenous leaders . . . consciously stage the 'legitimacy of their entry' into the discursive frameworks of coloniality." -- Caitlin Simmons * Western American Literature *"Speaking for the People reasserts the usefulness and relevance of literary studies in fashioning Indigenous political theory. Rifkin demonstrates how nineteenth-century Native texts have had to navigate settler worldings to express peoplehood and how their intellectual labor of negotiatedness should inspire present-day scholarship. His demonstration is as compelling as it is unsettling." -- Mathilde Louette * Transatlantica *"Speaking for the People . . . is valuable for literary scholars and Indigenous scholars alike to articulate the complexity of Indigenous activism in a settler state." -- Alison Russell * New England Quarterly *"Speaking for the People has generated a rich set of coordinates and queries for analyzing nineteenth-century Native writing, and Rifkin’s readings model how these questions take us deep into nineteenth-century Native political discussions while resonating in contemporary NAIS scholarship." -- Kelly Wisecup * Native American and Indigenous Studies *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. What's in a Nation? Cherokee Vanguardism in Elias Boudinot's Letters 35 2. Experiments in Signifying Sovereignty: Exemplarity and the Politics of Southern New England in William Apess 77 3. Among Ghost Dances: Sarah Winnemucca and the Production of Paiute Identity 127 4. The Native Informant Speaks: The Politics of Ethnographic Subjectivity in Zitkala-Ša's Autobiographical Stories 176 Coda. On Refusing the Ethnographic Imaginary, or Reading for the Politics of Peoplehood 221 Notes 235 Bibliography 277 Index 301

Read more less

Book SynopsisMonique Moultrie collects oral histories of Black lesbian religious leaders in the United States to show how their authenticity, social justice awareness, spirituality, and collaborative leadership make them models of womanist ethical leadership.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. That Their Living Will Not Be in Vain 1 1. Shattering Stain-Glassed Ceilings: African American Queer Storytelling 17 2. Going to Hell for My Authenticity: Existence as Resistance 38 3. Justice Is Spiritual: Interrogating Spiritual Activism 68 4. Mighty Causes Are Calling Us: Expanding Womanist Spiritualities 103 5. Doing the Work Their Souls Must Have: Cultivating Womanist Ethical Leadership 126 Conclusion. Leading from the Margins 168 Epilogue. Online Archives 182 Appendix: Interview Guide 187 Interview Guide 187 Notes 189 Bibliography 203 Index 217

Read more less

Book SynopsisKathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of anarchist letterpress printers and presses, whose printed materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to 1940s.Trade Review“By focusing on letterpress Ferguson presents a novel way of looking at the history of Anarchism. Letterpress as a way of working generates an active hands-on ambition to build and embody new and creative ideas. . . . Ferguson’s history promotes the message that meaningful radical development builds from face-to-face, hand-to-hand, cooperative endeavour.” -- Peter Good * Kate Sharpley Library *"Ferguson's half-century of involvement in radical politics and her painstaking research in anarchist collections (many of them ill organized) qualifies her to write this dense but compelling history. . . . Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- T. S. Martin * Choice *"In fluid prose, Ferguson offers a fresh historical look at the anarchist movement through a focus on lesser-known figures and their lesser-known labours, including printing and letter-writing." -- Layla Saleh * LSE Review of Books *"Letterpress Revolution is essential reading. It is a result of exhaustive and detailed research that clarifies instead of obscures. ... It enriches anarchist history allowing us to appreciate the nuances and bravery of people as well as their complexities." -- Barry Pateman * KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. Anarchist Letters 1 1. Printers and Presses 21 2. Epistolarity 83 3. Radical Study 129 4. Intersectionality and Thing Power 185 Appendix A. Compositors, Pressmen, and Bookbinders 215 Appendix B. Brief Biographies 225 Appendix C. Printers Interviewed 231 Notes 233 Letters Referenced 281 Bibliography 287 Index 317

Read more less

Book SynopsisJosé David Saldívar offers a critical examination of Junot Díaz, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his work radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world.Trade Review"This is an engaging, important contribution to understanding of Junot Díaz’s work and life. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." -- A. A. Edwards * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface xi Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1 1. “Wrestling with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings”: How Junot Díaz Thinks About Coloniality, Power, and the Speculative Genres 27 Part I. Junot Díaz’s MFA Program Era at Cornell University and Beyond 2. Díaz’s Planet MFA: “Negocios” 47 3. Díaz’s Planet POC (People of Color): Drown 73 Part II. Understanding Imaginary Transference and the Colonial Difference 4. Becoming Oscar “Oscar Wao” 99 Part III. A Legacy In-formation 5. Junot Díaz’s Search for Decolonial Love 151 Conclusion and Coda: “Monstro” and Islandborn 179 Notes 191 Bibliography 225 Index 239

Read more less

Book SynopsisBeginning in the mid-1800s, Americans hauled frozen pond water, then glacial ice, and then ice machines to Hawai?i—all in an effort to reshape the islands in the service of Western pleasure and profit. Marketed as “essential” for white occupants of the nineteenth-century Pacific, ice quickly permeated the foodscape through advancements in freezing and refrigeration technologies. In Cooling the Tropics Hi?ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart charts the social history of ice in Hawai?i to show how the interlinked concepts of freshness and refreshment mark colonial relationships to the tropics. From chilled drinks and sweets to machinery, she shows how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses. By outlining how ice shaped Hawai?i’s food system in accordance with racial and environmental imaginaries, Hobart demonstrates that thermal technologies can—and must—be attended to in struggles for Trade Review"Cooling the Tropics offers a compelling model for future research focused on the simultaneously sensorial, biopolitical, and ecological implications of colonialism’s thermal infrastructures." -- Hsuan L. Hsu * The Senses and Society *"Fascinating and thoughtful. . . . Recommended. General readers and advanced undergraduates through faculty." -- F. Ng * Choice *“Cooling the Tropics is well worth reading. … With many revealing and fascinating examples, [Hobart] tells an engaging story of the American colonisation of Hawaii that is open, unfixed and challengeable.” -- Helene Brembeck * Review of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Studies *"Contributing to a rich, contemporary conversation of critical ruminations on materiality, the elements, and questions of race and indigeneity, Cooling the Tropics pushes readers to think about how indigeneity is shaped in colonial discourses. … This well researched book will fascinate and keep readers on the hook." -- Jen Rose Smith * Society and Space *Table of ContentsNote on ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i Usage vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Feeling Cold in Hawai‘i 1 1. A Prehistory of the Artificial Cold in Hawai‘i 21 2. Vice, Virtue, and Frozen Necessities in the Sovereign City 47 3. Making Ice Local: Technology, Infrastructure, and Cold Power in the Kalākaua Era 71 4. Cold and Sweet: The Taste of Territorial Occupation 91 5. Local Color, Rainbow Aesthetics, and the Racial Politics of Hawaiian Shave Ice 113 Conclusion: Thermal Sovereignties 137 Notes 147 Bibliography 205 Index 233

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. They challenge the white, Western, and Northern rights-based genealogy of disability studies, showing how a single coherent narrative of the field is a mode of exclusion that relies on logics of whiteness and imperialism. The contributors examine how disability justice activists work in concert with other social justice projects, explore crip environments, create alternate disciplinary genealogies, and reject notions of the model minority. Throughout, they demonstrate how the mandate for a single genealogy of the discipline whitewashes disability and continues forms of violence. By cripping disability studies, the contributors allow for divergent histories, the coexistence of anti-ableist and antiracist theorizing, and a radically just and capacious understanding of disability. ContTrade Review"This is an essential anthology that challenges the existing (white, Western/Northern, imperialist) frameworks of disability studies in favor of lenses focused on transnational feminism and queer/trans of color critique and activism." -- Karla J. Strand * Ms. *

Read more less

Book SynopsisMade in Asia/America explores the key role video games play within the race makings of Asia/America. Its fourteen critical essays on games, ranging from Death Stranding to Animal Crossing, and five roundtables with twenty Asian/American game makers examine the historical entanglements of games, Asia, and America, and reveal the ways games offer new modes of imagining imperial violence, racial difference, and coalition. Shifting away from Eurocentric, white, masculinist takes on gaming, the contributors focus on minority and queer experiences, practices, and innovative scholarly methods to better account for the imperial circulation of games. Encouraging ambiguous and contextual ways of understanding games, the editors offer an “interactive” editorial method, a genre-expanding approach that encourages hybrid works of autotheory, queer of color theory, and conversation among game makers and scholars to generate divergent meanings of games, play, and &ldqu

