The movement of millions of settlers to Siberia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked one of the most ambitious undertakings pursued by the tsarist state. Colonizing Russia's Promised Land examines how Russian Orthodoxy acted as a basic building block for constructing Russian settler communities in current-day southern Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. Russian state officials aspired to lay claim to land that was politically under their authority, but remained culturally unfamiliar. By exploring the formation and evolution of Omsk diocese - a settlement mission - Colonizing Russia's Promised Land reveals how the migration of settlers expanded the role of Orthodoxy as a cultural force in transforming Russia's imperial periphery by "russifying" the land and marginalizing the Indigenous Kazakh population. In the first study exploring the role of Orthodoxy in settler colonialism, Aileen Friesen shows how settlers, clergymen, and state officials viewed the recreation of Orthodox parish life as practised in European Russia as fundamental to the establishment of settler communities, and to the success of colonization. Friesen uniquely gives peasant settlers a voice in this discussion, as they expressed their religious aspirations and fears to priests and tsarist officials. Despite this agreement, tensions existed not only among settlers, but also within the Orthodox Church as these groups struggled to define what constituted the Russian Orthodox faith and culture.

The Secret Teachings of All Ages is perhaps the most comprehensive and complete esoteric encyclopedia ever written. The sheer scope and ambition of this book are stunning. In this book Manly P. Hall has successfully distilled the essence of more arcane subjects than one would think possible. He covers Rosicrucianism and other secret societies, alchemy, cryptology, Kabbalah, Tarot, pyramids, the Zodiac, Pythagorean philosophy, Masonry, gemology, Nicholas Flammel, the identity of William Shakespeare, The Life and Teachings of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus, The Qabbalah, The Hiramic Legend, The Tree of the Sephiroth, Mystic Christianity, and there are more than 200 illustrations included here. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to explore esoteric knowledge.

*Shows how this order, also known as oriental Freemasonry, preserves the ancient spiritual doctrines forgotten by modern Freemasonry*Explains how to transform the soul into the alchemical Magnum opus by combining Masonic grips and the abbreviated letters of the Qur'an*Includes a detailed biography of Baron von SebottendorffOriginally published in Germany in 1924, this rare book by Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff reveals the secret spiritual exercises of the Bektashi Order of Sufis as well as how this order, also known as Oriental Freemasonry, preserves the ancient spiritual doctrines forgotten by modern Freemasonry. Sebottendorff explains how the mysterious abbreviated letters found in the Qur'an represent formulae for perfecting the spirit of the individual. When combined with Masonic hand signs and grips and conducted accordingly to a precise schedule, these formulae incorporate spiritual power into the body and transform the soul from its base state into a noble, godlike state: the Magnum Opus of the mediaeval alchemists. Laying out the complete programme of spiritual exercises, Sebottendorff explains each abbreviated word-formula in the Qur'an, the hand gestures that go with them and the exact order and duration for each exercise. Including a detailed biography of Sebottendorff and an examination of alchemy's Islamic heritage, this book shows how the traditions of Oriental Freemasonry can ennoble the self and lead to higher knowledge.

Company towns are often portrayed as powerless communities, fundamentally dependent on the outside influence of global capital. Neil White challenges this interpretation by exploring how these communities were altered at the local level through human agency, missteps, and chance. Far from being homogeneous, these company towns are shown to be unique communities with equally unique histories.Company Towns provides a multi-layered, international comparison between the development of two settlements--the mining community of Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia, and the mill town of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada. White pinpoints crucial differences between the towns' experiences by contrasting each region's histories from various perspectives--business, urban, labour, civic, and socio-cultural. Company Towns also makes use of a sizable collection of previously neglected oral history sources and town records, providing an illuminating portrait of divergence that defies efforts to impose structure on the company town phenomenon.

