Search results for ""Author Fredericks"
The University of Chicago Press States of Exception in American History
States of Exception in American History brings to light the remarkable number of instances since the Founding in which the protections of the Constitution have been overridden, held in abeyance, or deliberately weakened for certain members of the polity. In the United States, derogations from the rule of law seem to have been a feature of—not a bug in—the constitutional system. The first comprehensive account of the politics of exceptions and emergencies in the history of the United States, this book weaves together historical studies of moments and spaces of exception with conceptual analyses of emergency, the state of exception, sovereignty, and dictatorship. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Cold War figure prominently in the essays; so do Francis Lieber, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, Clinton Rossiter, and others who explored whether it was possible for the United States to survive states of emergency without losing its democratic way. States of Exception combines political theory and the history of political thought with histories of race and political institutions. It is both inspired by and illuminating of the American experience with constitutional rule in the age of terror and Trump.
£86.80
Skyhorse Publishing Mother Goose: More Than 100 Famous Rhymes!
Racehorse Publishing’s Quintessential Children’s Classics series is a collection of timeless children’s literature. Handsomely packaged and affordable, this new series aims to revitalize these enchanting works, and continue the tradition of sharing them with the next generation of readers.Flash back to your childhood. We all remember hearing the remarkable, rhyming tales from a mystery woman known only by the name Mother Goose.” Having been reprinted hundreds of times and passed down from generation to generation, Mother Goose’s stories are some of the most popular children’s poetry in the world.Originally made popular in the 17th century, these rhymes were on the forefront of fairy tale literature, and are often cited as the beginning of the genre. Now, these nursery rhymes are made available again in this stunning re-packaging of the classic Volland edition. This edition includes over one hundred and ten of Mother Goose’s most famous nursery rhymes, a foreword, and full color illustrations on every page by renowned illustrator Frederick Richardson.
£12.60
Beaufort Books Black Fatherhood: Reclaiming Our Legacy
This one of a kind book aims to highlight the importance of being a present father while breaking the stereotype that surrounds Black fatherhood. Written by Dr. Curtis L. Ivery and his son Marcus, the book is a blueprint for being a successful family man as well as a model African-American man. It's also an account of the current state of the African-American community and family, which is increasingly viewed as disconnected and falling apart. Riddled with quotes by celebrated leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Bill Cosby, and Nelson Mandela, the book provides tips on how to be a father each day, every day. Ivery talks about the importance of instilling a value system and emphasizes ways in which fathers can have optimal relationships with their children. The book also delves into our current society and examines how it's affecting African-American communities and families, as well as how we can overcome this. This book is an indispensable guide for fathers and children alike that will surely strengthen any family's bond.
£20.99
Moonstone Press Death and the Pleasant Voices
'All these people who thought themselves securely in possession are now going to be dependent on the caprice of this young man.’ During a blinding rainstorm, Jake Seaborne takes a wrong turn and arrives at Ullstone Hall, where is he is initially mistaken for ‘Hugo’, the new heir to the family estate. It seems Hugo is the offspring of the late Mr Ullstone’s first marriage in India, but the children of his second marriage have never met him. In short, the Ullstone family destiny is now in the hands of a complete stranger. A friend, Sir Frederick Lawson (who it turns out knows Jake’s family) has been asked to act as a “sort of buffer” for Hugo on his arrival, but Lawton cannot stay and Jake agrees to act in that role until he can return. But not everything is as it appears to be, and when the handsome and charming Hugo arrives, trouble follows and before long three people are dead.
£11.24
Fordham University Press Africans in Harlem: An Untold New York Story
The untold story of African-born migrants and their vibrant African influence in Harlem. From the 1920s to the early 1960s, Harlem was the intellectual and cultural center of the Black world. The Harlem Renaissance movement brought together Black writers, artists, and musicians from different backgrounds who helped rethink the place of Black people in American society at a time of segregation and lack of recognition of their civil rights. But where is the story of African immigrants in Harlem’s most recent renaissance? Africans in Harlem examines the intellectual, artistic, and creative exchanges between Africa and New York dating back to the 1910s, a story that has not been fully told until now. From Little Senegal, along 116th Street between Lenox Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, to the African street vendors on 125th Street, to African stores, restaurants, and businesses throughout the neighborhood, the African presence in Harlem has never been more active and visible than it is today. In Africans in Harlem, author, scholar, writer, and filmmaker Boukary Sawadogo explores Harlem’s African presence and influence from his own perspective as an African-born immigrant. Sawadogo captures the experiences, challenges, and problems African émigrés have faced in Harlem since the 1980s, notably work, interaction, diversity, identity, religion, and education. With a keen focus on the history of Africans through the lens of media, theater, the arts, and politics, this historical overview features compelling character-driven narratives and interviews of longtime residents as well as community and religious leaders. A blend of self-examination as an immigrant member in Harlem and research on diasporic community building in New York City, Africans in Harlem reveals how African immigrants have transformed Harlem economically and culturally as they too have been transformed. It is also a story about New York City and its self-renewal by the contributions of new human capital, creative energies, dreams nurtured and fulfilled, and good neighbors by drawing parallels between the history of the African presence in Harlem with those of other ethnic immigrants in the most storied neighborhood in America.
£27.99
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co KG Macht des Glaubens -- 450 Jahre Heidelberger Katechismus
The year 2013 will see a big anniversary: 450 years of Heidelberg Catechism. This Protestant confession was written in Heidelberg in 1563 on behalf of Frederick III, Elector Palatine and spread over the world when it was approved on the Synod of Dort in 1619. Since then the Heidelberg Catechism has shaped the spiritual and political life and became a symbol of change and departure from the old in Europe, America, and Asia. Even today the Heidelberg Catechism is the binding confession of the Reformed Church. It is in everyday use by more than 20 million people worldwide.In this exhibition book well known specialists in the field present how the Heidelberg Catechism spread and influenced culture, education and ecclesiastical life; they also show the context of its time and the courtly pomp of the electors and the House of Orange. Together with over 700 pictures illustrating the contributes and many objects in the exhibitions this documentation becomes an incomparable event!
