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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Local history
Every place is a product of the stories we tell about it-stories
that do not merely describe but in fact shape geographic, social,
and cultural spaces. Lone Star Vistas analyzes travelogues that
created the idea of Texas. Focusing on the forty-year period
between Mexico's independence from Spain (1821) and the beginning
of the US Civil War, Astrid Haas explores accounts by
Anglo-American, Mexican, and German authors-members of the region's
three major settler populations-who recorded their journeys through
Texas. They were missionaries, scientists, journalists, emigrants,
emigration agents, and military officers and their spouses. They
all contributed to the public image of Texas and to debates about
the future of the region during a time of political and social
transformation. Drawing on sources and scholarship in English,
Spanish, and German, Lone Star Vistas is the first comparative
study of transnational travel writing on Texas. Haas illuminates
continuities and differences across the global encounter with
Texas, while also highlighting how individual writers' particular
backgrounds affected their views on nature, white settlement,
military engagement, Indigenous resistance, African American
slavery, and Christian mission.
After a life of public service Sir Matthew Nathan retired to the
Manor of West Coker near Yeovil in Somerset. He developed a keen
interest in his new home; he began first to read about it, then to
deepen and widen his research, and then to turn his knowledge into
this connected account, which was originally published in 1957. The
local sources - the manorial records of his own estate, the parish
and county records - were very rich. With great thoroughness he
incorporated them in a local history of the area up to the
nineteenth century. Nearly all the forces which affect the affairs
of the nation can be traced in the records of the area. It is local
and amateur history, but of the best calibre, and there is much to
interest historians interested in local records. These are
liberally quoted and there are detailed maps.
This book explores the background of the NRA, the most important
economic measure of the first hundred days of Franklin D.
Roosevelt's New Deal. It also is the history of the business
community's efforts during the 1920s and '30s to emasculate the
federal policy of maintaining a competitive enterprise system.
Taking you through the year day by day, The Colchester Book of Days
contains quirky, eccentric, amusing and important events and facts
from different periods in the history of Britain's oldest recorded
town. Ideal for dipping into, this addictive little book will keep
you entertained and informed. Featuring hundreds of snippets of
information gleaned from the vaults of Colchester's archives, it
will delight residents and visitors alike.
Professor F. W. Maitland was the foremost Victorian scholar on
English legal history, and Mary Bateson a Cambridge medieval
historian. This 1901 volume was edited for the Corporation of
Cambridge and the Cambridge Antiquarian Society. It provides a
transcript and translation of the royal charters issued to the
borough of Cambridge between the twelfth and the seventeenth
centuries. Maitland lays stress on the considerable independence
the medieval borough had. It was largely self-governing, royal
charters bestowing or confirming liberties rather than regulating
the town governance or providing a constitution. However, there
were some limitations, chiefly relating to justice, for which royal
permission was needed. It was not until the late seventeenth
century that royal authority began to tighten its control of
borough affairs. The introduction explains the conventions of such
charters, and how the reader should interpret the information
contained therein. A valuable source of local history with wider
significance.
No one had really heard of Chaminade University-a tiny NAIA
Catholic school in Honolulu with fewer than eight hundred
undergraduates-until its basketball game against the University of
Virginia on December 23, 1982. The Chaminade Silverswords defeated
the Cavaliers, then the Division I, No. 1-ranked team in the
nation, in what the Washington Post later called "the biggest upset
in the history of college basketball." Virginia was the most
heralded team in the country, led by seven-foot-four-inch,
three-time College Basketball Player of the Year Ralph Sampson.
They had just been paid $50,000-more than double Chaminade's annual
basketball budget-to play an early season tournament in Tokyo and
were making a "stopover" game in Hawaii on their way back to the
mainland. The Silverswords, led by forward Tony Randolph, came back
in the second half and won the game 77-72. Chaminade's incredible
victory became known as the "Miracle on Ward Avenue" or simply "The
Upset" in Hawaii and was featured in the national news. Never
before in the history of college basketball had a school moved so
dramatically and irretrievably into the nation's consciousness. The
Silverswords' victory was more than just an upset; it was something
considered impossible. And the team's wins over major college
programs continued in the ensuing years. Today Chaminade is still
referred to as "The Giant Killers"-the school that beat Ralph
Sampson and Virginia. The Greatest Upset Never Seen relives the
1982-83 season, when Chaminade put small-college basketball and
Hawaii on the national sports map.
