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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history
A vibrant history of the castle in Britain, from the early Middle Ages to the present day The castle has long had a pivotal place in British life, associated with lordship, landholding, and military might, and today it remains a powerful symbol of history. But castles have never been merely impressive fortresses-they were hubs of life, activity, and imagination. John Goodall weaves together the history of the British castle across the span of a millennium, from the eleventh to the twenty-first century, through the voices of those who witnessed it. Drawing on chronicles, poems, letters, and novels, including the work of figures like Gawain Poet, Walter Scott, Evelyn Waugh, and P. G. Wodehouse, Goodall explores the importance of the castle in our culture and society. From the medieval period to Civil War engagements, right up to modern manifestations in Harry Potter, Goodall reveals that the castle has always been put to different uses, and to this day continues to serve as a source of inspiration.
The pilgrims in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales begin their journey in a London inn and they stay at many more as they wend their way to Becket's tomb. Leading beer writer Roger Protz remains faithful to the route, visiting pubs of historic interest and breweries old and new before embarking on the Pilgrims' Way from Winchester to Canterbury, revealing fascinating history as well as a few more spots to sample a pint. The Canterbury Ales is a feast of a book for those who love good beer, pubs, breweries ... and Chaucer's literary masterpiece.
For a zitty face. Take urine eight days old and heat it over the fire; wash your face with it morning and night. In late medieval England, ordinary people, apothecaries and physicians gathered up practical medical tips for everyday use. While some were sensible herbal cures, many were weird and wonderful. This book selects some of the most revolting or remarkable remedies from medieval manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. There are embarrassing ailments and painful procedures, icky ingredients and bizarre beliefs. The would-be doctors seem oblivious to pain, and any animal, vegetable or mineral, let alone bodily fluid, can be ground up, smeared on or inserted for medical benefit. Similar ingredients are used in 'recipes' for how to make yourself invisible, how to make a woman love you, how to stop dogs from barking at you and how to make freckles disappear. Written in the down-to-earth speech of the time, these remedies often blur the distinction between medicine and magic. They also give a humorous insight into the strange ideas, ingenuity and bravery of men and women in the Middle Ages, and a glimpse of the often gruesome history of medicine through time. The remedies have been collected and transcribed from fifteenth-century manuscripts by students at the University of Oxford. Modern English translations, for easier reading, are given alongside the original Middle English.
Colleges and universities are among the most cherished--and controversial--institutions in the United States. In this updated edition of "A History of American Higher Education," John R. Thelin offers welcome perspective on the triumphs and crises of this highly influential sector in American life. Thelin's work has distinguished itself as the most wide-ranging and engaging account of the origins and evolution of America's institutions of higher learning. This edition brings the discussion of perennial hot-button issues such as big-time sports programs up to date and addresses such current areas of contention as the changing role of governing boards and the financial challenges posed by the economic downturn.
This book provides an accessible introduction to a wide range of concerns that have preoccupied historians over time. Global in scope, it explores historical perspectives not only from historiography itself, but from related areas such as literature, sociology, geography and anthropology which have entered into productive dialogues with history. Clearly written and accessible, this third edition is fully revised with an updated structure and new areas of historical enquiry and themes added, including the history of emotions, video history and global pandemics. In all of this, the authors have attempted to think beyond the boundaries of the West and consider varied approaches to history. They do so by engaging with theoretical perspectives and methodologies that have provided the foundation for good historical practice. The authors analyse how historians can improve their skills by learning about the discipline of historiography, that is, how historians go about the task of exploring the past and determining where the line separating history from other disciplines, such as sociology or geography, runs. History: An Introduction to Theory and Method 3ed is an essential resource for students of historical theory and method working at both an introductory and more advanced level.
