The Hatfield-McCoy feud has long been the most famous vendetta of the southern Appalachians. Over the years it has become encrusted with myth and error. Scores of writers have produced accounts of it, but few have made any real effort to separate fact from fiction. Novelists, motion picture producers, television script writers, and others have sensationalized events that needed no embellishment. Using court records, public documents, official correspondence, and other documentary evident, Otis K. Rice presents an account that frees, as much as possible, fact from fiction, event from legend. He weighs the evidence carefully, avoiding the partisanship and the attitude of condescension and condemnation that have characterized many of the writings concerning the feud. He sets the feud in the social, political, economic, and cultural context of eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining the legacy of the Civil War, the weakness of institutions such as the church and education system, the exaggerated importance of family, the impotence of the law, and the isolation of the mountain folk, Rice gives new meaning to the origins and progress of the feud. These conditions help explain why the Hatfield and McCoy families, which have produced so many fine citizens, could engage in such a bitter and prolonged vendetta

"The silence of Barbara Synge" provides a fascinating companion volume to Bill McCormack's acclaimed "Fool of the Family" (2000), a biography of the playwright J.M. Synge (1871--1909).

Taking the alledged death of Mrs John Hatch (née Synge) in 1767 as a focal point, this book explores the varied strands of the Synge family tree in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland.

Key events in the family's history are carefully documented, including a suicide in 1769 which is echoed in an early Synge play, the effects of the famine which influenced The "Playboy of the Western World" in 1907, and the behavior of Francis Synge at the time of the union.

"The Silence of Barbara Synge" is a unique work of cultural enquiry, combining archival research, literary criticism, and religious and medical history to pull the strands together and relate them to the family's literary descendent J.M. Synge.

An encyclopedia that compiles pseudonyms from all over the world, from all ages and occupations. It interprets some 635,000 pseudonyms of roughly 270,000 people. It includes initials, nick names, order names, birth and married names.

"And the families of Ackley, Adams, Bradford, Burbank, Cool, Crow, Dwight, Flint, Goodwin, Granger, Hoar, Kuhl, Mason, Partridge, Wark, and Whiting."

This Encyclopedia is the first to compile pseudonyms from all over the world, from all ages and occupations in a single work: some 500,000 pseudonyms of roughly 270,000 people are deciphered here. Besides pseudonyms in the narrower sense, initials, nick names, order names, birth and married names etc. are included.

As the constitutional importance of the monarchy has declined, the British royal family has forged a new and popular role for itself as patron, promoter, and fund-raiser for the underprivileged and the deserving. This book-the first to study the evolution of the "welfare monarchy"-tells the story of the royal family's charitable and social work from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on previously unused material from the Royal Archives, Frank Prochaska shows that the monarchy's welfare work has raised its prestige and reaffirmed its importance at the same time that it has brought vitality and success to a vast range of voluntary activities and charities. Prochaska traces the dynamic alliance that has existed between the crown and British civil society over the last 250 years, examining the royals' charitable activities and the factors that motivated them-from Prince Albert, who had a mission to give the monarchy a new kind of influence and moral authority in a period of diminished political power, to King George V and Queen Mary, who were convinced that the monarchy had to combat bolshevism and socialism, to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who tried to create a royal image that would unite the nation. Full of fresh perceptions and novel information (including how much money individual members of the royal family have given away), elegantly written, and handsomely illustrated, the book illuminates the royal family's changing role and the transformation of the idea of nobility.