£65.98
New Directions Publishing Corporation French Love Poems
Filled with devotion and lust, sensuality and eroticism, fevers and overtures, these poems showcase some of the most passionate verses in the French language. From the classic sixteenth-century love sonnets of Louise Labé and Maurice Sceve to the piercing lyricism of the Romantics and the dreamlike compositions of the Surrealists, French Love Poems is the perfect, seductive gift for anyone who makes your heart flutter. This collection includes poems by Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Claude Cahun, René Char, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Paul Éluard, Louise Labé, Stéphane Mallarmé, Anna de Noailles, Joyce Mansour, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and many others; as well as translations by Mary Ann Caws, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Frederick Seidel, Richard Sieburth, and William Carlos Williams.
£9.91
University of Toronto Press The Discovery of Insulin: Special Centenary Edition
The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921–2 was one of the most dramatic events in the history of the treatment of disease. Insulin, discovered by the Canadian research team of Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip, and John Macleod, was a wonder drug with the ability to bring diabetes patients back from the brink of death. It was no surprise that in 1923 the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded for its discovery. In this engaging and award-winning account, historian Michael Bliss draws on archival records and personal adventures to recount the fascinating story behind the discovery of insulin – a story as much filled with fiery confrontation and intense competition as medical dedication and scientific genius. With a new preface by Michael Bliss and a foreword by Alison Li, the special centenary edition of The Discovery of Insulin honours the one hundredth anniversary of insulin’s discovery and its continued significance a century later.
£24.99
University of California Press Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith
To be a black woman of faith in the American South is to understand and experience spirituality in a particular way. How this understanding expresses itself in everyday practices of faith is the subject of "Between Sundays", an innovative work that takes readers beyond common misconceptions and narrow assumptions about black religion and into the actual complexities of African American women's spiritual lives. Gracefully combining narrative, interviews, and analysis, this book explores the personal, political, and spiritual commitments of a group of Baptist women whose experiences have been informed by the realities of life in a rural, southern community. In these lives, 'spirituality' emerges as a space for creative agency, of vital importance to the ways in which these women interpret, inform, and reshape their social conditions - conditions often characterized by limited access to job opportunities, health care, and equitable schooling. In the words of these women, and in Marla F. Frederick's deft analysis, we see how spirituality - expressed as gratitude, empathy, or righteous discontent - operates as a transformative power in women's interactions with others, and in their own more intimate renegotiations of self.
£27.00
Syracuse University Press North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom
The compelling and wide-ranging tale that examines the moral choices made by blacks and whites of New York State to aid the newly freed slaves to secure the promise of freedom. The North Star was both an astronomical reference guiding slaves north to freedom, and a symbol of the moral enterprise that sought to end slavery. This crusade for freedom in the north was born of the religious revivals of the 1820s and 1830s in central and western New York - known as the ""Burned-Over District,"" which lit the fires that eventually burst into the conflagration of the Civil War. Milton C. Sernett begins with a history of slavery in upstate New York and ends with John Brown's execution and burial in the Adirondacks. He includes great abolitionists - among them Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Gerrit Smith, Beriah Green, Jermain Lougen, and Samuel May - and many lesset-known characters who rescued fugitives from slave hunters, maintained safe houses along the Underground Railroad, and otherwise furthered the cause of freedom.
£17.94
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Refiguring in Black
Refiguring in Black is a meditation on black life, and a meditation on the questions and concerns with which black life is confronted. It takes the form of a critical engagement with the thought of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Charles Mingus – key figures in the black radical tradition. Sithole does not reduce these thinkers to biographical subjects but examines them as figures of black thought in ways that are creative and generative. Erudite and passionate, this book is a statement of and testimony to refiguring as a form of critical practice by those who are engaged in a radical refusal, and thus part of the long arc of the black radical tradition. As a way of understanding the contemporary moment and unmasking antiblackness in all its forms and guises, Sithole’s work brings the annals of black thought into being in order to think differently and necessitate rupture, refusing to concede to the order of things and refusing to be complicit in the dehumanization that has marked the black condition.
£50.00
Rowman & Littlefield Buffalo Bill, Boozers, Brothels, and Bare-Knuckle Brawlers: An Englishman's Journal of Adventure in America
The travel journal of the wealthy young Englishman, Evelyn Booth, weaves a factual, enthralling, and entertaining narrative that follows his escapades throughout the United States of the late nineteenth century. Transcribed and edited (with relevant commentary for contemporary audiences) by Kellen Cutsforth, Booth’s journal reveals his career as a young care-free “frat boy” with unlimited funds, gives first-hand accounts that involve drunken nights, fist fights, illicit sex with prostitutes, sporting events, and full-blown adventures with the most well-known celebrities of the day, including encounters with famous scout and showman William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody and the Wild West Cowboys; bare knuckled world champions John L. Sullivan and Jack “Nonpareil” Dempsey; Fred Archer, the most famous horse jockey of the day, and prostitutes, gamblers, and infamous houses.
£17.99
Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press Clara's Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe
In 1741, an enterprising Dutch sea captain transported a young, female Indian rhinoceros from Assam to Europe where she was displayed before everyone from peasants to princes. In an age before railways and modern roads, the three-ton Clara traveled in an enormous coach drawn by eight horses. She journeyed across mainland Europe and Britain for 17 years, becoming a favorite of Frederick the Great and Louis XV. She modeled for scientific portraits and etchings; she inspired poems, songs, and fashions; and she was duly immortalized in everything from tin coins to the finest porcelain. Awarded the prestigious Institute of Historical Research Prize, Glynis Ridley's sparkling history brings Clara's tragicomic story vividly to life. Clara's Grand Tour is also a portrait of an era that saw the rhinoceros as both an object of marvel and a challenge to fundamental philosophical and theological beliefs.