Computer: A History of the Information Machine traces the history of the computer and its unlimited, information-processing potential. Comprehensive and accessibly written, this fully updated fourth edition adds new chapters on the globalization of information technology, the rise of social media, fake news, and the gig economy, and the regulatory frameworks being put in place to tame the ubiquitous computer. Computer is an insightful look at the pace of technological advancement and the seamless way computers are integrated into the modern world. The authors examine the history of the computer including the first steps taken by Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, and how wartime needs and the development of electronics led to the giant ENIAC, the first electronic computer. For a generation IBM dominated the computer industry. In the 1980s, the desktop PC liberated people from room-sized, mainframe computers. Next, laptops and smartphones made computers available to half of the world's population, leading to the rise of Google and Facebook, and powerful apps that changed the way we work, consume, learn, and socialize. The volume is an essential resource for scholars and those studying computer history, technology history, and information and society, as well as a range of courses in the fields of computer science, communications, sociology, and management.
A lively illustrated tour of London in the company of Vic Lee - artist, storyteller and self-confessed 'ragamuffin from south-east London'. Based on Vic Lee's series of prints of London, this book covers a variety of different streets and areas across the city, from Walthamstow Village in the north to Lordship Lane in East Dulwich in the south, from Broadway market in the east to Portobello Road in the west. Through over twenty different areas, he brings to life the local life and architecture. Interwoven around the places are stories and anecdotes that he has picked up during his researches and conversations along the way, as well as some that may or may not be true... Areas included in the book are: Saint Pauls Cathedral Soho Battersea Mayfair Portobello Road Southbank Centre The Tate Lambs Conduit Street Exmouth market Clerkenwell and Shoreditch Broadway market Kingsland Road Columbia Road Walthamstow Village Stoke Newington Islington Crouch end Clapham Dulwich Village East Dulwich Brixton Peckham Maida Vale Created in Vic Lee's inimitable, intricate illustration style this book is a work of art for lovers of London life and its special places
Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"-the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Born in Konigsberg to secular Jewish parents, she was a student of the two major exponents of Existenz philosophy in Germany, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. Arendt escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, traveling first to Paris and then in 1940 to the United States, where she gained citizenship in 1951. As director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction she oversaw the collection and presentation of over 1.5 million articles of Judaica and Hebraica that had been hidden from or looted by the Nazis. This Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical ideas and political theories belonging to one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. As a survivor of the Holocaust, Arendt's life informed her work exploring the meaning and construction of power, evil, totalitarianism, and direct democracy. Through insightful readings of Arendt's best-known works, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Life of the Mind (1978), Dana Villa traces the importance of Arendt's ideas for today's reader. In so doing, Villa explains how Arendt gained world-wide fame with the publication of Origins, and went on to have a distinguished career as a political theorist and public intellectual. A sometimes controversial figure, Arendt is now recognised as one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century and her works have become an acknowledged part of the Western canon of political theory and philosophy. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Understanding how Covid-19 started is more important than we know for the future of humankind. Determining whether the virus came from nature or from a lab will help us to safeguard against the next pandemic. This disease will forever punctuate modern history. It has led to the deaths of millions, sickened hundreds of millions and affected the lives of almost every person on the planet. We now know that Covid is here to stay. Genetic engineering expert Dr Alina Chan and renowned science writer Matt Ridley examine the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for Covid-19, using their formidable skills to scrutinise arguments and rigorously analyse the sprawling data. Viral is a fascinating account that takes in pangolins, horseshoe bats, internet sleuths and misleading scientific papers. It details the evidence and investigates hypotheses for the virus origin, chief among them a potential laboratory leak or a natural spillover. Science has made great strides over the last decades. Chan and Ridley give an insight into the proliferating pathogen research and virus hunting around the world. Whatever the source of the virus, the world needs to adopt new policies and strategies to prevent or mitigate future outbreaks. Set in the caves and mineshafts, food markets and wildlife smugglers' stores, laboratories and databases of China and elsewhere, Viral is a page-turner that reads like a detective novel and goes deeper into the deepest mystery of the day than any other work. This is the book on the search for the origin of Covid-19.