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Baked potatoes, Bombay potatoes, pommes frites . . . everyone eats potatoes, but what do they mean? To the United Nations they mean global food security (potatoes are the world's fourth most important food crop). To 18th-century philosophers they promised happiness. Nutritionists warn that too many increase your risk of hypertension. For the poet Seamus Heaney they conjured up both his mother and the 19th-century Irish famine. What stories lie behind the ordinary potato? The potato is entangled with the birth of the liberal state and the idea that individuals, rather than communities, should form the building blocks of society. Potatoes also speak about family, and our quest for communion with the universe. Thinking about potatoes turns out to be a good way of thinking about some of the important tensions in our world. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essaTrade ReviewPotato by resourceful Rebecca Earle gives us history, recipes, prayers of thanks, and family stories … Each section educates, brings a smile, makes you hungry, and makes you think. * The Philadelphia Inquirer *Rebecca Earle … intellectualizes the history of potatoes to portray the tuber’s entanglement with the emergence of modernity, the birth of the liberal state, and with the idea that the individual is the basic building unit of society. The story of potatoes unfolding over the centuries bears a close resemblance with human stories replete with ordinariness, grit, prejudice, migration, and changing fortune … Earle relies on history books, cookbooks, pictures, paintings, and posters to interweave human stories with the ups and downs of potatoes … Earle has written a fine book, much in the tradition of ekphrasis, which burrows and shovels art objects to cultivate a piece of writing. * New York Journal of Books *Learn more about this staple tater through this engrossing report about its origin, development, and influence on our lives. * Manhattan Book Review *Rebecca Earle offers ideas that go far beyond the seeming simplicity of the humble spud … [a] thought-provoking little volume. * The Irish Times *From its Andean home, the potato went almost everywhere in the world and thought about the potato went almost everywhere in the culture. Rebecca Earle elegantly follows the potato’s travels through political economy, statecraft, nutritional science, gastronomy, religion, and literature. This is a marvellous historical mash-up of a food which did much to make modernity. * Steven Shapin, Harvard University, and author of The Scientific Revolution (2nd ed., 2018) and A Social History of Truth (1994) *Potato is a delight. Rebecca Earle writes vividly and with wonderful insight. Who could ever have thought that the entire world – cultures, ideologies, identity – could be decoded through the language of the humble spud? I'll never look at a potato the same way again. * Ruby Tandoh, author of Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want (2018) *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Lying Around Like a Latke 1 Potato Mother 2 Global Citizens 3 The State of the Potato 4 Pleasure and Responsibility 5 Potato Philosophy Acknowledgements List of Figures Notes Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisHearing Maskanda outlines how people make sense of their world through practicing and hearing maskanda music in South Africa. Having emerged in response to the experience of forced labour migration in the early 20th century, maskanda continues to straddle a wide range of cultural and musical universes. Maskanda musicians reground ideas, (hi)stories, norms, speech and beliefs that have been uprooted in centuries of colonial and apartheid rule by using specific musical textures, vocalities and idioms. With an autoethnographic approach of how she came to understand and participate in maskanda, Titus indicates some instances where her acts of knowledge formation confronted, bridged or invaded those of other maskanda participants. Thus, the book not only aims to demonstrate the epistemic importance of music and aurality but also the performative and creative dimension of academic epistemic approaches such as ethnography, historiography and music analysis, that aim towards conceptualTrade ReviewAttentive to her positionality as a European scholar, Titus turns her musicological ear to maskanda. She invites readers into the pleasures of hearing Zulu musicians’ syncretic creativity, while gaining an understanding of the stylistic features that musicians value. Readers will be inspired to explore this dynamic, abundant world of listening, vexed as it is by histories of racism, sexism, coloniality and scarce resources. * Louise Meintjes, Professor of Music and Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, USA, and author of Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid *South African music followers and educators have long been waiting for a major intellectual study of the famous and much beloved musical form, Zulu maskanda guitar. This is at last it. Barbara Titus addresses the music and its exponents from more perspectives than we thought possible, from the artistic to the social to the philosophical. Ethnomusicologists must add this study to their libraries. * David B. Coplan, Emeritus Professor in Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction – Foregrounding Aural Experiences Part I – Maskanda in Colonial, Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa 1. Maskanda’s Colonial, Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Presence 2. Foregroundings of Maskanda’s Styles and Substyles Part II – Maskanda as a Discourse of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa 3. Ground Level: The Kushikisha Imbokodo Festival in Durban 4. Middle Level: The MTN Onkweni Royal Festival in Ulundi 5. Up Level: Shiyani Ngcobo’s Tour through the Netherlands Part III – Hearing Maskanda 6. Knowing Zuluness Aurally 7. At Home in the World 8. Sharing Aural Space Conclusion: Maskanda Epistemology Appendix: Song Lyrics References Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisTouted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society. Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica's Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica's Jews—Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists—reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica's Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.Trade Review"A vital contribution to Sephardic history, Devin Naar's book lovingly but objectively fills in the Greek Jewish story of the interwar period. Jewish Salonica speaks through the words of its subjects, drawing on a dazzling array of local Jewish sources and casting this understudied period in a wholly new and dynamic light." -- Katherine Fleming * New York University, author of Greece: A Jewish History *"Richly documented and a pleasure to read, this study offers a compelling account of how the Sephardic Jews of Salonica experienced the transition from being subjects of the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman empire to living as a minority in the Greek nation-state. A must-read for anyone interested in the history of this unique community." -- Matthias Lehmann * University of California, Irvine, and author of Emissaries from the Holy Land *"[Devin Naar] has achieved something of signal importance with this volume. He has assembled a uniquely detailed profile of a leading Sephardic community under the Ottoman Empire and the succeeding Greek national state out of archives in Russia, Greece, Israel, the United States, and Spain." -- Stephen Schwartz * Middle East Quarterly *"But Naar has not written a standard chronological history; rather, his study is a deep analysis of the Jewish community and its various components that proudly faced the challenges of the shift from a favored Ottoman millet to a beleaguered—both internally and externally—community in serious decline." -- Steven Bowman * Association for Jewish Studies Review *"[Jewish Salonica] clearly contributes to our store of knowledge on the relationship between the transition from a multicultural empire to a homogenous nation- state, as well as on the changing meanings of such concepts as Sephardic, Jewish, community, self-governance, autonomy, the modern state, Ottoman, Greek, and Turk in the age of competing nationalisms." -- Irfan Kokdas * New Perspectives on Turkey *"Naar by all means has successfully created more than a dignified memento to those [Salonican Jews] who perished [in the Holocaust], providing a significant and appealing scholarly contribution to Jewish studies, intellectual history, and identity formation, which will undoubtedly become a reference point for further research." -- Katerina Kralova * The Journal of Modern Greek Studies *"Naar's book successfully changes the way we remember the interwar period for Salonican Jewry, from a period of decline to one of creativity in the face of severe obstacles, from imagining them as passive victims, to active agents who sought to perpetuate their role and presence in the ever-changing city as they attempted to find a space for themselves as 'part of Greece without relinquishing their Jewishness,' as Hellenic Jews, a dual status preserved from the Ottoman era." -- Marc David Baer * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Jewish Salonica by Devin E. Naar... is a very important new addition to the history of Sephardic Jews and the transition of Salonica from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek state, a history of "Jewish Salonica" as the title suggests....It is a significant book that will make a lasting contribution to the history of Jews in Salonica/Thessaloniki." -- Sakis Gekas * H-Nationalism *"Naar's innovative book constitutes a substantial contribution to the Sephardi studies and fills countless gaps, specifically with respect to Salonica under Greek rule. Naar's longing to his ancestral city... did not diminish from his ability to precisely draw the image of this important and divided community in the eve of its existence, while stressing the liveliness and vitality expressed by this community and its institutions until transported to death." -- Yaron Ben-Naeh and Tamir Karkason * Europe Now *"Jewish Salonica is an excellent book that invites broader discussions about ruptures and continuities between empires and nation-states. It highlights how minority groups refashion themselves during these transitions by inventing new strategies to negotiate their boundaries, redefine their identities, and protect their space with the aim of preserving the interests of their communities and preventing their decline. Jewish Salonica is a major contribution not only to Jewish history and Sephardic studies but also to Mediterranean, European, postcolonial, human rights, Ottoman, and Middle Eastern studies. It will be of great use for scholars, students, historians, and policy makers interested in understanding the complexities of empires and nation-states and the status and rights of minorities within these contexts." -- Bedross Der Matossian * Journal of Modern History *"Drawing on untapped community archives dispersed around the world as well as extensive Judeo-Spanish newspapers and memoirs, Naar's book is a key contribution to the history of Sephardi Jews and a timely intervention in debates about the post-Ottoman "unmixing of peoples" in the era of the nation-state....Thanks to Naar's exhaustive and creative efforts, the community's transformation and mobilization as simultaneously flourishing and struggling is fleshed out in a fascinating and inviting narrative" -- Michelle U. Campos * American Historical Review *"Captivating and riveting....[Naar] sets out to give the Jews of Salonica/Thessaloniki a voice, to understand them from the inside, to grapple with their trials and tribulations to evidence their agency, collectively, and individually in the face of change and growing adversity." -- Dani Krantz * Sephardic Horizons *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Is Salonica Jewish? chapter abstractThe chapter introduces competing visions for the future of Salonica during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), including bold proposals to transform it into an internationalized city or an independent Jewish city-state. These episodes illustrate the centrality of Salonica and its Jews in Ottoman and Greek history and how new sources—local archives and newspapers—change our understanding of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and consolidation of Greece. Not preordained, the passage from Ottoman to Greek rule transpired gradually. Aspects of the Ottoman framework—including tensions between the allegiances of Jews to their community and to the state—echoed into modern Greece. The story was complicated: could Judaism and Hellenism—two historically antagonistic ideals—be reconciled in modern times? 1Like a Municipality and a State: The Community chapter abstractThe first chapter explores the creation and development of the institution of the Jewish Community of Salonica. Due to the autonomous status of the Jewish Community, Jews relied upon it and its philanthropic organizations—as if a municipality or a state, as one commentator observed— to endure the transition from Ottoman to Greek jurisdiction, war, fire, and economic crisis. In conflict and in partnership with the state, the Jewish Community, through the Beit Din (rabbinical court), defined its members, implemented Jewish marriage law (which some escaped through conversion), managed Jewish popular neighborhoods for the impoverished masses, and inducted Jewish men into military service. Allegiance to the Jewish Community and to the state sometimes complemented each other, whereas other times they stood in opposition. 2Who Will Save Sephardic Judaism?: The Chief Rabbi chapter abstractThe ongoing debates over the role and nature of the spiritual and political leader of the Jewish Community, the chief rabbi, forms the heart of the second chapter. Deliberations among competing Jewish political factions over the nature of the position of the chief rabbi reflected their differing values and contested visions for the future of Salonica and its Jewish residents from the late Ottoman until World War II. While Jewish political groups largely agreed that the chief rabbi ought to represent the city's Jews to their neighbors, the state, international organizations, and Jewish communities around the world, they often disagreed over who the chief rabbi ought to be and what kind of image he should project to the world about the status of the Jews of Salonica. 3More Sacred than Synagogue: The School chapter abstractJewish leaders believed that the future of Jewish life in Salonica would be forged at school, a site that acquired a sacred aura for its crucial role in educating Jewish youth. This chapter argues that schools became sites in which to transform the children of the last generation of Ottoman Jews into the first generation of Hellenic Jews, conscientious as Jews and as citizens of their country. Focusing on the contested role of language and its relationship to questions of identity and belonging, the chapter emphasizes the ways in which the Jewish Community and the state partnered to develop new Jewish educational opportunities, such as a rabbinical training program, Greek state schools for Jewish students, Greek language textbooks about Judaism, and Hebrew-language textbooks about Greece. On the eve of World War II, when most European countries pushed Jews out of state schools, in Greece, integration was reaching new heights. 4Paving the Way for Better Days: The Historians chapter abstractThe fourth chapter charts how Salonican Jews' interest in their own history migrated from the margins of public awareness during the late Ottoman era to the very center of public attention during the interwar years. During this period, Jewish intellectuals created narratives of their own community's past in newspapers and other publications as a vehicle to unite in the context of fragmentation and crisis, to imbed themselves in the Ottoman context and, by rewriting their story, to advocate for a place within the Greek context. From presenting Jewish history in Salonica as an Ottoman-Jewish romance, they increasingly emphasized the historic synergies between Judaism and Hellenism. In the process, local Jewish historians varyingly envisioned their city as Jewish ("Jerusalem of the Balkans"), Sephardic ("Citadel of Sephardism"), or Greek ("Macedonian Metropolis"), and agreed that greater knowledge of their past would help them secure their future. 5Stones that Speak: The Cemetery chapter abstractThis chapter interrogates the place of the Jewish cemetery of Salonica—once the largest in Europe—within the spatial, political and cultural landscapes of the city from the late Ottoman era until World War II. It focuses on the tactics that Jews deployed to safeguard their burial ground in the context of nineteenth century Ottoman urban reforms, and in the face of expropriation measures of the Greek state and the local university. Could a Jewish necropolis remain in the center of a Greek metropolis? Jewish leaders argued that the tombstones "spoke," that the inscriptions narrated the integral role played by Jews—as Salonicans—in their city and in Greece. The attempt to preserve the space of the Jewish dead constituted an effort to secure the place of the Jewish living—and reveals the ultimate fragility of the effort and the power of exclusionary nationalism. Conclusion: Jewish Salonica—Reality, Myth, Memory chapter abstractThe Holocaust decimated the Jewish population of Salonica, which was reduced by more than ninety percent. In the wake of the war, Jewish survivors in Salonica and those abroad emphasized images of their city as a historically unmatched, mythic Jewish space. Part of the process of mourning and infused by nostalgia, these images echoed the depictions of the city from before the war that Jews developed as a way to integrate themselves into their urban environment and secure their position across the divide between the Ottoman Empire and the Greek state. Just as Jews embraced the state ideology of Ottomanism, so too did Jewish elite later engage with Hellenism and sought to reconcile their status as Salonicans, as Jews, and as citizens. Although few Jews remain in Salonica today, the city continues to come to terms with its past amidst financial crisis, and to embrace its bygone Jewish history.