£11.25
Canelo The Berlin Spies
The Second World War is coming to a close. But their fight is just beginning...Berlin, 1945: A group of Nazis frantically plot the next steps for their country. SS recruits gather east of the city for an audacious yet ill-fated mission to bring about a Fourth Reich.Three decades later, a young British diplomat in East Berlin is compromised after falling into a honey-trap. He contacts Major Edgar, a veteran British spymaster, who is drawn into an unlikely alliance with his old adversary, Viktor Krasotkin.Soon they are plunged into a world of Nazi war criminals and double agents. With nobody to trust, they must rely on each other. But as Cold War tensions rise, the cracks begin to show.The thrilling final novel in the Spies series, with an astonishing twist, perfect for fans of Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré.
£9.91
Pen & Sword Books Ltd A Photographic History of Londons Ceremonial Regiments
This richly illustrated volume tells the story of the seven regiments of the Household Division, along with the supporting personalities and units of London District. A subject as fascinating as it is multifarious. From the key personalities responsible for the razor-sharp execution of state ceremonial and public duties, to the historical figures who helped establish and shape a military dynasty. Travel through the history of the Household Division from its birth in 1660, with the restoration of Charles II, to its role in establishing Britain's Special Forces. It is a journey of political intrigue, cementing empire, and fighting terrorism. From the founding fathers such as George Monck, who laid the foundations for a professional British Army, to adventurers like David Stirling and Sir Frederick 'Boy' Browning, the history of the Household Division is one of almost continuous action and innovation. Supported by the Honourable Artillery Company and the King's Troop, The Royal Horse
£22.50
Orion Publishing Co The Use Of The Self
The world famous classic by the originator of the Alexander Technique, with a new perspective by Anthony Kingsley.Frederick Matthias Alexander was born in Tasmania in 1869. In his twenties, he became a professional reciter of dramatic pieces. After almost completely losing his voice he pioneered a method of improving the 'use' of his body musculature in all positions and movements and cured his vocal problems without medical aid.Alexander then realised that most people stood, sat and moved in a defective manner and that incorrect 'use of the self' might be the cause of much human suffering. He moved to London and established a school, publishing several books and achieving success, with recommendations from famous contemporaries such as Aldous Huxley and Sir Stafford Cripps. Alexander died in 1955 but his 'principle' lives on through the work of many teachers of his method.
£9.99
Fordham University Press Emergency Relief Operations
Early Warning Systems: From Surveillance to Risk Assessment to Action Ted R. Gurr and Barbara Harff Initial Response to Complex Emergencies and Natural Disasters Ed Tsui Evidence-Based Health Assessment Process in Complex Emergencies Frederick M. Burkle, Jr., M.D. Concern Worldwide's Approach to Water and Sanitation and Shelter Needs in Emergencies Tom Arnold Internal Displacement: A Challenge of Peace, Security, and Nationbuilding Francis M. Deng Protection Strategies in Humanitarian Interventions Gerald R. Martone Issues of Power and Gender in Complex Emergencies Judy A. Benjamin Clinical Aspects of Malnutrition Kevin M. Cahill, M.D. Military-NGO Interaction Timothy Cross An Introduction to NGO Field Security Randolph Martin Resolutions, Mandates, Aims, Missions, and Exit Strategies Larry Hollingworth The Transition from Conflict to Peace Richard Ryscavage, S.J.
£31.00
Stanford University Press Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global
The presence of women and African Americans not simply as viewers, but also as televangelists and station owners in their own right has dramatically changed the face of American religious broadcasting in recent decades. Colored Television looks at the influence of these ministries beyond the United States, where complex gospels of prosperity and gospels of sexual redemption mutually inform one another while offering hopeful yet socially contested narratives of personal uplift. As an ethnography, Colored Television illuminates the phenomenal international success of American TV preachers like T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, and Juanita Bynum. Focusing particularly on Jamaica and the Caribbean, it also explores why the genre has resonated so powerfully around the world. Investigating the roles of producers, consumers, and distributors, Marla Frederick takes a unique look at the ministries, the communities they enter, and the global markets of competition that buffer them.
£21.99
Stanford University Press Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global
The presence of women and African Americans not simply as viewers, but also as televangelists and station owners in their own right has dramatically changed the face of American religious broadcasting in recent decades. Colored Television looks at the influence of these ministries beyond the United States, where complex gospels of prosperity and gospels of sexual redemption mutually inform one another while offering hopeful yet socially contested narratives of personal uplift. As an ethnography, Colored Television illuminates the phenomenal international success of American TV preachers like T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, and Juanita Bynum. Focusing particularly on Jamaica and the Caribbean, it also explores why the genre has resonated so powerfully around the world. Investigating the roles of producers, consumers, and distributors, Marla Frederick takes a unique look at the ministries, the communities they enter, and the global markets of competition that buffer them.
