|
|
Books > Humanities > History
Finally Fyreback settles into a proper job. Bringing rough justice
to all who are oppressed in these troubled times, and the Law such
as it is, has no legal jurisdiction. He learns a few extra skills
on the way, diplomacy doesna t seem to be one of them, but be sure
his Cleaver plays ita s part. Will this be the wind down to a
stable married life and family. Again who can say, now possessing a
Wife and Child with another to yet be born, peace and quiet will
return to the Border with a new Monarch to rule both Scotland and
England under one Crown, but that is still a few years ahead.
This book provides new and exciting interpretations of Helen
Keller's unparalleled life as "the most famous American woman in
the world" during her time, celebrating the 141st anniversary of
her birth. Helen Keller: A Life in American History explores
Keller's life, career as a lobbyist, and experiences as a
deaf-blind woman within the context of her relationship with
teacher-guardian-promoter Anne Sullivan Macy and overarching social
history. The book tells the dual story of a pair struggling with
respective disabilities and financial hardship and the oppressive
societal expectations set for women during Keller's lifetime. This
narrative is perhaps the most comprehensive study of Helen Keller's
role in the development of support services specifically related to
the deaf-blind, as delineated as different from the blind. Readers
will learn about Keller's challenges and choices as well as how her
public image often eclipsed her personal desires to live
independently. Keller's deaf-blindness and hard-earned but limited
speech did not define her as a human being as she explored the
world of ideas and wove those ideas into her writing, lobbying for
funds for the American Federation for the Blind and working with
disabled activists and supporters to bring about practical help
during times of tremendous societal change. Presents
well-researched, factual material in an easy-to-understand writing
style about a complex, iconic American woman, Helen Keller, who
inspired generations of people worldwide because of her lifelong
quest for knowledge and her ability to communicate ideas despite
being deaf-blind Humanizes and demonstrates the diversity of the
deaf-blind community, which has historically been the smallest
minority in the United States at less than 1% of the population
Positions Keller in the panorama of American history, economics,
politics, and popular culture, challenging the existing narrative
created by her teacher-guardian-promoter Anne Sullivan Macy
Re-envisions Keller within the world of ideas where she experienced
and expressed individuality through dialogs constructed from her
writings and the work of those who informed her thinking Includes
10 images that provide an intimate look into Keller's personal and
public life
Unitarians established a church in the nation's capital in 1821,
and the first Universalist sermon in Washington was presented at
city hall in 1827. Since these beginnings, Washington-area
Unitarians and Universalists have created congregations that affirm
ideals of religious liberalism: a commitment to religious freedom,
a reasoned approach to faith, a hopeful view of human capacities to
create a better world, and the belief that God is most
authentically known as love. Images of America: Unitarians and
Universalists of Washington, D.C. features prominent figures such
as Robert Little, an English Unitarian who fled his native land and
became minister of First Unitarian Church of Washington; political
rivals John Quincy Adams and John C. Calhoun, both founding members
of the congregation; and Clara Barton, who organized the American
Red Cross after her experiences on the battlefields during the
Civil War. In 1961, Unitarians and Universalists joined together,
and the story continues as Unitarian Universalists interpret the
values of religious liberalism for each new generation.
Born out of a desire to commemorate those men from King's Road, St
Albans, who lost their lives in the Great War, the road's current
residents suggested the idea of a lasting memorial. Then came the
task of researching the lives and the families of those men. It
involved many hours of leafing through old newspapers and archives,
obtaining advice from local and national bodies and seeking help
from relatives of the deceased. A further memorial - this book,
which includes a brief history of this street - is the result. The
book was compiled by Compiled by Judy Sutton & Helen Little
with help and support from many others.
By day Percy Monkman (1892 to 1986) worked in the same Bradford
bank for 40 years, ending up as chief cashier. Everything else
about Percy was totally unconventional. By night, at weekends, on
holidays he transformed himself into an entertainer, actor, artist
and cartoonist whose work was regularly acclaimed by the public and
held in great respect by colleagues. Percy was highly creative,
talented and energetic, a man who achieved high standards in all
his artistic activities. The eldest of five boys, he was born into
a humble working-class family and attended school until he was
nearly 14. After a couple of office jobs, at 16 he passed a banking
examination and started to work at Becketts Bank (later acquired by
the Westminster Bank). Unexpectedly, the First World War gave Percy
an opportunity for a new life that he grasped firmly with both
hands. He spent much of the war as a comedian in an entertainment
troupe that ran concert party shows for soldiers just behind the
front line. Back in civilian life he continued his entertainment
career with great success throughout the interwar years. In the
Second World War he was back at entertaining the troops, this time
groups of returning servicemen across Yorkshire. In 1935 Percy
joined the Bradford Civic Playhouse and became a fixture in the
cast for over 20 years. Here, in one of the best amateur theatres
in the country, he played in many diverse productions, usually in
comic roles. Alongside entertaining and acting, Percy developed his
third creative passion of watercolour painting. He took advantage
of every opportunity to paint, usually landscapes of the Yorkshire
Dales. When he retired from the bank in 1952, he was able to devote
all his time to this passion, which he described as 'fanatic,
dedicated and impulsive'. Largely self-taught, he believed strongly
in being part of a community of like-minded painters so that he
could learn from them. The Bradford Arts Club gave him this network
for all his adult life. He exhibited widely and sold most of his
paintings. When the mood took him, he was also a talented
cartoonist whose works were sometimes published. A committed family
man, Percy also built a large number of life-long friends, who were
a fascinating mixture of people from all walks of life, with
similar passions for entertaining, acting and painting, often
eccentrics and sometimes very well connected in Bradford society.