Read more less

Book SynopsisTHE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER'Beautifully-penned story on the harshness of life and how hope survives' – Sun'Absorbing . . . Marsh writes with a novelistic flair' – Daily Mail From the grimy streets of Acton and Notting Hill to the bright lights of the West End, Sunday Times bestselling author Beezy Marsh's All My Mother’s Secrets is a powerful, uplifting story of a young woman’s struggle to come to terms with her family’s tragic past.Annie Austin’s childhood ends at the age of twelve, when she joins her mother in one of the slum laundries of Acton, working long hours for little pay. What spare time she has is spent looking after her younger brother George and her two stepsisters, under the glowering eye of her stepfather Bill. In London between the wars, a girl like Annie has few choices in life – but a powerful secret will change her destiny.All Annie knows about her real father is that he died in the Great War, and as the years pass she is haunted by the pain of losing him. Her downtrodden mother won’t tell her more and Annie’s attempts to uncover the truth threaten to destroy her family. Distraught, she runs away to Covent Garden, but can she survive on her own and find the love which has eluded her so far?Trade ReviewBeautifully penned story on the harshness of life and how hope survives. * The Sun *Heartwarming. * Kimberley Chambers *Absorbing . . . Marsh writes with a novelistic flair. * Daily Mail *

Read more less

Book SynopsisExam board: AQALevel: A-levelSubject: HistoryFirst teaching: September 2016First exams: Summer 2017 (AS); Summer 2018 (A-level)Target success in AQA AS/A-level History with this proven formula for effective, structured revision; key content coverage is combined with exam preparation activities and exam-style questions to create a revision guide that students can rely on to review, strengthen and test their knowledge.- Enables students to plan and manage a successful revision programme using the topic-by-topic planner- Consolidates knowledge with clear and focused content coverage, organised into easy-to-revise chunks- Encourages active revision by closely combining historical content with related activities- Helps students build, practise and enhance their exam skills as they progress through activities set at three different levels- Improves exam technique through exam-style questions with sample answers and commentary from expert authors and teachers- Boosts historical knowledge with a useful glossary and timeline