The Little Book of Essex is packed full of entertaining bite-sized
pieces of historic and contemporary trivia that come together to
make essential reading for visitors and locals alike. It can be
described as a compendium of frivolity, a reference book of
little-known facts, or a wacky guide to one of England's most
colourful counties. Dip in randomly, or read consecutively, there
are no rules. Be amused and amazed at the stories and history of
Essex's landscape, towns, villages, heritage, buildings and, above
all, its people.
From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders,
white Europeans and Americans asserted an identification with the
racial origins of Polynesians, declaring them to be racially almost
white and speculating that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan
descent. In Possessing Polynesians Maile Arvin analyzes this
racializing history within the context of settler colonialism
across Polynesia, especially in Hawai'i. Arvin argues that a logic
of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism, by
which both Polynesia (the place) and Polynesians (the people)
become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness. Seeing whiteness
as indigenous to Polynesia provided white settlers with the
justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources.
Understood as possessions, Polynesians were and continue to be
denied the privileges of whiteness. Yet Polynesians have long
contested these classifications, claims, and cultural
representations, and Arvin shows how their resistance to and
refusal of white settler logic have regenerated Indigenous forms of
recognition.
Northumbria was one of the great kingdoms of Britain in the Dark
Ages, enduring longer than the Roman Empire. Yet it has been all
but forgotten. This book puts Northumbria back in its rightful
place, at the heart of British history. From the impregnable
fastness of Bamburgh Castle, the kings of Northumbria ruled a vast
area, and held sway as High Kings of Britain. From the tidal island
of Lindisfarne, extraordinary saints and learned scholars brought
Christianity and civilization to the rest of the country. Now,
thanks to the ongoing work of a dedicated team of archaeologists
this story is slowly being brought to light. The excavations at
Bamburgh Castle have revealed a society of unsuspected
sophistication and elegance, capable of creating swords and
jewellery unparalleled before or since, and works of art and
devotion that still fill the beholder with wonder.
The years immediately after the Second World War were known as the
decade of disappearing Irish - the peak period of emigration since
the Great Famine. Many of these migrants went to Britain and played
a key role in the rebuilding the country after the ravages of war.
Their legacy, both in bricks and mortar and also in their cultural
and social influences, can still be seen today. Following a brief
overview of Ireland and Britain during the post-war years, this
book explores the economic and social factors of migration, the
work, such as navvies and nurses, that the migrants found in
Britain, and the various support systems, such as the Church, pubs,
Irish clubs and charities, that were formed as a result, and which
created a vibrant legacy that survives to this day.
The Ironbridge Gorge, a cradle of the Industrial Revolution, in the
late 18th century was a magnet for writers, artists and industrial
spies. The latest wonders of engineering and metallurgical
technology were to be seen in a spectacular natural setting, where
the fast-flowing Severn passed between towering cliffs of
limestone, and hillsides honeycombed with mine workings amid the
smoke of furnaces and the clanking of engines. Barrie Trinder, the
acknowledged authority on the subject, has selected the most
interesting descriptions and pictures to provide an invaluable
anthology, through contemporary evidence, of the place and the
people in that pioneering period, when this corner of Shropshire
was changing the world and was indeed, as Charles Hulbert described
it in 1837, 'the most extraordinary district in the world'. This
book has become essential reading for anyone with an interest in
the history of this fascinating area, or in the Industrial
Revolution in general. It brings new understanding of the gorge
itself and the industrial monuments preserved there and new
insights for the specialist historian, whether concerned with
social conditions, popular religion or industrial technology. This
edition will continue to serve the same main groups of readers -
local historians, educational groups and specialist historians -
and, most of all, those general readers who know the area and
recognise that something strange and seminal happened there that
transformed not only Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale but the whole of
our civilisation. The activity that once made the gorge so
extraordinary has spread and grown to become a commonplace in
modern industrial societies, leaving the place where it began a
monument and a museum.
Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's
spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men--the
brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair,
striving to secure America's place in the world; and the cunning
serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death.
Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik
Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly
discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.
2022 Best Book Award, Oral History Association Hundreds of stories
of activists at the front lines of the intersecting African
American and Mexican American liberation struggle Not one but two
civil rights movements flourished in mid-twentieth-century Texas,
and they did so in intimate conversation with one another. Far from
the gaze of the national media, African American and Mexican
American activists combated the twin caste systems of Jim Crow and
Juan Crow. These insurgents worked chiefly within their own racial
groups, yet they also looked to each other for guidance and, at
times, came together in solidarity. The movements sought more than
integration and access: they demanded power and justice. Civil
Rights in Black and Brown draws on more than 500 oral history
interviews newly collected across Texas, from the Panhandle to the
Piney Woods and everywhere in between. The testimonies speak in
detail to the structure of racism in small towns and huge
metropolises-both the everyday grind of segregation and the
haunting acts of racial violence that upheld Texas's
state-sanctioned systems of white supremacy. Through their memories
of resistance and revolution, the activists reveal previously
undocumented struggles for equity, as well as the links Black and
Chicanx organizers forged in their efforts to achieve
self-determination.
London's shadowed alleyways, ancient buildings and misty open
spaces simply swarm with phantoms - spirits of the famous and the
forgotten, the lovelorn, the loveless, the damned, and the
damnable. Paranormal London takes the bold ghost seeker on a
hair-raising journey to visit and explore some of the capital's
spookiest places. We visit the haunts of murderers and sail on a
phantom boat. There are close encounters with chilling
manifestations at infamous No. 50 Berkeley Square and you can hear
wails and tormented screams from Jack the Ripper's eternally
restless victims as they roam the East End's cobbled streets. You
can find a headless duke, visit the graves of plague victims and
come into contact with an unseen force that tries to push you
downstairs. Many of the city's most famous landmarks are haunted,
but hundreds of lesser-known sites claim paranormal happenings -
pubs, hotels, parks and tunnels, churches, roads, Underground
stations, banks, cinemas, council estates and the lake in St
James's Park. If you are not a true believer in the paranormal when
you start to read this book, you will be by the end.
For the first time, these enchanting folk tales, the origins of
which lie in the oral tradition, have been gathered together in
book form. The charming selection of thirty fairy tales and legends
are full of Herefordian wit and wisdom, and are perfect for reading
aloud or alone. Although on the surface they may appear quaint,
these stories tell of strange happenings in the peaceful
Herefordshire countryside, formed from early attempts to explain
the natural and spiritual world. From the Saxon king of East Anglia
who became the patron saint of Hereford Cathedral, and the story of
the black hound of Baskerville Hall which inspired Arthur Conan
Doyle, to a medieval love story, these gripping tales have stood
the test of time, and remain classic texts which will be enjoyed
time and again by modern readers.
Cambridgeshire has charmed visitors for centuries, and this
collection of intricate illustrations is a celebration of the
county's unique appeal. Featuring a range of picturesque vistas,
from the historic spires of Cambridge University and cathedral city
of Peterborough to the vibrant market towns of the Fenlands, each
stunning scene is full of intriguing detail sure to fire the
imagination and make you reach for your colouring pencils. There
are absolutely no rules - you can choose any combination of colours
you like to bring these images to life. Suitable for children. If
you love Cambridgeshire, then you will love colouring it in!
From the Victorian cloth mills to contemporary studios, the people
of Stroud have a long and noble history of making things by hand.
All around the valleys, makers are engaged in creating beautiful
and useful objects, works of art and installations. Here, Clare
Honeyfield, multi-award-winning business owner and coach, brings to
life the conversations she's had with the many wonderful and
talented makers and artists of the ever-popular Stroud.
This volume and Volume 57 present the Elizabethan wills and
inventories collected by the Exeter Orphans' Court between 1560 and
c.1602. The court administered the estates of all 'orphans' (the
children of wealthy freemen whose fathers were deceased) within the
city. They form the most important series of documents relating to
the houses, material culture and social history of people living in
Exeter during the latter half of the sixteenth century, including
the number of rooms in their homes, their furniture, clothes and
kitchen equipment, and the pattern of their debts. They are thus an
invaluable resource for anyone interested in everyday life and the
household in Elizabethan England.
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