HISTORY / FREEMASONRY Thanks to documents discovered nearly two hundred years after his death, we now have a fuller picture of the profound influence that Freemasonry had on the life and work of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Musicologist Jacques Henry shows that the Masonic influence on Mozart's work goes far beyond pieces such as The Magic Flute that were overtly Masonic or fulfilled a ritual purpose for the composer. For those initiated, many of Mozart's other compositions express the same Masonic ideals no less clearly. His works actually provide a complete musical lexicon of Masonic symbols inspired by the principles of the craft and the spirit of the Masonic quest. Mozart constructed his Masonic compositions by creating auditory correspondences to the symbols present in the rituals, choosing keys and tempos that transpose their content into harmony. His understanding of the use of symbol allowed him to create music that would lead the listener into a harmony that transcended earthly existence.A number of musicologists believe that the place of the Masonic spiritual vision in Mozart's work is comparable to that held by Lutheran Christianity in the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. Mozart wed his deep understanding of music to the esoteric wisdom he gained as a Freemason to show that when we lose ourselves in the expression of the purest harmony, it is the same as the symbol being lost in what it symbolizes. Jacques Henry provides a rigorous and original analysis of Mozart's works that reveals their inner meaning as shaped by the composer's profound embrace of the spiritual principles of Freemasonry.Jacques Henry is artistic director of the annual Mozart festival in the Drome region ofFrance and an expert on the symbolism in Mozart's work. He lives in France.

A history of Gloucestershire County Cricket Club

A history of Raith Rovers Football Club since 1996

'A trained scout will see little signs and tracks, he puts them together in his mind and quickly reads a meaning from them such as an untrained man would never arrive at.' A startling amalgam of Zulu war-cry and imperial and urban myth, of borrowed tips on health and hygiene, and object lessons in woodcraft, Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (1908) is the original blueprint and 'self-instructor' of the Boy Scout Movement. An all-time bestseller in the English-speaking world, second only to the Bible, this primer of 'yarns and pictures' constitutes probably the most influential manual for youth ever published. Yet the book is at the same time a roughly composed hodge-podge of jingoist lore and tracker legend, padded with lengthy quotations from adventure fiction and B-P's own autobiography, and seamed through with the multiple anxieties of its time: fears of degeneration, concerns about masculinity and self-restraint, invasion paranoia. Elleke Boehmer's edition of Scouting for Boys is the first to reprint the original text and illustrations, and her fine introduction investigates a book that has been cited as an authority by militarists and pacifists, capitalists and environmentalists alike.

The British Women's Institute is more often associated with jam and Jerusalem than radical activity, but in this book Maggie Andrews explores the WI's relationship with feminism from the formation of the organisation in 1915 up to the eve of British feminism's renaissance in the late 1960s. The book aims to challenge, not only common sense perceptions about the Women's Institute but also those about feminism, interrogating preoccupations with domestic spaces and skills. This makes it is valuable reading for those interested in both historical and contemporary feminism, as well as, more broadly, the history of the twentieth century. Attention is given to the female cultural space and the value system provided by the WI, and the campaigns that articulated the needs of rural women and attempted to meet them. In this 100th anniversary year of the founding of the WI, this celebrated text is re-published in a new and completely revised edition. Maggie Andrews's new afterword considers the resurgence of interest in the WI amongst young women in the twenty-first century, and the relationship between this and the contemporary cultural enthusiasm for the domestic. There is also a new chapter on the formation of the WI in the First World War and substantial additions to existing chapters, including discussions of the WI involvement with radio in the inter-war years, and with evacuation in the Second World War.

This is a true and accurate account of treasonous conduct by the British and American governments: An account of how their citizens are deceived by policies provoking actions that are totally detrimental to the well-being of their citizens. Thoroughly researched, the book provides a great deal of hitherto unpublished information and throws new light on such diverse operations as the Gulf War and the Bolshevik Revolution. The chapter on covert actions throws new light on the murder of Martin Luther King, Pope John Paul 1, and other notables marked for elimination. Diplomacy By Deception will forever alter your perception of the two leading governments in Western civilization. This is an excellent companion book to the Committee of 300 by the same author.