Documented, historically accurate narratives, and thumbnail sketches comprise this outstanding contribution to the study of Pioneer life in Oregon from the viewpoint of pioneer women.

More than one million immigrants fled the Irish famine for North America--and more than one hundred thousand of them perished aboard the "coffin ships" that crossed the Atlantic. But one small ship never lost a passenger.
"All Standing" recounts the remarkable tale of the "Jeanie Johnston" and her ingenious crew, whose eleven voyages are the stuff of legend. Why did these individuals succeed while so many others failed? And what new lives in America were the ship's passengers seeking?
In this deeply researched and powerfully told story, acclaimed author Kathryn Miles re-creates life aboard this amazing vessel, richly depicting the bravery and defiance of its shipwright, captain, and doctor--and one Irish family's search for the American dream.

Provincial towns in Britain grew in size and importance in the eighteenth century. Ports such as Glasgow and Liverpool greatly expanded, while industrial centres such as Birmingham and Manchester flourished. Market towns outside London developed as commercial centres or as destinations offering spa treatments as in Bath, horse racing in Newmarket or naval services in Portsmouth. Containing over 100 images of towns in England, Wales and Scotland, this book draws on the extensive Gough collection in the Bodleian Library. Contemporary prints and drawings provide a powerful visual record of the development of the town in this period, and finely drawn prospects and maps - made with greater accuracy than ever before - reveal their early development. This book also includes perceptive observations from the journals and letters of collector Richard Gough (1735-1809), who travelled throughout the country on the cusp of the industrial age.

The "superb" (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan's words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John's father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court. At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation's prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US. Harlan's dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan's Plessy dissent his "Bible"--and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan's words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a "magnificent" (Douglas Brinkley) and "thoroughly researched" (The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system's most significant failures and most inspiring successes.

The Battle of Peach Tree Creek marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy, for it turned the page from the patient defence displayed by General Joseph E. Johnston to the bold offense called upon by his replacement, General John Bell Hood. Until this point in the campaign, the Confederates had fought primarily in the defensive from behind earthworks, forcing Federal commander William T. Sherman to either assault fortified lines, or go around them in flanking moves. At Peach Tree Creek, the roles would be reversed for the first time, as Southerners charged Yankee lines. The Gate City, as Atlanta has been called, was in many ways the capstone to the Confederacy's growing military-industrial complex and was the transportation hub of the fledgling nation. For the South it had to be held. For the North it had to be taken. With General Johnston removed for failing to parry the Yankee thrust into Georgia, the fate of Atlanta and the Confederacy now rested on the shoulders of thirty-three-year-old Hood, whose body had been torn by the war. Peach Tree Creek was the first of three battles in eight days in which Hood led the Confederate Army to desperate, but unsuccessful, attempts to repel the Federals encircling Atlanta. This particular battle started the South on a downward spiral from which she would never recover. After Peach Tree Creek and its companion battles for Atlanta, the clear-hearing Southerner could hear the death throes of the Confederacy. It was the first nail in the coffin of Atlanta and Dixie.

'I read the book with enormous appreciation. Tessa Boase brings all these long-ago housekeepers so movingly to life and her excitement in the research is palpable.' Fay Weldon: Novelist, playwright - and housekeeper's daughter Revelatory, gripping and unexpectedly poignant, this is the story of the invisible women who ran the English country house. Working as a housekeeper was one of the most prestigious jobs a nineteenth and early twentieth century woman could want - and also one of the toughest. A far cry from the Downton Abbey fiction, the real life Mrs Hughes was up against capricious mistresses, low pay, no job security and gruelling physical labour. Until now, her story has never been told. Revealing the personal sacrifices, bitter disputes and driving ambition that shaped these women's careers, and delving into secret diaries, unpublished letters and the neglected service archives of our stately homes, Tessa Boase tells the extraordinary stories of five working women who ran some of Britain's most prominent households. From Dorothy Doar, Regency housekeeper for the obscenely wealthy 1st Duke and Duchess of Sutherland at Trentham Hall, Staffordshire, to Sarah Wells, a deaf and elderly Victorian in charge of Uppark, West Sussex. From Ellen Penketh, Edwardian cook-housekeeper at the sociable but impecunious Erddig Hall in the Welsh borders to Hannah Mackenzie who runs Wrest Park in Bedfordshire - Britain's first country-house war hospital, bankrolled by playwright J. M. Barrie. And finally Grace Higgens, cook-housekeeper to the Bloomsbury set at Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex for half a century - an era defined by the Second World War. Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-GBX-NONEX-NONE

By the early 1820s, British policy in the Eastern Mediterranean was at a crossroads. Historically shaped by the rivalry with France, the course of Britain's future role in the region was increasingly affected by concern about the future of the Ottoman Empire and fears over Russia's ambitions in the Balkans and the Middle East. The Regency of Tripoli was at this time establishing a new era in foreign and commercial relations with Europe and the United States. Among the most important of these relationships was that with Britain. Using the National Archive records of correspondence of the British consuls and diplomats from 1795 to 1832, and within the context of the wider Eastern Question, this book reconstructs the the Anglo-Tripolitanian relationship and argues that the Regency played a vital role in Britain's imperial strategy during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Including the perspective of Tripolitanian notables and British diplomats, it contends that the activities of British consuls in Tripoli, and the networks they fostered around themselves, reshaped the nature and extent of British imperial activity in the region.

Nineteenth-century European representations of Africa are notorious for depicting the continent with a blank interior. But there was a time when British writers filled Africa with landed empires and contiguous trade routes linked together by a network of rivers. This geographical narrative proliferated in fictional and nonfictional texts alike, and it was born not from fanciful speculation but from British interpretations of what Africans said and showed about themselves and their worlds. Investigations of the representation of Africa in British texts have typically concluded that the continent operated in the British imagination as a completely invented space with no meaningful connection to actual African worlds, or as an inert realm onto which writers projected their expansionist fantasies. With African Impressions, Rebekah Mitsein revises that narrative, demonstrating that African elites successfully projected expressions of their sovereignty, wealth, right to power, geopolitical clout, and religious exceptionalism into Europe long before Europeans entered sub-Saharan Africa. Mitsein considers the ways that African self-representation continued to drive European impressions of the continent across the early Enlightenment, fueling desires to find the sources of West Africa's gold and the city states along the Niger, to establish a relationship with the Christian kingdom of Prester John, and to discover the source of the Nile. Through an analysis of a range of genres, including travel narratives, geography books, maps, verse, and fiction, Mitsein shows how African strategies of self-representation and European strategies for representing Africa grew increasingly inextricable, as the ideas that Africans presented about themselves and their worlds migrated from contact zones to texts and back again. The geographical narratives that arose from this cycle, which unfolded over hundreds of years, were made to fit expansionist agendas, but they remained rooted in the African worlds and worldviews that shaped them.

At a time when Napoleon needed all his forces to reassert French dominance in Central Europe, why did he fixate on the Prussian capital of Berlin? Instead of concentrating his forces for a decisive showdown with the enemy, he repeatedly detached large numbers of troops, under ineffective commanders, toward the capture of Berlin. In "Napoleon and Berlin, " Michael V. Leggiere explores Napoleon's almost obsessive desire to capture Berlin and how this strategy ultimately lost him all of Germany.

Napoleon's motives have remained a subject of controversy from his own day until ours. He may have hoped to deliver a tremendous blow to Prussia's war-making capacity and morale. Ironically, the heavy losses and strategic reverses sustained by the French left Napoleon's Grande Armee vulnerable to an Allied coalition that eventually drove Napoleon from Central Europe forever.