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEarly modern stereotypes used to be studied as evidence of popular belief, something mired with prejudices and commonly held assumptions. Stereotypes and stereotyping in early modern England goes beyond this view by exploring practices of stereotyping as contested processes. To do so, the volume draws on recent works on social psychology and sociology. It thereby brings together early modern case studies and explores how stereotypes and their mobilisation shaped various negotiations of power, in spheres of life such as politics, religion, economy and knowledge production.Table of ContentsIntroduction: rethinking early modern stereotyping in the twenty-first century – Koji Yamamoto and Peter Lake1 Religious and national stereotyping and prejudice in seventeenth-century England – Tim Harris2 On thinking (historically) with stereotypes, or the puritan origins of anti-puritanism – Peter Lake3 History plays, Catholic polemics and the staging of political economy in Elizabethan England – Koji Yamamoto4 Alchemists, puritans and projectors in the plays of Ben Jonson – Peter Lake and Koji Yamamoto5 Ranter and Quaker stereotyping in the English Revolution – Kate Peters6 Fighting popery with popery: subverting stereotypes and contesting anti-Catholicism in late seventeenth-century England – Adam Morton7 ‘We do naturally … hate the French’: Francophobia and Francophilia in Samuel Pepys’s Diary – David Magliocco8 ‘Sin and sea coal’: smoke as urban life in early modern London – William Cavert9 Laboratories of subjectification: characters and stereotypes in late Stuart and Georgian theatre – Bridget Orr10 From Reformation to Enlightenment in post-civil war orientalism – William J. BulmanCoda: the dialectics of stereotyping – past and present – Sandra Jovchelovitch, Koji Yamamoto and Peter LakeIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat did it mean to be a ‘rebel woman’ in the interwar years? Taking the form of a multiple biography, this book traces the struggles, passions and achievements of a set of ‘fearlessly determined’ women who stopped at nothing to make their mark in the traditionally masculine environments of mountaineering, politics, engineering and journalism. From the motorist Claudia Parsons to the ‘star’ reporter Margaret Lane, the mountaineer Dorothy Pilley and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, the women charted in this book challenged the status quo in all walks of life, alongside writing vivid, eye-witness accounts of their adventures. Recovering their voices across a range of texts including novels, poems, journalism and diaries, Rebel women between the wars reveals their inch by inch gains won through courageous and sometimes controversial and dangerous actions.Trade Review'I loved this engaging and often thrilling glimpse of a cohort of women between the wars who defied social expectations, and lived the lives they wanted to live. Their interweaving stories of quiet subversion and bold visibility provoked me to both admiration and the irrepressible urge to keep reading bits out to people.'Lissa Evans, bestselling author of Old Baggage and Crooked Heart'A brilliant book which brings to life the incredible stories of inspirational women. Their acts of courage changed the world for good. This wonderful book is a must read for the next generation of rebels.'Frances O'Grady, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress 'Every rebel heart will be uplifted by the lives of these women; they broke with convention, rocked boats, and dared to do the unexpected. This book sends the message loudly ‘yes you can’ and should be read by everyone putting their own toe in the water, seeking courage to live out their dreams.'Baroness Helena Kennedy QC'Lonsdale’s subjects are [...] pioneering journalists who weaponize words to attack the citadels of the Establishment. This, with their energy, is what draws them together.'TLS'Engaging and pacily written'.History Today'Truly inspiring reading.'T P Fielden, Daily Express (Books of the Year 2020)'There is so much of interest in this book, from revelations of the female support networks that helped somewomen to occasional female rivalry. It will clearly be a valuable resource for anyone who wants to understand how women who wanted to defy social expectations and lead fulfilling lives in the early part of the 20th century used writing as a weapon.'Anne Sebba, British Journalism Review'Rebel women between the wars is structured around multiple biography and focuses on individuals that most people, including journalists, would accept have been ‘lost to history.’ The names Shiela Grant Duff, Margaret Lane, Rose Macauley, Leah Manning, Stella Martin, Claudia Parsons, Dorothy Pilley, Naomi Royde-Smith, Alison Settle, Edith Shackleton, and Kylie Tennant do not stir the mainstream memory of cultural history. Dr. Lonsdale’s research and writing in this valuable and significant book makes it very clear that they should.'Tim Crook, Journal of the Chartered Institute of Journalists' This interesting book explores the lives of some determined women who, between the wars in 20th-century Britain, were keen to make their mark in the masculine public sphere. Drawing on letters, diaries and published commentary, Lonsdale paints a vivid picture of the motorist Claudia Parsons, the reporter Margaret Lane, the mountaineer Dorothy Pilley and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, among others. While personal papers have been carefully preserved for many of these figures, the journalist Edith Shackleton proves a more elusive figure because she left no diary and very few letters. Informative and absorbing, this book adds much to our knowledge of how some neglected women in the 1920s and 1930s dared to break free from social convention.'June Purvis, Times Higher Education -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: ‘The women at the gate’1 Female friendship, work and collaboration2 Alternative channels3 Parallel platforms and safe havens4 Risk-takers5 Parental influence and family networks6 Rejecting the feminine7 Formal networks8 Explosive engagement9 Hiding in plain sightConclusionIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat did it mean to be happy in early modern Europe? Positive emotions in early modern literature and culture includes essays that reframe historical understandings of emotional life in the Renaissance, focusing on under-studied feelings such as mirth, solidarity, and tranquillity. Methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary, these essays draw from the history of emotions, affect theory and the contemporary social and cognitive sciences to reveal rich and sustained cultural attention in the early modern period to these positive feelings. The book also highlights culturally distinct negotiations of the problematic binary between what constitutes positive and negative emotions. A comprehensive introduction and afterword open multiple paths for research into the histories of good feeling and their significances for understanding present constructions of happiness and wellbeing.Table of ContentsIntroduction – Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. MiuraPart I: Rewriting discourses of pleasure1 Happy Hamlet – Richard Strier2 Therapeutic laughter in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy – Cassie M. Miura 3 The pleasure of the text: reading and happiness in Rabelais and Montaigne – Ian Frederick Moulton4 Pleasure and the 'rustic life' – Ullrich Langer Part II: Imagining happy communities5 The theology of cheer, Erasmus to Shakespeare – Timothy Hampton6 ‘My crown is called content’: positive, negative, and political affects in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy – Paul Joseph Zajac 7 Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court: faction, emotion, and the Essex Circle – Bradley J. Irish 8 Merriness, affect, and community in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor – Cora Fox Part III: Forms, attachment, and ambivalence9 Happy objects and earthly pleasure in Thomas Traherne’s devotional poetry – Leila Watkins 10 Trust and disgust: the precariousness of positive emotions in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi – Lalita Pandit Hogan 11 ‘My heart is satisfied’: revenge, justice, and satisfaction in The Spanish Tragedy – Eonjoo Park 12 All’s Well That Ends Well? Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre – Patrick Colm Hogan Afterword – Michael SchoenfeldtIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn neighbourhoods and public spaces across Britain, young working people walked out together, congregated in the streets, and paraded up and down on the ‘monkey parades’. The beginnings of a distinct youth culture can be traced to the late nineteenth century, and the street and neighbourhood provided its forum. Dangerous amusements explores these sites of leisure and courtship, examining how young working-class men and women engaged with their environment. Drawing on an extensive range of sources, from newspapers and institutional records to oral histories and autobiography, this book traces the movements of young people across space. Exploring the relationship between the leisure lives of the young working class and urban space, this book offers a sensitive reappraisal of working-class youth and will be essential reading for historians of modern Britain.Table of ContentsIntroductionPart I: Leisure and the young working class1 Leisure, courtship and the young working class2 ‘The need for wholesome influences is great’: rational recreationPart II: Youthful leisure and the urban landscape3 Home, neighbourhood and community4 Regulating youthful leisure: streets and public space5 Walking in the city: the ‘monkey parades’ConclusionIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Carolingian period (c. 750-900) has traditionally been described as one of ‘reform’ or ‘renaissance’, where cultural and intellectual changes were imposed from above in a programme of correctio. This view leans heavily on prescriptive texts issued by kings and their entourages, foregrounding royal initiative and the cultural products of a small intellectual elite. However, attention to understudied texts and manuscripts of the period reveals a vibrant striving for moral improvement and positive change at all levels of society. This expressed itself in a variety of ways for different individuals and communities, whose personal relationships could be just as influential as top-down prescription. The often anonymous creators and copyists in a huge range of centres emerge as active participants in shaping and re-shaping the ideals of their world.Table of ContentsIntroduction: rethinking the Carolingian reforms – Carine van Rhijn1 Gender and horizontal networks in Carolingian monasticisms (up to c. 840) – Ingrid Rembold2 Analysing Attigny: contextualising Chrodegang of Metz’s influence on the life of canons – Stephen Ling3 A Carolingian ‘reform of education’? The reception of Alcuin’s pedagogy – Cinzia Grifoni and Giorgia Vocino 4 Correcting the liturgy and sacred language – Els Rose and Arthur Westwell5 Error assessment: how to distinguish between true and false? – Irene van Renswoude6 Reformatio and correctio in Carolingian theology and orthodoxy: reformation or aggiornamento? – Kristina MitalaitéIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book investigates how people have thought about and experienced time, and how their ideas about time have shaped their political views and actions. Using French thinkers and activists of the radical left and right between the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War as a case study, it argues that time provides an important means of exploring how concepts such as nationalism, revolution and social change were understood at the turn of the century. Attending to different experiences of time – the speed at which it was perceived to move, the extent to which the future was near and graspable, the ways in which the past was seen to impinge on the present – opens up exciting new possibilities for analysing politics, ideologies and worldviews.Table of ContentsIntroduction: a history of timesPart I: Time and the Dreyfus Affair1 Action: engaging in the Affair2 Disillusion: the Universités populaires and the aftermath of the AffairPart II: Time and the nation3 Darkness and emptiness: the radical right, the Franco-Prussian War, and the present4 The radical right and the ‘eternal France’Part III: Time and revolution5 Between reform and revolution: notions of change on the left6 The infinite temple: futurist fiction and scientific discourse on the left7 Syndicalist solutions? Proletarian time, the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the Cercle ProudhonConclusion: changing timesIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisIreland, slavery and the Caribbean is a complex and ground-breaking collection of essays. Grounded