'I read the book with enormous appreciation. Tessa Boase brings all these long-ago housekeepers so movingly to life and her excitement in the research is palpable.' Fay Weldon: Novelist, playwright - and housekeeper's daughter Revelatory, gripping and unexpectedly poignant, this is the story of the invisible women who ran the English country house. Working as a housekeeper was one of the most prestigious jobs a nineteenth and early twentieth century woman could want - and also one of the toughest. A far cry from the Downton Abbey fiction, the real life Mrs Hughes was up against capricious mistresses, low pay, no job security and gruelling physical labour. Until now, her story has never been told. Revealing the personal sacrifices, bitter disputes and driving ambition that shaped these women's careers, and delving into secret diaries, unpublished letters and the neglected service archives of our stately homes, Tessa Boase tells the extraordinary stories of five working women who ran some of Britain's most prominent households. From Dorothy Doar, Regency housekeeper for the obscenely wealthy 1st Duke and Duchess of Sutherland at Trentham Hall, Staffordshire, to Sarah Wells, a deaf and elderly Victorian in charge of Uppark, West Sussex. From Ellen Penketh, Edwardian cook-housekeeper at the sociable but impecunious Erddig Hall in the Welsh borders to Hannah Mackenzie who runs Wrest Park in Bedfordshire - Britain's first country-house war hospital, bankrolled by playwright J. M. Barrie. And finally Grace Higgens, cook-housekeeper to the Bloomsbury set at Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex for half a century - an era defined by the Second World War. Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-GBX-NONEX-NONE

In Paradise of the Pacific, Susanna Moore, the award-winning author of In the Cut and The Life of Objects, pieces together the elusive, dramatic story of Hawai'i - a place of kings and queens, gods and goddesses, missionaries and explorers - a not-so-distant time of abrupt transition, in which an isolated pagan world of human sacrifice and strict taboo, without a currency or a written language, was confronted with the equally ritualised world of capitalism, Western education, and Christian values.

Africa Reimagined is a passionately argued appeal for a rediscovery of our African identity. Going beyond the problems of a single country, Hlumelo Biko calls for a reorientation of values, on a continental scale, to suit the needs and priorities of Africans. Building on the premise that slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid fundamentally unbalanced the values and indeed the very self-concept of Africans, he offers realistic steps to return to a more balanced Afro-centric identity.

Historically, African values were shaped by a sense of abundance, in material and mental terms, and by strong ties of community. The intrusion of religious, economic and legal systems imposed by conquerors, traders and missionaries upset this balance, and the African identity was subsumed by the values of the newcomers. Biko shows how a reimagining of Africa can restore the sense of abundance and possibility, and what a rebirth of the continent on Pan-African lines might look like. This is not about the churn of the news cycle or party politics – although he identifies the political party as one of the most pernicious legacies of colonialism. Instead, drawing on latest research, he offers a practical, pragmatic vision anchored in the here and now.

By looking beyond identities and values imposed from outside, and transcending the divisions and frontiers imposed under colonialism, it should be possible for Africans to develop fully their skills, values and ingenuity, to build institutions that reflect African values, and to create wealth for the benefit of the continent as a whole.

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: oh Pium. Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story.

Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and a history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire's financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself.

Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, in Smoke and Ashes Amitav Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the end of the witch trials everywhere. This volume charts the processes and reasons for the decriminalisation of witchcraft but also challenges the widespread assumption that Europe has been 'disenchanted'. For the first time surveys are given of the social role of witchcraft in European communities down to the end of the nineteenth century and of the continued importance of witchcraft and magic as topics of debate among intellectuals and other writers

Contributions by Danielle Christmas, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Garrett Bridger Gilmore, Spencer R. Herrera, Cassandra Jackson, Stacie McCormick, Maria Seger, Randi Lynn Tanglen, Brook Thomas, Michael C. Weisenburg, and Lisa Woolfork Reading Confederate Monuments addresses the urgent and vital need for scholars, educators, and the general public to be able to read and interpret the literal and cultural Confederate monuments pervading life in the contemporary United States. The literary and cultural studies scholars featured in this collection engage many different archives and methods, demonstrating how to read literal Confederate monuments as texts and in the context of the assortment of literatures that produced and celebrated them. They further explore how to read the literary texts advancing and contesting Confederate ideology in the US cultural imaginary-then and now-as monuments in and of themselves. On top of that, the essays published here lay bare the cultural and pedagogical work of Confederate monuments and counter-monuments-divulging how and what they teach their readers as communal and yet contested narratives-thereby showing why the persistence of Confederate monuments matters greatly to local and national notions of racial justice and belonging. In doing so, this collection illustrates what critics of US literature and culture can offer to ongoing scholarly and public discussions about Confederate monuments and memory. Even as we remove, relocate, and recontextualize the physical symbols of the Confederacy dotting the US landscape, the complicated histories, cultural products, and pedagogies of Confederate ideology remain embedded in the national consciousness. To disrupt and potentially dismantle these enduring narratives alongside the statues themselves, we must be able to recognize, analyze, and resist them in US life. The pieces in this collection position us to think deeply about how and why we should continue that work.