His most significant friendship was with JB Priestley, his exact
contemporary and England's most famous man of letters in the 20th
century. Percy's extraordinary life of achievement is a unique
record of social history, reflecting life in 20th century Bradford.
Sadly, this is now largely a lost world. This affectionate and
comprehensive biography by his grandson, illustrated with over 90
images, is both a visual delight and a joy to read, including high
quality reproductions of some of Percy's most famous paintings.
Through reconstruction of oral testimony, folk stories and poetry,
the true history of Hausa women and their reception of Islam's
vision of Muslim in Western Africa have been uncovered. Mary Wren
Bivins is the first author to locate and examine the oral texts of
the 19th century Hausa women and challenge the written
documentation of the Sokoto Caliphate. The personal narratives and
folk stories reveal the importance of illiterate, non-elite women
to the history of jihad and the assimilation of normative Islam in
rural Hausaland. The captivating lives of the Hausa are captured,
shedding light on their ordinary existence as wives, mothers, and
providers for their family on the eve of European colonial
conquest. From European observations to stories of marriage, each
entry provides a personal account of the Hausa women's encounters
with Islamic reform to the center of an emerging Muslim Hausa
identity. Each entry focuses on: BLFemale historiography BLThe
importance of oral history BLNew methodoligical approaches to the
oral culture of popular Islam BLThe raw voice of Hausa women. The
comprehensive history is easy to read and touches on an era that no
other scholar has dissected.
Theatre of the Book explores the impact of printing on the European theatre, 1480-1880. Far from being marginal to Renaissance dramatists, the printing press played an essential role in the birth of the modern theatre. Looking at playtexts, engravings, actor portraits, notation systems, and theatrical ephemera as part of the broader history of theatrical ideas, this illustrated book offers both a history of European dramatic publication and an examination of the European theatre's continual refashioning of itself in the world of print.
South Carolina's Indian-American governor Nikki Haley recently
dismissed one of her principal advisors when his membership to the
ultra-conservative Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) came to
light. Among the CCC's many concerns is intermarriage and race
mixing. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2001 the
CCC website included a message that read "God is the one who
divided mankind into different races.... Mixing the races is
rebelliousness against God. " Beyond the irony of a CCC member
working for an Indian-American, the episode reveals America's
continuing struggle with race, racial integration, and race mixing.
The Color Factor shows that the emergent twenty-first-century
recognition of race mixing and the relative advantages of
light-skinned, mixed-race people represents a "back to the future "
moment--a re-emergence of one salient feature of race in America
that dates to its founding. Each chapter addresses from a
historical perspective a topic in the current literature on
mixed-race and color. The approach is economic and empirical, but
the text is accessible to social scientists more generally. The
historical evidence concludes that we will not really understand
race until we understand how American attitudes toward race were
shaped by race mixing.
The nineteenth-century middle-class ideal of the married woman was
of a chaste and diligent wife focused on being a loving mother,
with few needs or rights of her own. The modern woman, by contrast,
was partner to a new model of marriage, one in which she and her
husband formed a relationship based on greater sexual and
psychological equality. In Making Marriage Modern, Christina
Simmons narrates the development of this new companionate marriage
ideal, which took hold in the early twentieth century and prevailed
in American society by the 1940s.
The first challenges to public reticence to discuss sexual
relations between husbands and wives came from social hygiene
reformers, who advocated for a scientific but conservative sex
education to combat prostitution and venereal disease. A more
radical group of feminists, anarchists, and bohemians opposed the
Victorian model of marriage and even the institution of marriage.
Birth control advocates such as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger
openly championed women's rights to acquire and use effective
contraception. The "companionate marriage" emerged from these
efforts. This marital ideal was characterized by greater emotional
and sexuality intimacy for both men and women, use of birth control
to create smaller families, and destigmatization of divorce in
cases of failed unions. Simmons examines what she calls the
"flapper" marriage, in which free-spirited young wives enjoyed the
early years of marriage, postponing children and domesticity. She
looks at the feminist marriage in which women imagined greater
equality between the sexes in domestic and paid work and sex. And
she explores the African American "partnership marriage," which
often included wives' employment and drew more heavily on the
involvement of the community and extended family. Finally, she
traces how these modern ideals of marriage were promoted in sexual
advice literature and marriage manuals of the period.