£81.90
Pen & Sword Books Ltd Blowing Hot and Cold
Air-conditioning is one of those universal modern conveniences whose origins are entirely unknown to the general public. Online sources credit the first commercial system to the American Willis Carrier in 1902 but this is not true. The first workable machine was patented four years earlier by Alexander Stewart, a Scottish marine engineer, who called his invention the Thermotank. It offered a massive improvement in comfort for passengers and was rapidly adopted by the shipping industry, eventually equipping many of the greatest liners of their day like _Lusitania_ and _Mauretania_. From these beginnings Alexander and his brothers William and Frederick Stewart built an immensely successful engineering firm with subsidiaries in America, Africa, Australia and Europe. Based on Clydeside, its fortunes were always closely linked to the shipbuilding industry, but with the slump at the end of the First World War the company was forced to look to other markets. At this point Alexander came up
£19.99
Schiffer Publishing Ltd The Charles River: A History of Greater Boston's Waterway
In its 400 years of recorded history, the Charles River has run from Hopkinton to Boston just as marathoners do every April. In that time it has served as the route of settlement for places like Charlestown, Cambridge, Watertown, and Waltham. This book shows the Charles' historic role as a major source of waterpower, transportation, and recreation for the 23 towns and cities along its route. The story of the Charles includes many notable American figures including John Smith, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the inventors of the Stanley Steamer automobile. There are even accounts of the river's more recent transition from a poster child for the conflict between man and nature to one of the world's environmental preservation successes. Illustrated with historic maps and more than 100 color photos, this history of one of Greater Boston's greatest living landmarks is ideal for residents and visitors alike.
£20.69
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Refiguring in Black
Refiguring in Black is a meditation on black life, and a meditation on the questions and concerns with which black life is confronted. It takes the form of a critical engagement with the thought of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Charles Mingus – key figures in the black radical tradition. Sithole does not reduce these thinkers to biographical subjects but examines them as figures of black thought in ways that are creative and generative. Erudite and passionate, this book is a statement of and testimony to refiguring as a form of critical practice by those who are engaged in a radical refusal, and thus part of the long arc of the black radical tradition. As a way of understanding the contemporary moment and unmasking antiblackness in all its forms and guises, Sithole’s work brings the annals of black thought into being in order to think differently and necessitate rupture, refusing to concede to the order of things and refusing to be complicit in the dehumanization that has marked the black condition.
£15.99
WW Norton & Co American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860
With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, mass immigration and wars with continental neighbours. And yet eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom; voices from the margins moved the centre; acts of empathy defied self-interest. Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller and the Native American activist William Apess to challenge vastly powerful practices and beliefs. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse were similarly moved to harness their creativity to forge new paths forward. These visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of innovation and dissent into the very foundation of the nation.
£26.99
University of California Press Herbert Eugene Bolton: Historian of the American Borderlands
This definitive biography offers a new critical assessment of the life, works, and ideas of Herbert E. Bolton (1870-1953), a leading historian of the American West, Mexico, and Latin America. Bolton, a famous pupil of Frederick Jackson Turner, formulated a concept - the borderlands - that is a foundation of historical studies today. His research took him not only to the archives and libraries of Mexico but out on the trails blazed by Spanish soldiers and missionaries during the colonial era. Bolton helped establish the reputation of the University of California and the Bancroft Library in the eyes of the world and was influential among historians during his lifetime, but interest in his ideas waned after his death. Now, more than a century after Bolton began to investigate the Mexican archives, Albert L. Hurtado explores his life against the backdrop of the cultural and political controversies of his day.
£32.40
Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd Fred A Farrell: Glasgow's War Artist
The first proper overview of Fred Farrell's vivid drawings from the First World War. Beautifully illustrated in full colour, insightful essays and catalogue entries explain the genesis, execution and reception of these poignant works. Frederick Arthur Farrell (1882-1935) came from a distinguished Glasgow family. He initially studied civil engineering, and as an artist was self-taught, although he owes a debt to the advice and example of Muirhead Bone. By the outbreak of World War I, he was developing a reputation as an up-and-coming etcher and watercolourist of portraits and topographical subjects. He enlisted as a sapper, or military engineer, with the Royal Engineers Railway Troops Depot but was discharged from the Army due to ill health. In December 1916, Farrell returned to the Front as a war artist, attached for three weeks to the 15th, 16th and 17th Highland Light Infantry in Flanders. In November 1917 he was in France, attached for two months to the staff of the 51st (Highland) Division. In between, authorized by the Minister of Munitions and Admiralty, and supported by Glasgow's Lord Provost, Farrell drew the heroic home effort of women in Glasgow's munitions factories, shipyards and engineering works. As a former soldier, Farrell's sketches and watercolours of the Front powerfully offer a landscape filtered through personal experience and emotion. Battle scenes and strategic deliberations are reconstructed, informed by first-hand accounts. Many include portraits of actual soldiers. There are poignant images of graves, devastated landscapes and destroyed churches. However, there are also scenes of reconstruction and renewed activity amid the desolation. He is at his most dynamic in his drawings of the munitions factories which are full of noise, light and movement. In these there is a sense of joy and energy in industry and machinery, in patterning and design. The commission Farrell received from the Corporation of Glasgow to produce 50 drawings of the front line and munitions factories in the city to record the war for posterity was extraordinary. He was unique in being the only war artist to be commissioned by a city rather than by the government, Imperial War Museum or armed forces. Glasgow was one of the first cities to recognize the importance of creating such a memorial, rather than just creating images for propaganda purposes.
£16.99
New York University Press Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America
Honorable Mention for the 2014 MLA Alan Bray Memorial Award Finalist for the 2013 LAMBDA LGBT Studies Book Award In nineteenth-century America—before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality—what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as sexuality? Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the canonical to the improbable—from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith—Peter Coviello delineates the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation by the codings of “modern” sexuality. While telling the story of nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of sex: all the extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that, under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in challenging new directions, Tomorrow’s Parties assembles an archive of broken-off, uncreated futures—futures that would not come to be. Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of nineteenth-century America.