A new and updated edition of Malcolm Beith's thrilling inside-account of Joaquin El Chapo Guzman's notorious Sinaloa drug cartel. Until 2016, the dense hills of Sinaloa, Mexico, were home to the most powerful drug lord since Pablo Escobar: Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. Guzman was among the word's ten most wanted men and appeared on Forbes magazine's billionaire list. With his massive wealth, his army of professional killers, and a network of informants that reached into the highest levels of government, catching Guzman was considered impossible - until it wasn't. Newsweek correspondent Malcolm Beith has spent years reporting on the drug wars and followed the chase with full access to senior officials and exclusive interviews with soldiers and drug traffickers in the region, including members of Guzman's cartel. Newly updated with Beith's gripping account of the trial that put Guzman away for life, The Last Narco is essential reading about one of the most dramatic news stories of our day - a true-crime thriller happening in real-time.
"I will always be somebody." This assertion, a startling one from a nineteenth-century woman, drove the life of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only American woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor. President Andrew Johnson issued the award in 1865 in recognition of the incomparable medical service Walker rendered during the Civil War. Yet few people today know anything about the woman so well-known--even notorious--in her own lifetime. Theresa Kaminski shares a different way of looking at the Civil War, through the eyes of a woman confident she could make a contribution equal to that of any man. She takes readers into the political cauldron of the nation's capital in wartime, where Walker was a familiar if notorious figure. Mary Walker's relentless pursuit of gender and racial equality is key to understanding her commitment to a Union victory in the Civil War. Her role in the women's suffrage movement became controversial and the US Army stripped Walker of her medal, only to have the medal reinstated posthumously in 1977.
In A lion on the landing Elsa Joubert provides a window into the past of the Afrikaner people. She uses her own life story as a way of portraying the reality of living as an Afrikaner child in the first half of the twentieth century. It is the same formula that she applied in her novel, The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena, to reveal the truths of life for black people in South Africa.
The Utopians is the remarkable story of six experimental communities –
Santiniketan-Sriniketan in India, Dartington Hall in England,
Atarashiki-mura in Japan, the Institute for the Harmonious Development
of Man in France, the Bruderhof in Germany and Trabuco College in
America – that sprang up in the aftermath of the First World War.
Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behaviour: sex. From the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for `gross indecency' in 1895, Eric Berkowitz evokes the entire sweep of Western sex law. The cast of Sex and Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes and London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged - and justice, as Berkowitz shows - rarely had anything to do with it.
'A REMARKABLE BOOK... AN AMAZINGLY AUDACIOUS AND COMPLETELY INNOVATIVE WAY OF WRITING HISTORY... IMMEDIATE AND GRIPPING' - WILLIAM BOYD In Petrograd a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to the Urals. A rancorous Russian exile crosses war-torn Europe to make his triumphal entry into the capital. 'Peace now!' the crowds cry... German soldiers return from the war to quash a Communist rising in Berlin. A former field-runner trained by the army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews... A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk from Switzerland into a celebrity, shaking the foundations of human understanding with his revolutionary theories of time and space... In Paris an American reporter in search of himself writes ever shorter sentences and discovers a new literary style... Lenin and Hitler, Einstein and Hemingway, Sigmund Freud and Andre Breton, Emmaline Pankhurst and Mustafa Kemal - these are some of the protagonists in this dramatic panorama of a world in turmoil. Emperors, kings and generals depart furtively on midnight trains and submarines. Women are given the vote. Artistic experiments flourish. The real becomes surreal. Marching tunes are syncopated into jazz. Civilisation is loosed from its pre-war moorings. People search for meaning in the wreckage. Even as the ink is drying on the armistice that ends the war in the west in 1918, fresh conflicts and upheavals erupt elsewhere. It takes six years for Europe to find uneasy peace. Crucible is the collective diary of an era: filled with all-too-human tales of exuberant dreams, dark fears, grubby ambitions and the absurdities of chance. Encompassing both tragedy and humour, it brings immediacy and intimacy to a moment of deep historical transformation - with consequences which echo down to today.