in history, it integrates perspectives from art historians, architectural and landscape historians, and literary scholars to produce a genuinely interdisciplinary collection that spans from 1620-1830: the high point of European colonialism. By exploring imperial, national and familial relationships from their building blocks of plantation, migration, property and trade, it finds new ways to re-create and question how slavery made the Atlantic world.Trade ReviewNatalie A Zacek provides a sharply contemporary perspective on public debate and identity, deconstructing, inter alia, the ‘Irish Slave’ meme in ‘How the Irish became black’. This invaluable publication disentangles the polarities of subjects and agents, insularity and global dynamics.Sylvie Kleinman, History Island, September 2023. -- .Table of ContentsForeword - Sir Hilary BecklesIntroduction – Finola O’Kane and Ciaran O’NeillPart I: Setting Out the Terrain1. Setting out the terrain: Ireland and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century - David Dickson 2. From Perfidious Papists to Prosperous Planters: Making Irish elites in the early modern English Caribbean - Jenny Shaw3. Free, and unfree – Ireland and Barbados, 1620-60- David Brown4. Trade, plunder and Irishmen in early English Jamaica – Nuala Zahedieh5. Doing business in the wartime Caribbean: John Byrn, Irish merchant of Kingston, Jamaica (September – October 1756) - Thomas M. TruxesPart II: Consolidating Territories6. Ireland and British Colonial Slave-ownership 1763-1833 - Nick Draper7. Soldiers, settlers, slavers: Irish lives on the Spanish borderlands of North America and the Caribbean in the revolutionary 1790s- José Shane Brownrigg-Gleeson8. Searching for sovereignties: the formation of the penal laws and slave codes in Ireland and the British Caribbean, c. 1680 to c. 1720 - Aaron Graham9. Comparing Imperial design strategies; The Franco-Irish plantations of Saint-Domingue - Finola O'Kane10. Eyre Coote, the House of Assembly and the Defence of Jamaica, 1806-8 - David Fleming11. In search of excess: Lambert Blair and his appetites - Ciaran O'NeillPart III: Comparative Perspectives12. Two islands, many forts: Ireland and Bermuda in 1624 - Emily Mann13. Imperial barrack-building in 18C Ireland and Jamaica– Charles Ivar McGrath14. The architectures of empire in Jamaica: the Irish legacy ­ Louis P. Nelson15. Designed in parallel or in translation?: The connected landscapes of Kelly’s Pen, Jamaica and Westport, Co. Mayo - Finola O’Kane16. Formations and Deformations of Empire: Maria Edgeworth and the West Indies - Claire Connolly17. How the Irish became black- Natalie Zacek18. ‘Where are you actually from?’: Racial issues in the Irish context – Sandrine Uwase NdahiroIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisBelfast punk and the Troubles is an oral history of the punk scene in Belfast from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s. The book explores what it was like to be a punk in a city shaped by the violence of the Troubles, and how this differed from being a punk elsewhere. It also asks what it means to have been a punk – how punk unravels as a thread throughout the lives of the people interviewed, and what that unravelling means in the context of post-peace-process Northern Ireland. In doing so, it suggests a critical understanding of sectarianism, subjectivity and memory politics in the North, and argues for the importance of placing punk within the segregated structures of everyday life described by the interviewees.Adopting an innovative oral history approach drawing on the work of Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli, the book analyses a small number of oral history interviews with participants in granular detail. Outlining the historical context and the cultural memory of punk, the central chapters each delve into one or two interviews to draw out the affective, imaginative and political ways in which punks and former punks evoke their memories of taking part in the scene. Through this method, it analyses the punk scene as a structure of feeling shaped through the experience of growing up in wartime Belfast.Belfast punk and the Troubles is an intervention in Northern Irish historiography stressing the importance of history from below, and will be compelling reading for historians of Ireland and of punk, as well as those interested in innovative approaches to oral history.Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Alternative Ulster? Sectarianism, segregation and the punk scene2. The Belfast punk scene in cultural memory3. Epiphany, transgression and movement 4. Making affective and political spaces5. Gender, respectability and emigration6. Collecting, storytelling and memoryConclusionAppendixBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume explores the possibilities of studying embodied subjects in the past through the sources and approaches of archaeology, history and material culture studies. It draws on collections of human remains, material culture and documentary evidence from Britain during the period 1700–1850, considering the themes of gender, rank, age, disability and maternity. Each chapter looks at the lived experiences of the material body, bringing together disciplines that share an interest in the material or embodied turn. Combining archaeological and historical data to reconstruct embodied experiences, the volume represents the first collection of genuinely collaborative scholarship by historians and archaeologists.Table of ContentsIntroduction: the material body in archaeology and history – Elizabeth Craig-Atkins and Karen Harvey1 Archives of embodiment: body and experience in the archaeological and historical record – Karen Harvey2 Marking maternity: integrating historical and archaeological evidence for reproduction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – Elizabeth Craig-Atkins and Mary E. Fissell 3 Embodying the history of shoes: footwear and gender in Britain, 1700–1850 – Matthew McCormack4 ‘The Corporation of Corpse-stealers’: archaeological and historical evidence of bodysnatching in early eighteenth-century London – Robert Hartle5 Who smokes anymore? Documentary, archaeological and osteological evidence for tobacco consumption and its relationship to social identity in industrial England, 1700–1850 – Anna M. Davies-Barrett and Sarah A. Inskip 6 Uncovering the lives of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inhabitants of Bristol through osteoarchaeological and documentary analysis – Heidi Dawson-Hobbis and Jocelyn Davis7 Disability, gender and old age in the Industrial Revolution: cultural historical and osteoarchaeological perspectives – Sophie L. Newman and David M. TurnerIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisBrilliant, volatile and invariably male, the surgeon stereotype is a widespread and instantly recognisable part of western culture. Setting out to anatomise this stereotype, Cold, hard steel offers an exciting new history of modern and contemporary British surgery. The book draws on archival materials and original interviews with surgeons, analysing them alongside a range of fictional depictions, from the Doctor in the House novels to Mills & Boon romances and the pioneering soap opera Emergency Ward 10. Presenting a unique social, cultural and emotional history, it sheds light on the development and maintenance of the surgical stereotype and explains why it has proved so enduring. At the same time, the book explores the more candid and compassionate image of the surgeon that has begun to emerge in recent years, revealing how a series of high-profile memoirs both challenge the surgical stereotype and simultaneously confirm it.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Sir Lancelot Spratt and the myth of the modern surgeon1 Self-made myths2 Surgeons in film, fiction, and on TV screens 3 Surgical conduct and surgical communities4 Gender in surgery5 Race and ethnicity in surgery6 Surgical time7 Military myths and metaphorsConclusion: moving mythsBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the Axis War on the side of Germany, Mussolini's Italy was responsible for serious war crimes, especially in Yugoslavia and Greece. This 'dark side' of the fascist war, however, is not present in the national memory built after 1945. To distinguish Italy from the former German ally and avoid a punitive peace, the monarchist and anti-fascist ruling classes elaborated a master narrative that highlighted the opposition of the Italian people to Mussolini's war and the humanitarian behavior of Italian soldiers, depicted as saviors of Jews. All responsibility for the crimes committed in the Axis war was placed on the shoulders of the Germans, who thus became a convenient alibi for the national conscience.Table of ContentsIntroduction1 Italy and the Axis in Allied propaganda 2 Who betrayed their country? 3 The origins of war memory4 ‘Italy won too’: atonement and redemption of a ‘nation underground’5 Forgetting the Axis6 ‘Good Italians’ and ‘bad Germans’ 7 Humans or Germans?ConclusionIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisLet’s spend the night together explores how sex and sexuality provided essential elements of British youth culture in the 1950s through to the 1980s. It shows how the underlying sexual charge of rock ‘n’roll – and pop music more generally – was integral to the broader challenge embodied in the youth cultures that developed after World War Two. As teenage hormones rushed to move to the music and take advantage of the spaces opening up through consumption, education and employment, so the boundaries of British morality and cultural propriety were tested and often transgressed. Be it the assertive masculinity of the teds or the lustful longings of the teeny-bopper, the gender-bending of glam or the subterranean allure of an underground club/disco, the free love of the 1960s or the punk provocations in the 1970s, sex was forever to the fore and, more often than not, underpinned the moral panics that fitfully followed any cultural shift in youthful style and behaviour. Drawing from scholarship across a range of disciplines, the Subcultures Network explore how sex and sexuality were experienced, presented, conferred, responded to and understood within the context of youth culture, popular music and social change in the period between World War Two and the advent of AIDS. The essays locate sex, music and youth culture in the context of post-war Britain: with a widening and ever-more prevalent media; amidst the loosening bonds of censorship; in a society shaped by changing patterns of consumption and the emergence of the ‘teenager’; existing, as Jeff Nuttall famously argued, under the shadow of the (nuclear) bomb.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Let’s spend the night together: sex, pop music and British youth culture, 1950s–80s - Matthew Worley, Keith Gildart, Anna Gough-Yates, Sian Lincoln, Bill Osgerby, Lucy Robinson, John Street, Pete Webb1. Where were you? UK chart pop and the commodification of the teenage libido, 1952–63 - Tom Hennessy2. The Jerry Lee Lewis scandal, the popular press and the moral standing of rock ‘n’ roll in late 1950s Britain - Gillian A.M. Mitchell3. ‘I’m different; I’m tough; I fuck’: attitudes towards young men, sex and masculinity in Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: Pop from the Beginning (1969) - Patrick Glen4. ‘We are no longer certain, any of us, what is “right” and what is “wrong”’: Honey, Petticoat, and the construction of young women’s sexuality in 1960s Britain - Sarah Kenny5. Lovers’ lanes and haystacks: rural spaces, girls’ experiences of courtship and sexual intimacy in post-war England - Sian Edwards6. Queering modernism: social, sartorial and spatial intersections between mod and gay (sub-) culture, 1957–67 - Shaun Cole and Paul Sweetman7. ‘You just let your hair down’: lesbian parties and clubs in the 1960s and early 1970s - Alison Oram8. Singing Elton’s song: queer sexualities and youth cultures in England and Wales, 1967–85 - Daryl Leeworthy9. ‘Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out’: Blowup (1966) and the free hedonism(s) of Swinging London - Marlie Centawer10. ‘Everything gets boring after a time’: Deep End and swinging sex - David Wilkinson11. Run the track, but no bother chat slack: overstanding the relationship between slackness and culture within the reggae dancehall, 1960s–80s - William ‘Lez’ Henry12. ‘This could be a night to remember’: authenticity, historicising and the silencing of sexual experience in the northern soul scene - Sarah Raine and Caitlin Shentall13. ‘Mummy … what is a Sex Pistol?’: SEX, sex and British punk in the 1970s - Matthew Worley14. The ‘style terrorism’ of Siouxsie Sioux: femininity, early goth aesthetics and BDSM fashion - Claire Nally15. Coming of age Asian and Muslim in post-punk West Yorkshire - Nabeel Zuberi16. ‘I’m your man’: heartthrobs and banter in Smash Hits - Hannah Charnock