£23.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Lady of the Camellias
The landmark novel that inspired both Verdi's opera La Traviata and the Oscar-winning musical Moulin Rouge!, in a sparkling new translation. One of the greatest love stories of all time, The Lady of the Camellias recounts the history of Marguerite Gautier, the most beautiful, brazen, and expensive courtesan in all of Paris. Known to all as 'the Lady of the Camellias' because she is never seen without her favourite flowers, she leads a glittering life of endless parties and aristocratic balls, with the richest men in France flocking to her boudoir to lay their fortunes at her feet. But despite having many lovers, she has never really loved - until she meets Armand Duval, young, handsome and from a lower social class, and yet hopelessly in love with Marguerite.ALEXANDRE DUMAS fils (1824-1895) was the son of the famous novelist Alexandre Dumas. In 1847 he published his first novel, Adventures of Four Women and a Parrot, followed a year later by The Lady of the Camellias and ten other novels over the next decade. After the great success of the dramatic version of The Lady of the Camellias, he was gradually drawn away from the novel to the stage. In 1874 he was elected to the French Academy and until his death continued to produce a long line of successful plays.LIESL SCHILLINGER is a journalist and literary critic who writes regularly for The New York Times Book Review and spent many years on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. JULIE KAVANAGH is the author of The Girl Who Loved Camellias, a biography of the courtesan who inspired The Lady of the Camellias. An award-winning biographer of Rudolf Nureyev and Frederick Ashton, she has been London editor of both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.'One of the greatest love stories of the world' Henry James'Anyone who has read an outdated English translation of this novel; seen the opera it inspired - La Traviata, by Verdi; or watched the film it inspired - Camille, starring Greta Garbo, might have missed the audacity, obstinacy, sensuality, and recklessness of its characters' Liesl Schillinger
£13.90
Little, Brown & Company Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty
Not long after the death of his father, whose heart gave out suddenly in November 1967, Charles Koch, then in his early 30s, discovered a letter his father had written when his four sons were small. "My dear boys," it began when you are 21, you will receive what now seems to be a large sum of money. It may either be a blessing or a curse." "Above all," he cautioned, "be kind and generous to one another."In the ensuing decades, Fred's legacy became a blessing and a curse. Two of his sons, Charles and David, joined forces to build Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world. But they ended up in an epic feud with brothers Bill and Frederick that spanned nearly two decades, tearing the family apart-and nearly Koch Industries along with it. Bill would start his own energy company and attain a modicum of fame as a litigious wine-collector and yachtsman (he likened winning The America's Cup in 1992 to the ecstasy of "10,000 orgasms.") After being marginalized by the patriarch because of his effete manner, Frederick became a patron of the arts and a fastidious refurbisher of historic estates.Starting with their boyhood when fraternal disputes were sometimes settled in the boxing ring, SONS OF WICHITA takes you inside this highly private family and traces the evolution of these four distinct personalities as well as their corporate, philosophical, social and political ambitions (many forget David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party's vp candidate in 1980). Influenced by the conservative, anti-communist sentiments of their father, a founding member of the John Birch Society, Charles and David devised an ambitious strategy to foist their ideological agenda upon the nation-quietly channeling millions of dollars of their fortune into a web of freemarket think tanks, academic programs, advocacy groups, and more, while also building what amounts to a shadow Republican Party, replete with a donor network capable of raising as much in an election cycle as the Republican National Committee. Never before did they flex their political muscles as vigorously as they did during the 2012 campaign, when Charles and David clashed with the Obama administration in what Charles described as the "mother of all wars."Like The Rockefellers before them, The Koch (pronounced like the soft-drink "Coke") Brothers are a great American dynasty. Unlike The Rockefellers, they have never been the subject of a major biography before.
£14.99
Columbia University Press Central Park Trees and Landscapes: A Guide to New York City's Masterpiece
This is the ultimate field guide to the trees and landscapes of Central Park, with a lively, authoritative text and over 900 color photographs, botanical plates, and extraordinarily detailed maps. Under the direction of the Central Park Conservancy, the park's landscapes have been painstakingly restored to achieve the effects envisioned more than 150 years ago by the park's designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. This book highlights the leading role that trees play in defining 22 of these landscapes and chronicles the history of each of more than 200 tree species and varieties present in the park-where it came from and where the most outstanding specimens are located. Besides being a superb guide to the world's greatest center-city park, this book is a highly informative guide to most of the tree species commonly encountered in the eastern United States. Anyone who loves trees will find this book a very rewarding read, full of fascinating details and beautiful illustrations. Central Park Trees and Landscapes is divided into two major sections: "The Landscapes" opens with a geological account of Manhattan Island-from its position 500 million years ago on the edge of the proto-North American continent to its emergence about 15,000 years ago from the Laurentide Ice Sheet. The effects that human inhabitants had on the ecology of the island are described-from the burning of field stubble by Native Americans to the clearing of forest trees by Europeans. Next, the narrative focuses on the land that would eventually become Central Park-how it was saved from being dissected by John Randel's rigid street grid and how Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux became the park's designers. The heart of the section is devoted to the construction of the park in the late 1850s and 1860s. Twenty-two of the park's grand landscapes are pictured in dozens of photographs and in seven detailed maps pinpointing nearly 20,000 trees. Readers can identify each tree on the maps by species using the Tree Maps Key (located on the back of the front flap). "The Tree Guide" contains informative essays full of intriguing botanical and historical facts on over 200 of the park's tree species and varieties. Each two-page entry features illustrations of leaves, fruits, flowers, and bark as well as a striking portrait photograph of a park tree. The entries are organized into groups by leaf shapes shown on an easy-to-use identification key (located inside the front cover).
£20.00
University of Nebraska Press Scarlet Plume
In 1862 the largest Indian uprising in American history occurred in southern Minnesota. Enraged Sioux attempted to throw off the broken treaties that still bound them and to avenge the insults and depredations they had been forced to bear. Hundreds of whites were killed. Women were taken captive.Told from the point of view of Judith Raveling, a young woman widowed by the uprising, Scarlet Plume draws on the brutal history of the conflict from beginning to end. Taken captive by the Sioux, Judith is given to Scarlet Plume, one of the many warriors who know their cause is lost. Caught between the men who would wage war ruthlessly and his own judgment, which tells him how dearly the Sioux will pay for every white person killed, Scarlet Plume tries to save as many as he can. Defying the dangers of a pitiless war, he returns Judith to the safety of her people. Soon she must try to save him. Scarlet Plume is the third of Frederick Manfred’s five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales.