This book, first published in 1982, is a systematic and detached analysis of the 60,000 British conscientious objectors in the Second World War, forming an examination of the relationship between the individual and the State in time of war. It sets out to show how the British Government dealt with the challenge that conscientious objectors posed and how far it was able to correct the abuses and injustices that occurred in the First World War. It traces the background of pacifism between the Wars and the introduction of conscription, and gives a detailed account of the functioning of the Conscientious Objectors' Tribunals and an assessment of their work. It goes on to examine the reactions and attitudes of Tribunal members, employers and the rest of the population, and how these were affected by the Government lead. It recounts the experience of objectors in civilian life and private and public employment, and how they fared in the armed forces and prisons. It also assesses the contributions made by the voluntary organisations who helped conscientious objectors in the war.
This book, first published in 1976, re-examines many aspects of the German Peasant War of 1525, important as the first national peasant revolt in Germany and because of the influence of Engels' work on the subject. With one contributor noting the similarities between the organisation, demands and action of the Swabian peasants and those of the Zapatas of Mexico four centuries later, these essays provide remarkable insights and analyses into the enduring importance of the German Peasant War.
This book, first published in 1977, looks at the two peasant revolts that occurred in 1549, in the troubled period following the death of Henry VIII. The uprisings reveal a harsh background of economic and social injustice, intensified at the time by inflation. Peasants in North Devon rose against the imposition of the English Prayer Book, and with the local authorities paralysed and the government wavering between conciliation and repression, a general rebellion broke out. Reinforced by Cornishmen, rallying to the defence of their national identity, the peasants assembled a formidable army and laid siege to Exeter itself. Only after three major battles was the revolt suppressed. The Norfolk peasants rose against agrarian abuses, routing a small royal force and occupying Norwich. Ably led by Robert Kett, they expelled the gentry and governed the county on a programme of social justice until they were crushed by the forces released by the collapse of the other risings. These revolts display the deep-seated resentments and injustices felt by the peasantry of the sixteenth century.
This monograph offers a novel investigation of the Edwardian picture postcard as an innovative form of multimodal communication, revealing much about the creativity, concerns and lives of those who used postcards as an almost instantaneous form of communication. In the early twentieth century, the picture postcard was a revolutionary way of combining short messages with an image, making use of technologies in a way impossible in the decades since, until the advent of the digital revolution. This book offers original insights into the historical and social context in which the Edwardian picture postcard emerged and became a craze. It also expands the field of Literacy Studies by illustrating the combined use of posthuman, multimodal, historic and linguistic methodologies to conduct an in-depth analysis of the communicative, sociolinguistic and relational functions of the postcard. Particular attention is paid to how study of the picture postcard can reveal details of the lives and literacy practices of often overlooked sectors of the population, such as working-class women. The Edwardian era in the United Kingdom was one of extreme inequalities and rapid social change, and picture postcards embodied the dynamism of the times. Grounded in an analysis of a unique, open access, digitized collection of 3,000 picture postcards, this monograph will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of Literacy Studies, sociolinguistics, history of communications and UK social history.
The University Archives was established in 1634. Based in the Bodleian Library, it is the institutional archive of Oxford University, holding records which span just over 800 years, documenting the University's activities and decisions throughout that time. Fifty-two documents and objects from the University Archives are showcased here, telling a wide range of intriguing stories about the University. Arranged chronologically, they deal with the University's relations with governments and monarchs; the effects of war; teaching and student behaviour; the University's buildings and institutions; widening access to university education; and the impact it has had on the city of Oxford and its people. Also documented here are fascinating insights into the University's erstwhile police force, a hidden time capsule, brewing licences, brawls and illicit steeplechasing. The items - all illustrated - also often unlock human stories to which we can relate today, opening a window on the individuals (from University, city, or even further afield) whose lives the University has touched, including people who would perhaps not be expected to feature in a history of Oxford University, but whose stories are preserved forever in its magnificent archives. |
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