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the late 1990s, Manchester was a city in upheaval. The devastation of the IRA bomb and the closure of the notorious Haçienda nightclub were seismic events that rocked the city’s confidence at a time when identikit bands were flooding its clubs and bars, fuelled on anthemic guitar rock and swagger. Stereotypes were everywhere, while the spirit of Manchester was silently suffocating.Mancunians: Where do we start, where do I begin? is the story of those who didn’t fit the typecast: the musicians of colour, the football fans alienated by rampant commercialism, frustrated public figures, optimistic developers and ambitious artists.Through a mixture of memoir and interviews with well-known Mancunians such as Guy Garvey, Tunde Babalola, Sylvia Tella, Badly Drawn Boy and Stan Chow, David Scott portrays the city at the turn of the century in a way never seen before.Trade Review‘Witty and wise... Mancunians is everything a book about Mancunians should be.’Daniel Harris, The Guardian‘Here is someone who is fiercely "Mancunian", with an understanding of the city’s recent past, but not bogged down by the baggage and beholden to it... Highly recommended.'Iain Key, Louder Than War‘A great read from one of Manchester’s finest wordsmiths.’Clint Boon‘An honest love letter to the city.’Christine Bottomley‘A touching and brilliant balance of the personal and the popular, from a time when there was so much change in the city.’Mr Scruff -- .Table of ContentsPreface: A view from the Low1 'Manchester was miserable' / 15 June 19962 'The city that lets down its pupils' / Youth3 'It’s the world of the drama series The Wire' / Crime4 'He’s going to have sex with that girl on stage!' / Nightlife5 'A different success for Manchester' / Music6 'Did horse semen lead to their downfall?' / Football7 'And Tony Wilson didn’t even say it!' / Media8 'Proper Manc' / Identity9 (There is no) ConclusionIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women’s electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, Distant Sisters uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Considering intimate and institutional connections, well-connected elites and ordinary women, this book argues developments in Auckland, Sydney, and Adelaide—long considered the peripheries of the feminist world—cannot be separated from its glamourous metropoles. Focusing on Antipodean women, simultaneously insiders and outsiders in the emerging international women’s movement, and documenting the failures of their expansive vision alongside its successes, this book reveals a more contingent history of international organising and challenges celebratory accounts of fin-de-siècle global connection.This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5, Gender equality.Trade Review'Distant Sisters is fresh and necessary, a razor-sharp collection of ‘messy stories’ that warn against simplistic readings of the past to the suit the imperatives or trends of the present.'Dr Yves Rees, Sydney Review of Books 'Distant Sisters [is a] meticulous account of Australasian women’s international activism in support of women’s suffrage between 1880 and 1914'.Professor Marilyn Lake, Australian Book Review'Distant Sisters is a seamlessly and beautifully written, as well as rigorously researched, account of the intersecting ambitions, aspirations, endeavours, successes and failures of political women connected by virtue of their place in the Australasian region. It is a masterful recount of the ‘messy stories’ both underpinning and arising out of Australasian suffrage success.’Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Women’s History Review 'Meticulously researched … this careful study allows us to see both the excitement of women who wished to be the first to achieve the franchise and the disappointments that followed. Through his thorough engagement with a range of sources Keating has illustrated the importance of cross-border connections'.Professor Barbara Brookes, History Australia 'James Keating’s Distant Sisters is … an important book … It is meticulously researched, elegantly written and skilfully organised, building on international as well as local research and eschewing simple celebratory conclusions about Australasian women’s global engagement. Thus, while acknowledging the positive achievements, it emphasises contingency, contradictions and limitations, especially in imagining an Australian identity and forging trans-Tasman cooperation.'Emeritus Professor Judith Smart, Victorian Historical Journal'In this welcome new addition to suffrage historiography, Keating … delivers a portrait of the Australasian suffrage campaign that is far from traditional. It moves the reader away from a focus on the mere mechanics of the campaign, or indeed a spotlight on its key figures, to view instead a picture that is more detailed and complex. It helps the reader understand why the history of this movement and its activists has not taken a centre-stage in the global narratives of the women’s franchise, while also highlighting the roles of some of the almost unknown or forgotten figures weaving through its history. By using a methodology that privileged spatial concepts we understand why regional issues mattered so greatly and also why ‘Indigenous voices were absent from the Australian campaigns’.'Women’s History Review -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction: Leading the empire, leading the world?1 For God and home and every land: Suffrage internationalism in the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union2 ‘My heart...yearn[s] for a genuine voting Australian woman!’: Australasian suffragists and the international suffrage movement3 The business of correspondence: Politics, friendship, and intimacy in suffragists’ letters 4 Shaking hands across the seas: The Australasian women’s advocacy press5 Suffragists on tour: Exporting and narrating the female franchiseConclusionBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.Table of Contents1 Exploring the supernatural in early modern Scotland – Julian Goodare and Martha McGill 2 The elrich poems: the supernatural and the textual – Janet Hadley Williams3 Emotional relationships with spirit-guides in early modern Scotland – Julian Goodare4 Experiencing the invisible polity: trance in early modern Scotland – Georgie Blears5 The ninety-nine dancers of Moaness: Orkney women between the visible and invisible – Liv Helene Willumsen6 Angels in early modern Scotland – Martha McGill7 Scottish political prophecies and the crowns of Britain, 1500–1840 – Michael B. Riordan8 Astrology and supernatural power in early modern Scotland – Jane Ridder-Patrick9 Fallen spirits and divine grace: sermons and the supernatural in post-Reformation Scotland – Michelle D. Brock10 The uses of providence in early modern Scotland – Martha McGill and Alasdair Raffe11 The invention of Highland Second Sight – Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart12 The pagan supernatural in the Scottish Enlightenment – Felicity Loughlin13 Eighteenth-century Scotland and the visionary supernatural – Hamish MathisonIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book provides fresh perspectives on a key period in the history of humanitarianism. Drawing on economic, cultural, social and diplomatic perspectives, it explores the scale and meaning of humanitarianism in the era of the Great War. Foregrounding the local and global dimensions of the humanitarian responses, it interrogates the entanglement of humanitarian and political interests and uncovers the motivations and agency of aid donors, relief workers and recipients. The chapters probe the limits of humanitarian engagement in a period of unprecedented violence and suffering and evaluate its long-term impact on humanitarian action.Table of ContentsIntroduction: humanitarianism and the Greater War – Elisabeth Piller and Neville WyliePART I: GLOBAL WAR, GLOBAL AID 1 Humanitarian aid across the ocean: Argentine contributions to the relief of Europe during the Great War – María Inés Tato2 Sagas of swords, scrolls, and dolls: Japanese humanitarian aid to Belgium –Hanne Deleu3 Geographies of humanitarian mobilisation: Portuguese Africa and the Great War – Ana Paula Pires4 Philanthropy in time of war: Paul Nathan and the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden –Christoph JahrPART II: THE POLITICS AND POWER OF AID 5 The neutrals at war: humanitarian competition in the Great War – Cédric Cotter6 Neutrality and the politics of protection: the United States as a protecting power, 1914–17 – Neville Wylie7 Blockaders as humanitarians? Connecting the Allied blockade of Germany and post-warHumanitarianism – Phillip Dehne8 Better fed than red: international famine relief, 1921–22 – Kimberly LowePART III: THE LEGACIES AND LIMITS OF GREAT WAR-ERA RELIEF9 Abandoning Poland: Great War humanitarianism as a history of failure – Elisabeth Piller10 Children and the ‘hunger politics’ of 1919-20: food aid to German children and thefounding of the international Save the Children Movement – Tatjana Eichert and Rebecca Gill11 ‘The most deplorable victims’? The language of humanitarianism and relief to intellectuals in the era of the Great War –Tomás Irish 12 The imperial ‘guardians’ of slavery: international humanitarianism, colonial labour policies, and the crisis of imperial governance under the League of Nations, 1919–26 – Christian Mueller Afterword – Branden LittleIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisBaroquemania explores the intersections of art, architecture and criticism to show how reimagining the Baroque helped craft a distinctively Italian approach to modern art. Offering a bold reassessment of post-unification visual culture, the book examines a wide variety of media and ideologically charged discourses on the Baroque, both inside and outside the academy. Key episodes in the modern afterlife of the Baroque are addressed, notably the Decadentist interpretation of Gianlorenzo Bernini, the 1911 universal fairs in Turin and Rome, Roberto Longhi’s historically grounded view of Futurism, architectural projects in Fascist Rome and the interwar reception of Adolfo Wildt and Lucio Fontana’s sculpture. Featuring a wealth of visual materials, Baroquemania offers a fresh look at a central aspect of Italy's modern art.Trade Review'This is a very well-written and extremely well-researched book on a fascinating topic. It is certainly essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Italian art.'Francesca Billiani, Professor of Italian at the University of Manchester. -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 Decadent Seicento: the emergence of the Baroque in the Italian fin de siècle2 The Baroque’s revenge: the 1911 jubilee exhibitions and the search for an Italian style3 Baroque Futurism: Roberto Longhi, seventeenth-century art and the Italian avant-garde 4 Classical Baroque: the Seicento and the return-to-order5 Baroque memories in the architecture of interwar Rome6 Form and formlessness: the reimagination of Baroque sculpture during FascismConclusionsIndex