£16.99
New Directions Publishing Corporation Prince Friedrich of Homburg: A New Translation for the American Stage
Available until now only in verse translation, it has been newly rendered for the American stage by Diana Stone Peters and Frederick G. Peters. A work of profound psychological insight, Prince Friedrich of Homburg probes with passionate intensity questions fundamental to “civilized” behavior. Prince Friedrich, the hero of the historic battle of Fehrbellin (1675) against the invading Swedes, receives not laurels for his victory but the sentence of death for disobeying orders in the field. Faced with certain execution, his mood swings from abject terror to high-minded exultation as first he challenges, and then accepts, the rule of law and subservience to the state. The action moves relentlessly in the near-frenzied pace characteristic of Kleist. Intended as a paean to a Prussia triumphant in the Napoleonic wars. the play was, ironically, censured and never produced in Kleist's lifetime. In our own day, Prince Friedrich of Homburg has been both denounced as a protofascist work and lauded as a supreme metaphysical disquisition. Whatever the merits of such intellectualization, it remains one of the most moving and performable plays available for the modern stage.
£9.91
WW Norton & Co The Norton Book of American Autobiography
From Mary Rowlandson's story of her capture by Indians in the mid-seventeenth century to Mary Paik Lee's story of being a pioneer Korean woman in America at the beginning of the twentieth century, the autobiographical form has provided our most vivid, intimate glimpses of daily American life and self-understanding. In this groundbreaking anthology, respected writer and critic Jay Parini brings together an abundant selection from over three centuries of "the democratic voice . . . discovering itself." Here are the voices of the Founding Fathers and African American slaves; of transcendentalists and suffragists; of ancestors such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Henry James, Helen Keller, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and many others; and of a wide range of contemporaries, including Maxine Hong Kingston, Gore Vidal, Julia Alvarez, and Mark Doty. The rich, continuous influence of autobiographical writing in our culture is clear, and as memoirs continue to fascinate readers, this invaluable anthology provides an essential guide to our foremost American literary tradition.
£31.99
John Wiley & Sons Inc Beam, Straight Up: The Bold Story of the First Family of Bourbon
An insider's look at the Jim Beam brand, from a 7th generation Master Distiller Written by the 7th generation Beam family member and Master Distiller, Frederick Booker Noe III, Beam, Straight Up is the first book to be written by a Beam, the family behind the 217-year whiskey dynasty and makers of one of the world's best-selling bourbons. This book features family history and the evolution of bourbon, including Fred's storied youth "growing up Beam" in Bardstown, Kentucky; his transition from the bottling line to renowned global bourbon ambassador; and his valuable business insights on how to maintain and grow a revered brand. Includes details of Fred Noe's life on the road, spreading the bourbon gospel Describes Fred's journey to becoming the face of one of America's most iconic brands Shares a simple primer on how bourbon is made Offers cocktail and food recipes For anyone wanting a behind the scenes look at Jim Beam, and an understanding of the bourbon industry, Beam, Straight Up will detail the family business, and its role in helping to shape it.
£16.19
Johns Hopkins University Press Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture
This volume spotlights the visual arts, vision, and blindness during the Enlightenment in France, Britain, and Germany. The essays range from exploring the musical and cultural impact of an eighteenth-century virtuoso violinist to analyzing lotteries as romance in eighteenth-century England. Contributors and Contents: Mary Sheriff, The King, the Trickster and the Gorgon: On the Illusions of Rococo ArtBeverly Wilcox, The Hissing of Monsieur PaginJessica Richard, Lotteries and the Romance of Chance in Eighteenth-Century EnglandEmrys D. Jones, 'Friendship like mine / Throws all Respects behind it': Male Companionship and the Cult of Frederick, Prince of WalesDavid Hagan, Threading the Needle: Problems in Reading Dennis Diderot's La lettre sur les aveuglesJosephine Touma, From the Playhouse to the Page: Some Visual Sources for Watteau's Theatrical UniverseDaniel O'Quinn, Diversionary Tactics and Coercive Acts: John Burgoyne's Fete ChampetreShelley King, Portrait of a Marriage: John and Amelia Opie and the Sister ArtsDavid Fairer, Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty AirDorothea Von Mucke, Iconic Turn and the Power of Images: Goethe's Elective AffinitiesLaure Marcellesi, Louis-Sebastien Mercier: Prophet, Abolitionist, Colonialist
£39.00
Prestel Albrecht Dürer
During his lifetime, Dürer found tremendous success as a printmaker and painter, taking commissions from prominent figures such as Frederick the Wise, for whom Dürer produced the masterpiece Adoration of the Magi, and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. While Dürer’s paintings and prints are highly lauded, his drawings and studies are equally important . Featured in this book are Dürer’s drawings from the Albertina Museum’s preeminent collection. The Albertina Museum houses the world’s most important collection of drawings by Dürer which include family portraits, studies of animals and plants, and studies of the human body. Influenced by his contacts to Italy and by his humanist friends he showed a strong interest in human proportions, anatomy, and perspective. This book showcases more than 100 of Dürer’s drawings including Hare, Self Portrait at the Age of 13, and Melencolia I, accompanied by paintings and prints. Featuring scholarly essays and beautifully reproduced works, this book shows the importance of Dürer’s drawings in his oeuvre and how he helped drawing become an appreciated medium in its own right.
