By the 1970s, Robt. Jowitt & Sons was believed to be the oldest surviving wool company in Britain. From a small family concern it grew into a large international business before suffering from the general decline in domestic demand and increase in overseas competition which afflicted all British wool businesses. This book tells the story of the company and the family behind it. In the seventeenth century, the Jowitts were persecuted for being Quakers. By hard work and moderate habits, they escaped poverty to become leading opinion-formers and benefactors in nineteenth-century Leeds. They backed the Reform Bill, fought tirelessly against the slave trade and were instrumental in setting up the Leeds branch of the Cotton Districts Relief Fund. Th ey were a major force behind the General Infirmary, the Medical School and the University. As well as business records and newspaper articles, the book draws upon unpublished diaries which give a fascinating glimpse into the private lives of the Jowitts, in particular John Jowitt junior and Deborah Benson's trip to Europe in 1835, the year before their marriage. The diaries also shed light on the family's central role in the Beaconite controversy which caused many, including the Jowitts, to leave the Society of Friends. Peter Danckwerts studied at Oxford Polytechnic, the University of Leeds, the Open University and Birkbeck College, University of London.

Never before has the full history of Hatton Garden and its diamond and jewellery trade been revealed in such detail. Stories of individuals who made the community what it is today and events that are usually hidden from the public's eye have been compiled by one of the Garden's best-known jewellers, Vivian Watson FGA, who joined the family business in the 1960s, becoming the third generation of his family to work there. With a unique network of contacts, he has interviewed the great and the good. Richly illustrated from a private collection of hundreds of images and maps, this book will inform and entertain the reader on the secret world of diamonds and gems. Many will feel compelled to read it from cover to cover and others will enjoy dipping in and out.

Suspect Others explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity arise from a unique set of rituals in Suriname, a postcolonial Caribbean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competition for belonging, political power, and control over natural resources, Surinamese Ndyuka Maroons and Hindus look to spirit mediums to understand the causes of their successes and sufferings and to know the hidden minds of relatives and rivals alike. But although mediumship promises knowledge of others, interactions between mediums and their devotees also fundamentally challenge what devotees know about themselves, thereby turning interpersonal suspicion into doubts about the self. Through a rich ethnographic comparison of the different ways in which Ndyuka and Hindu spirit mediums and their devotees navigate suspicion, Suspect Others shows how present-day Caribbean peoples come to experience selves that defy concepts of personhood inflicted by the colonial past. Stuart Earle Strange investigates key questions about the nature of self-knowledge, religious revelation, and racial discourse in a hyper-diverse society. At a moment when exclusionary suspicions dominate global politics, Suspect Others elucidates self-identity as a social process that emerges from the paradoxical ways in which people must look to others to know themselves.

" ""Serving as tour guide, Fox invites his audience to go with him log rafting down the Kentucky River, bass fishing in the Cumberland Mountains, rabbit hunting in the Bluegrass, and chasing outlaws in the border country of Kentucky and Virginia. Along the route we meet Old South colonels and their ladies, lawless moonshiners and their shy daughters, bloodthirsty preachers, and educated young gentlemen visitors who explore the southern mountains for fun and profit. These sketches offer a delightful blend of macho adventure and sage observation by an erudite young writer who had lived in the two worlds that provide his subject matter-the elegant society of the Bluegrass aristocracy and the hardscrabble feuding clans of mountaineers.""

Salacious means salty: not just the brininess of the sea, but of the spice-of-life-and-sometimes-death kind. It seemed the appropriate word to use for an invigorating gallop alongside the fast-and - loose livers of the Sussex-by-the-Sea, past and present. Some people try to claim that the filthing of Sussex is a result of the Brighton effect, the insidious metropolitan stain of London-sur-Mer oozing out over the rest of us, but history proves them wrong. It's not all down to Georgie Peorgie and his naughty puddings, pies, and tarts.You would not believe what used to go on in Steyning of all places, who would have thought it. And if you thought violence was something invented by asbo-wielding hoodies wait until you meet the Hawkhurst Gang and their spine-chilling cutlasses. In what other county could any one have pulled off a scam as eccentric as the Petdown Man? Sussex is just as renowned for its darkside as for its natural sunny beauty, and "Salacious Sussex" is the book to celebrate it.This title presents a scandal for every taste, from ancient history to the modern age (as far as the libel laws will allow). It is divided into five themed chapters, each covering a different kind of scandal from hanky panky to murder via chicanery and shenanigans, with a detour into lechery and satanism. The darkside of the county dragged into the sunshine. It is the latest addition to our exciting serie of books on Sussex for the enthusiast.

From a rediscovered collection of priceless autobiographical accounts written by hundreds of pioneer women, Joanna Stratton has made a remarkable and widely celebrated book. Never before has there been such a detailed record of women's courage, such a living portrait of the women who civilized the American frontier. Here are their stories: wilderness mothers, schoolmarms, Indian squaws, immigrants, homesteaders, and circuit riders. Their personal recollections of prairie fires, locust plagues, cowboy shootouts, Indian raids, and blizzards on the plains vividly reveal the drama, danger and excitement of the pioneer experience.

These were women of relentless determination, whose tenacity helped them to conquer loneliness and privation. Their work was the work of survival, it demanded as much from them as from their men -- and at last that partnership has been recognized. "These voices are haunting" (New York Times Book Review), and they reveal the special heroism and industriousness of pioneer women as never before.