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics.

In Beyond the Wall, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.

Powerfully told, and drawing on a vast array of never-before-seen interviews, letters and records, this is the definitive history of the other Germany, the one beyond the Wall.

The Gateways Club, at the heart of 1960s swinging London, was one of the few places where lesbian women could meet openly. This book tells its story, from its rise in the 1950s to its closure in 1985, as a secret world of escape--new clientele often found the club only by following likely members to its anonymous exterior on the Kings Road, Chelsea. Celebrities, straight and gay alike, from Diana Dors to Dusty Springfield, relished its bohemian atmosphere, and the club reached a wider audience when it was featured as a backdrop in the 1968 film "The Killing of Sister George." Included are interviews with 80 of its members, famous and not so famous. Their accounts--humorous, tragic, and erotic--reveal how life has changed during the half century since the Gateways began.

From June 12, 2020, until the passage of the state law making the occupation a felony two months later, peaceful protesters set up camp at Nashville's Legislative Plaza and renamed it for Ida B. Wells. Central to the occupation was Justin Jones, a student of Fisk University and Vanderbilt Divinity School whose place at the forefront of the protests brought him and the occupation to the attention of the Metro Nashville Police Department, state and US senators, and Governor Bill Lee. The result was two months of solidarity in the face of rampant abuse, community in the face of state-sponsored terror, and standoff after standoff at the gates of the people's house with those who claimed to represent them. In this, his first book, Jones describes those two revolutionary months of nonviolent resistance against the state's soldiers who sought to dehumanize its citizens. The People's Plaza is a rumination on the abuse of power, and a vision of a more just, equitable, anti-racist Nashville-a vision that kept Jones and those with him posted on the plaza through intense heat, unprovoked arrests, vandalism, theft, and violent suppression. It is a first-person account of hope, a statement of intent, and a blueprint for nonviolent resistance in the American South and elsewhere.

The Ancient Schools of Gloucester traces the history of education in the City of Gloucester from its origins in the cloister school of St Peter's Abbey about a thousand years ago. Starting in the early Middle Ages, the rivalries between the two Gloucester grammar schools maintained by St Oswald's and Llanthony priories are described. The contributions of the Benedictines, Augustinian canons and founders of the medieval chantries are assessed. The creation of new grammar schools in the reign of Henry VIII at the Crypt and King's is fully documented along with the development of these schools through the pivotal years of the Civil War and into the 18th century. There is a special focus on the career of Maurice Wheeler, Gloucester's most distinguished schoolmaster. As the country began to move towards mass education during the 18th century, the role of other initiatives, such as private schools for girls, Sunday Schools and Sir Thomas Rich's Bluecoat school for apprentice boys, is also covered. Whilst several histories have been published in the past of individual schools, this chronological and fully illustrated study is the first time an author has brought together the early histories of the ancient schools of the City into a single volume, which sets the Gloucester experience in its national context.

A "sharp and entertaining" (The Wall Street Journal) exploration of fashion through the ages that asks what our clothing reveals about ourselves and our society. Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Merchants dressing like princes and butchers' wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet, and fur were reserved for the nobility, and ballooning pants called "trunk hose" could be considered a menace to good order. The Renaissance-era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, "One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth." Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina's "Negro Act" made it illegal for Black people to dress "above their condition." In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States, and in the 1940s, the baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men caused riots in cities from coast to coast. Even in today's more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it--and what our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards, and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime. And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear t-shirts and flip-flops, setting the tone for an entire industry: women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in the tech world, and some venture capitalists refuse to invest in any company run by someone wearing a suit. In Dress Codes, law professor and cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford presents a "deeply informative and entertaining" (The New York Times Book Review) history of the laws of fashion from the middle ages to the present day, a walk down history's red carpet to uncover and examine the canons, mores, and customs of clothing--rules that we often take for granted. After reading Dress Codes, you'll never think of fashion as superficial again--and getting dressed will never be the same.