£44.99
University of Pennsylvania Press Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Few concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately invoked in American public culture than that of privacy. What these discussions have lacked, however, is a historically informed sense of privacy's genealogy in U.S. culture. Now, Milette Shamir traces this peculiarly American obsession back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when our modern understanding of privacy took hold. Shamir explores how various discourses, as well as changes in the built environment, worked in tandem to seal, regulate, and sanctify private spaces, both domestic and subjective. She offers revelatory readings of texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and other, less familiar antebellum writers and looks to a wide array of sources, including architectural blueprints for private homes, legal cases in which a "right to privacy" supplements and exceeds property rights, examples of political rhetoric vaunting the sacred inviolability of personal privacy, and conduct manuals prescribing new codes of behavior to protect against intrusion.
£23.99
University of Texas Press Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR
A funny thing happened on the way to the movies. Instead of heading downtown to a first-run movie palace, or even to a suburban multiplex with the latest high-tech projection capabilities, many people's first stop is now the neighborhood video store. Indeed, video rentals and sales today generate more income than either theatrical releases or television reruns of movies. This pathfinding book chronicles the rise of home video as a mass medium and the sweeping changes it has caused throughout the film industry since the mid-1970s. Frederick Wasser discusses Hollywood's initial hostility to home video, which studio heads feared would lead to piracy and declining revenues, and shows how, paradoxically, video revitalized the film industry with huge infusions of cash that financed blockbuster movies and massive marketing campaigns to promote them. He also tracks the fallout from the video revolution in everything from changes in film production values to accommodate the small screen to the rise of media conglomerates and the loss of the diversity once provided by smaller studios and independent distributors.
£19.99
Orion Publishing Co The Woman's Hour
Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and a lot of racists who don't want black women voting. And then there are the "Antis"--women who oppose their own enfranchisement, fearing suffrage will bring about the moral collapse of the nation. They all converge in a boiling hot summer for a vicious face-off replete with dirty tricks, betrayals and bribes, bigotry, Jack Daniel's, and the Bible.Following a handful of remarkable women who led their respective forces into battle, along with appearances by Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Frederick Douglass, and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Woman's Hour is an inspiring story of activists winning their own freedom in one of the last campaigns forged in the shadow of the American Civil War, and the beginning of the great twentieth-century battles for civil rights.
£9.89
Rizzoli International Publications Painting a Nation: American Art at Shelburne Museum
Electra Havemeyer Webb assembled Shelburne Museum s trove of American paintings in the late 1950s, creating a renowned and rich survey of American portraits, landscapes, marine paintings, sporting art, still lifes, and genre scenes from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. During an era that preferred European modernism and abstraction, Webb s visionary endeavour presented a new story of the United States: an attractive and industrious nation with its own valuable artistic traditions. This handsome book features the best of Shelburne s American paintings, including works by colonial painters John Wollaston and John Singleton Copley, portraits by William Matthew Prior and Ammi Phillips, Hudson River School landcapes by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and John Frederick Kensett, and scenes of American life by Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and many more. The collection is also notable for its great depth in the works by Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Carl Rungius, Grandma Moses, and Ogden Pleissner.
£34.27
2Leaf Press The Beiging of America – Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century
THE BEIGING OF AMERICA, BEING MIXED RACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, takes on "race matters" and considers them through the firsthand accounts of mixed race people in the United States. Edited by mixed-race scholars Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Sean Frederick Forbes and Tara Betts, this collection consists of 39 poets, writers, teachers, professors, artists and activists, whose personal narratives articulate the complexities of interracial life. THE BEIGING OF AMERICA was prompted by cultural critic/scholar Hua Hsu, who contemplated the changing face and race of U.S. demographics in his 2009 The Atlantic article provocatively titled "The End of White America." In it, Hsu acknowledged "steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage" that undergirded assertions about the "beiging of America." THE BEIGING OF AMERICA is an absorbing and thought-provoking collection of stories that explore racial identity, alienation, with people often forced to choose between races and cultures in their search for self-identity. While underscoring the complexity of the mixed-race experience, these unadorned voices offer a genuine, poignant, enlightening and empowering message to all readers.
£20.00
Meze Publishing The Derbyshire Cook Book: Second Helpings: A celebration of the amazing food and drink on your doorstep
The Derbyshire Cook Book: Second Helpings celebrates the best of the county's food scene and follows on from the acclaimed first edition released in 2015. Showcasing how the region’s food scene has developed in the last three years, the book features more than 40 recipes and stories from some of the region’s finest local restaurants, delis, gastro pubs, farm shops, cafes and local suppliers. It includes a foreword and recipe from Chris Mapp, owner and head chef at Barlow's Tickled Trout, plus chapters and recipes from Chatsworth Farm Shop (part of the Chatsworth Estate), the Michelin-starred Fischer's at Baslow, highly acclaimed restaurant/hotel Peacock at Rowsley (who also appear in the Michelin Guide), as well as cosy country pubs like The Elm Tree at Elmton and the award-winning Old Hall Inn in Chinley. There are also chapters from producers such as potted meat specialists Granny Marys, artisan cheese-makers Cow Close Farm and local ice cream aficionados Fredericks. So whether your taste is fine dining, no nonsense hearty food or something altogether more exotic, there’s lots for you here.