Though male dominance persisted in companionate marriages,
Christina Simmons shows how they called for greater independence
and satisfaction for women and a new female heterosexuality. By
raising women's expectations of marriage, the companionate ideal
also contained within it the seeds of second-wave feminists'
demands for transforming the institution into one of true equality
between the sexes.
In May 2022 Bradford was awarded the honour of being UK City of
Culture 2025. Bradford is one of the most fascinating places in the
country. This history provides a unique reference of what Bradford
has already achieved and how it can now build on that foundation.
It grew in the 19th century from a small market town to one of the
UK's largest cities. It built its new wealth on factory production
of woollen goods, a classic case study of the Industrial
Revolution. This book is no conventional narrative of Bradford's
history. It celebrates each day in the year with some important
story from 1212 to 2020 - the impact of a strong-minded or talented
individual, a critical event of success or disaster, or an
important moment in the development of the city, its buildings or
its institutions. Bradford has experienced good and bad times,
periods of growth, decline and regeneration, and several waves of
immigration. Often rising above adversity and strife, many
individuals have made outstanding contributions to the city and the
nation. They feature businessmen such as Sir Titus Salt and Samuel
Lister, who made large fortunes through hard work and innovation,
and creative giants with international reputations such as JB
Priestley and David Hockney. Many mill-owners became very wealthy,
but many more workers suffered from poverty and ill-health. Not for
nothing did Friedrich Engels describe Bradford as a 'stinking hole'
or TS Eliot refer to silk hats on Bradford millionaires in his most
famous poem. The stories cover a wide range of topics - industry,
commerce, politics, arts, leisure, sport, education, health etc.
They include social issues such as the extreme poverty and squalor
in the 19th century and women's rights and multi-culturalism in the
20th. The accent, however, is on the positive - the unusual, the
brave, the eccentric and the amazing. Never before have such
stories about everyday life in and around Bradford across the
centuries been brought together in one volume. Martin Greenwood has
built a remarkable kaleidoscope of life in his home city from
medieval times to the current day.
Fourteenth-century Japan witnessed a fundamental political and
intellectual conflict about the nature of power and society, a
conflict that was expressed through the rituals and institutions of
two rival courts. Rather than understanding the collapse of Japan's
first warrior government (the Kamakura bakufu) and the onset of a
chaotic period of civil war as the manipulation of rival courts by
powerful warrior factions, this study argues that the crucial
ideological and intellectual conflict of the fourteenth century was
between the conservative forces of ritual precedent and the ritual
determinists steeped in Shingon Buddhism. Members of the monastic
nobility who came to dominate the court used the language of
Buddhist ritual, including incantations (mantras), gestures
(mudras), and "cosmograms" (mandalas projected onto the geography
of Japan) to uphold their bids for power. Sacred places that were
ritual centers became the targets of military capture precisely
because they were ritual centers. Ritual was not simply symbolic;
rather, ritual became the orchestration, or actual dynamic, of
power in itself. This study undermines the conventional wisdom that
Zen ideals linked to the samurai were responsible for the manner in
which power was conceptualized in medieval Japan, and instead
argues that Shingon ritual specialists prolonged the conflict and
enforced the new notion that loyal service trumped the merit of
those who simply requested compensation for their acts. Ultimately,
Shingon mimetic ideals enhanced warrior power and enabled Shogun
Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, rather than the reigning emperor, to assert
sovereign authority in Japan.
In late November 1864, the last Southern army east of the
Mississippi that was still free to maneuver started out from
northern Alabama on the Confederacy's last offensive. John Bell
Hood and his Army of Tennessee had dreams of capturing Nashville
and marching on to the Ohio River, but a small Union force under
Hood's old West Point roommate stood between him and the state
capital. In a desperate attempt to smash John Schofield's line at
Franklin, Hood threw most of his men against the Union works,
centered on the house of a family named Carter, and lost 30 percent
of his attacking force in one afternoon, crippling his army and
setting it up for a knockout blow at Nashville two weeks later.
With firsthand accounts, letters and diary entries from the Carter
House Archives, local historian James R. Knight paints a vivid
picture of this gruesome conflict.
Newark Airport was the first major airport in the New York
metropolitan area. It opened on October 1, 1928, occupying an area
of filled-in marshland. In 1935, Amelia Earhart dedicated the
Newark Airport Administration Building, which was North America's
first commercial airline terminal. Newark was the busiest airport
in the world until LaGuardia Airport, in New York, opened in 1939.
During World War II, Newark was closed to passenger traffic and
controlled by the United States Army Air Force for logistics
operations. The Port Authority of New York took over the airport in
1948 and made major investments in airport infrastructure. It
expanded, opened new runways and hangars, and improved the
airport's terminal layout. The art deco administration building
served as the main terminal until the opening of the North Terminal
in 1953. The administration building was added to the National
Register of Historic Places in 1979.
THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2019
'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on
the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming'
GUARDIAN
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the
same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street,
Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran
coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from
printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.
Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by
the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.
Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie
Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back
their stories.
WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS FOR HISTORY 2019
|
|