Read more less

a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

Read more less

Book SynopsisInterior design is all about the senses. This volume explores how sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste have been mobilised within various forms of interiors from the late sixteenth century to today. It provides new insight on the significance of the senses in all aspects of interior design and decoration. -- .

Read more less

Book SynopsisFascinating, absorbing and educative' A. C. GraylingHighly original and beautifully written' Dominic LawsonA compelling insight into how our imagination works, based on the latest scientific research.People often think of imagination as something used only in creative endeavours. In fact, we use imagination constantly as we reminisce, anticipate, plan, daydream, read, create imagined worlds. The truth is we live in the here and now much less than we tend to think. Imagination isn't the exception in our daily lives; it's our default setting. Yet only now are we beginning to understand exactly how it works.From hallucination to sleepwalking, from REM sleep to delusions, neurologist Adam Zeman brilliantly guides us through the latest scientific studies in the world of the imagination. He draws on research in neuroscience, the study of human origins and child development to show how the human brain is above all else a creative, imaginative organ and that we have evolved to share what we imagine.Our brains behave in strikingly similar ways when we observe, remember, imagine or act. Imagine looking at a cube and your eye will trace the contours of the cube as if you were actually seeing it. Yet it turns out that people differ hugely in their imaginative experience. Some people lack sensory imagery altogether they would be unable to picture their family if asked to but still lead fulfilling, even highly creative, lives.From how we visualise to how we understand the minds of others, from the benefits of play to mental disorders, The Shape of Things Unseen dazzles and delights. It is an essential guide to the latest discoveries about the workings of the human mind.