£13.46
Rudolf Steiner Press Background to the Gospel of St Mark
‘Christianity was bound at first to be a matter of faith and is only now beginning, very gradually, to be a matter of knowledge.’ – Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Steiner gave 70 lectures on the four canonical Gospels, characterizing the distinctive contribution of each of the evangelists. The Gospel of Mark is a ‘cosmic’ text that calls for an astronomical as well as a human reading. It is also critical for understanding the evolution of Christianity, which depends on knowledge of ‘the Mystery of Golgotha’ (Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection and ascension). ‘We are only at the beginning of Christian evolution’, Steiner states, reiterating that its further development will depend on spiritual knowledge. In order to develop such cognition, ‘most important of all is reverence for the great truths and the feeling that we can approach them only with awe and veneration’. Many profound spiritual truths are indeed revealed in these lectures. Among the panoply of topics covered are: ‘Mystery Teachings in St Mark’s Gospel’; ‘The Son of God and the Son of Man’; ‘The Symbolic Language of the Macrocosm’; ‘The Moon-religion of Yahweh’ and ‘The Penetration of the Buddha-Mercury Stream into Rosicrucianism’. This thoroughly revised edition includes notes and appendices by Frederick Amrine and an extensive introduction by Robert McDermott.
£20.00
Columbia University Press DNA: A Graphic Guide to the Molecule that Shook the World
With humor, depth, and philosophical and historical insight, DNA reaches out to a wide range of readers with its graphic portrayal of a complicated science. Suitable for use in and out of the classroom, this volume covers DNA's many marvels, from its original discovery in 1869 to early-twentieth-century debates on the mechanisms of inheritance and the deeper nature of life's evolution and variety. Even readers who lack a background in science and philosophy will learn a tremendous amount from this engaging narrative. The book elucidates DNA's relationship to health and the cause and cure of disease. It also covers the creation of new life forms, nanomachines, and perspectives on crime detection, and considers the philosophical sources of classical Darwinian theory and recent, radical changes in the understanding of evolution itself. Already these developments have profoundly affected our notions about living things. Borin Van Loon's humorous illustrations recount the contributions of Gregor Mendel, Frederick Griffith, James Watson, and Francis Crick, among other biologists, scientists, and researchers, and vividly depict the modern controversies surrounding the Human Genome Project and cloning.
£16.99
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Physical Chemistry
Ever since Physical Chemistry was first published in 1913 (then titled Outlines of Theoretical Chemistry, by Frederick Getman), it has remained a highly effective and relevant learning tool thanks to the efforts of physical chemists from all over the world. Each new edition has benefited from their suggestions and expert advice. The result of this remarkable tradition is now in your hands. Now revised and updated, this Fourth Edition of Physical Chemistry by Silbey, Alberty, and Bawendi continues to present exceptionally clear explanations of concepts and methods. The basic theory of chemistry is presented from the viewpoint of academic physical chemists, but detailed discussions of practical applications are integrated throughout. The problems in the book also skillfully blend theory and applications. Highlights of the Fourth Edition:* A total of 170 computer problems appropriate for MATHEMATICATM, MATHCADTM, MATLABTM, or MAPLETM.* Increased emphasis on the thermodynamics and kinetics of biochemical reactions, including the denaturation of proteins and nucleic acids.* Expanded coverage of the uses of statistical mechanics, nuclear magnetic relaxation, nanoscience, and oscillating chemical reactions.* Many new tables and figures throughout the text.
£181.01
New York University Press Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony
Even the most cursory review of black literary production during the nineteenth century indicates that its primary concerns were the issues of slavery, racial subjugation, abolitionist politics and liberation. How did the writers of these narratives "bear witness" to the experiences they describe? At a time when a hegemonic discourse on these subjects already existed, what did it mean to "tell the truth" about slavery? Impossible Witnesses explores these questions through a study of fiction, poetry, essays, and slave narratives from the abolitionist era. Linking the racialized discourses of slavery and Romanticism, it boldly calls for a reconfiguration of U.S. and British Romanticism that places slavery at its center. Impossible Witnesses addresses some of the major literary figures and representations of slavery in light of discourses on natural rights and law, offers an account of Foucauldian discourse analysis as it applies to the problem of "bearing witness," and analyzes specific narratives such as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," and "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano." A work of great depth and originality, Impossible Witnesses renders traditional interpretations of Romanticism impossible and places Dwight A. McBride at the forefront of studies in race and literature.
£20.99
The University of Chicago Press Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America
The election of America's first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In "Awakening to Race", Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them. Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness - consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner's "new individualism" becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.
£25.16
Penguin Random House Children's UK The Family from One End Street
A Puffin Book - stories that last a lifetime.THE FAMILY FROM ONE END STREET by Eve Garnett is the story of everyday life in the big, happy Ruggles family who live in the small town of Otwell. Father is a dustman and Mother a washerwoman. Then there's all the children - practical Lily Rose, clever Kate, mischievous twins James and John, followed by Jo, who loves films, little Peg and finally baby William. A truly classic book awarded the Carnegie Medal as the best children's book of 1937.Eve Garnett was born in 1900 in Worcestershire, and studied art at Chelsea Polytechnic and the Royal Academy School of Art. Whilst a student, she sketched the people of the East End slums and was haunted by the poverty she had witnessed, resolving to do something to bring the plight of the working-class family to people's attention. The Family from One End Street was originally published by Frederick Muller in 1937, followed by The Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street in 1956, and Holiday at Dew Drop Inn in 1962. She died in 1991.
£8.42
The History Press Ltd British Sieges of the Peninsular War
The Peninsular War continues to be of great interest to students of military history, but the various siege operations have tended to be overlooked. However as Frederick Myatt demonstrates in British Sieges of the Peninsular War, they are of no less interest than the battles in the open fields, particularly in Spain where the circumstances were so unusual. The British Army under Wellington was hopelessly outnumbered by the French and could only keep the field at all by virtue of the superior supply system which enabled them to remain concentrated, whereas the French, who lived off the country, were compelled to disperse widely in order to survive. They were nevertheless capable of rapid concentration for a particular object, so that any siege operation conducted by the British inevitably ran the risk of being overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers of the relieving force. As a result, Wellington’s main preoccupation was not how long it would take to bring a siege to a successful conclusion by normal means but rather what chance he had of snatching success before the French overcame their supply problems and arrived in front of him.
£16.99