Read more less

Book Synopsis'Basu's account of how Arthur Conan Doyle set about trying to get a pardon for Edalji is in itself a fine piece of detective work.' The Times ‘Compulsive reading.’ A.N. Wilson 'Nails the nastiness of a peculiarly English scandal.' The Spectator 'A potent mix of racial injustice, Sherlockian mystery and Shrabani's signature storytelling.' Lucy Worsley In the village of Great Wyrley near Birmingham, someone is mutilating horses. Someone is also sending threatening letters to the vicarage, where the vicar, Shahpur Edalji, is a Parsi convert to Christianity and the first Indian to have a parish in England. His son George – quiet, socially awkward and the only boy at school with distinctly Indian features – grows up into a successful barrister, till he is improbably linked to and then prosecuted for the above crimes in a case that leaves many convinced that justice hasn’t been served. When he is released early, his conviction still hangs over him. Having lost faith in the police and the legal system, George Edalji turns to the one man he believes can clear his name – the one whose novels he spent his time reading in prison, the creator of the world’s greatest detective. When he writes to Arthur Conan Doyle asking him to meet, Conan Doyle agrees. From the author of Victoria and Abdul comes an eye-opening look at race and an unexpected friendship in the early days of the twentieth century, and the perils of being foreign in a country built on empire.Trade ReviewBasu's account of how Arthur Conan Doyle set about trying to get a pardon and compensation for Edalji is in itself a fine piece of detective work. * The Times *Compulsive reading. The bizarre story of Conan Doyle as detective and champion of justice has all the hallmarks of Shrabani Basu’s genius. * A.N. Wilson *It nails the nastiness of a peculiarly English scandal. * The Spectator *A potent mix of racial injustice, Sherlockian mystery and Shrabani's signature storytelling. -- Lucy WorsleyCompelling. * Prospect *

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis comprehensive and fascinating guide from genealogist and historian Celia Heritage will be an invaluable tool for all family and local historians wanting to track down documentary sources relating to people buried over the centuries. A wide-ranging examination of historical and archaeological findings means that the book will also appeal to anyone with an interest in death and burial. Celia throws light on changing social attitudes to death and burial from pre-historic times to the modern day, investigates the origins and evolution of cemeteries and graveyards, and discusses the many different types of graves and memorials. She details a wide range of online and offline sources that will help locate burials and memorials, while also offering vital advice regarding good research practice and what to do if you struggle to find a burial for a particular person. One chapter takes an in-depth look at the origins of the parish churchyard, while another looks at graveyards associated with nonconformist churches and institutions, including workhouses, asylums, hospitals and gaols. There is plenty of detail about less well-known genealogy sources such as undertakers' and stonemasons' records, together with better known sources such as burial registers and memorial inscriptions. Celia opens up a world in which the meaning of symbols used on gravestones becomes clear and she takes us below ground to investigate the different types of burial spaces in which our ancestors were laid to rest. She also explains why so many gravemarkers no longer survive - not just through weathering. Throughout, there is a wide range of hands-on case studies which bring the subject to life and put it right into the hands of the researcher. This is far more than just genealogy, and Celia portrays this fascinating subject from the view of both historian and archaeologist.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDeep in the heart of North Yorkshire, at a place called Walkington Wold, there lies a rather unusual burial ground, an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery. Twelve skeletons were unearthed by archaeologists, ten without skulls, later examination of the skeletons revealed that their owners were all subjected to judicial execution by decapitation, one of which required several blows. Similar fates have befallen other wretched souls, the undignified burial of suicides - in the Middle Ages, the most profound of sins - and the desecration of their bodies, go largely unrecorded. Whilst plague pits, vast cemeteries where victims of the Black Death were tossed into the ground, their bodies festering one on top of another, are only today betraying their secrets. Although unpalatable to some, these burial grounds are an important part of our social heritage. They have been fashioned as much by the people who founded and used them, as by the buildings, gravestones and other features which they contain. They are records of social change; the symbols engraved upon individual memorials convey a sense of inherent belief systems, as they were constructed, adapted or abandoned depending on people's needs. Symbols of Mortality explores how these attitudes, practices and beliefs about death have undergone continual change. By studying the development of society's funerary spaces, the author will reveal how we continue to reinforce our relationships with the dead, in a constant and on-going effort to maintain a bond with them.

Read more less

Book SynopsisKatey Dickens was born into a house of turbulent celebrity and grew up surrounded by fascinating, famous, and infamous people. From a very young age, she knew her vocation was to be an artist. Lucinda Hawksley charts the life of a celebrated portrait painter, who redefines our preconceptions about Victorian women. Living to be almost ninety, Katey survived an unconventional marriage, love affairs, heartbreak, depression, and the challenges of being a female artist in a male-dominated era. Compelling and illuminating, _Katey_ tells the story of a spirited woman who found fame at the centre of the first celebrity phenomenon; it also uncovers the reality of what it was like to be a child of Charles and Catherine Dickens. This biography of Katey, celebrating her artistic prestige-which saw her compared to Millais-is long overdue. The details of her fascinating life await rediscovery.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAt midnight on 5th July 1948, the National Health Service was born with the founding principal to be free at the point of use and based on clinical need rather than on a person's ability to pay. Seventy years since its formation, these core principals still hold true, although the world we now live in is a very different place to the post war era in which it was formed, and the long term sustainability of the service in its current form is questionable. This book traces the history of our health service, from Victorian healthcare in the early 20th century, through a timeline of change to the current day, comparing the problems and illnesses of 1948 to those we face seventy years later. Politics, funding, and healthcare systems around the world are demystified and we present case studies, views and snapshots from history from people who have experienced our changing NHS.

Read more less

Book SynopsisHenry VIII is one of history's most memorable monarchs. Popularly known for his six wives, and the unfortunate fate which befell Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, Henry initiated many reforms and changes which still affect our lives today. The annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon set in motion the separation of the English church from Rome and the establishment of the Church of England, which in turn led to the dissolution of the monasteries, the hauntingly evocative remains of which can be seen across the United Kingdom. Henry also oversaw the legal union between England and Wales, and he is also known as the father of the Royal Navy', with one of his great warships, the Mary Rose, lost in 1545 and recovered in 1982, becoming one of the most famous wrecks in maritime history. In addition to the monasteries, other buildings around the UK continue to remind us of the times of the Tudors - there is the site of Greenwich Palace at the Royal Naval College Greenwich, where Henry was born; his great palace at Hampton Court; Lambeth Palace where Thomas More refused to sign the oath to make Henry the Head of the Church, and the Bell Tower in the Tower of London where More was imprisoned before he was beheaded. Henry's breach with the Pope led to the threat of war with Catholic France and Spain, which prompted Henry to construct a series of powerful forts around the English and Welsh coasts. These elegant and symmetrical defensive structures are still awe-inspiring. In this engaging and hugely informative book, the author takes us on a journey across the country, from Deal Castle on the south coast, to Tower Green where Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard lost their heads, and far north to Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire. Along the way we see places where Henry stayed, where the Mary Rose was recovered, the homes of his consorts and Smithfield where prominent individuals convicted of heresy were burned at the stake. Travel, then, not just across the country, but also back in time through 100 objects from the days of the second Tudor monarch - Henry VIII.

Read more less

Book SynopsisEliza de Feuillide seemed fascinating and outlandish to her cousins in rural eighteen century England. When she visited their village, her appearance was electrifying. She was an attractive, accomplished French countess with a vivacious personality who inspired their imaginations and regaled them with stories of life in London and Paris where she hobnobbed with French nobility and wore the latest fashions. One of these impressionable younger cousins would find Eliza's stories so fascinating that she would incorporate elements of Eliza's life into some of the most famous novels in English literature. This cousin was Jane Austen. Yet Eliza's life was not as glamorous as Jane or her Austen cousins might have thought. She faced many tragedies in her life that wealth and social class could not protect her against. She was also forced to adapt and re-examine her priorities in a way that would dramatically change her life choices and result in a more sedate lifestyle. Read about the perseverance and courage of the real person behind several fictional characters in Jane Austen's writings and novels and the deeper connection Eliza had to the Austen family.

Read more less