This book is a compilation of selected stories, essays, and reminiscences that Dorothy West wrote for the Vineyard Gazette from the 1960s to the early 1990s. In these entries, West retraces life on the island as she experienced it from 1908, when she was an infant, to 1993 when she wrote her final column. Born in 1907 in Boston, Dorothy West went on to develop into a prize-winning author by the time she was in her teens. The 1926 award she received in New York, and the lure of the city itself, inspired West to leave Boston and join what was then a fledgling literary movement that would evolve into the Harlem Renaissance. She circulated among what in essence was the black literary "royalty" of her times, of which she was a signal member. By the mid-1940s West had returned toMassachusetts, to Marthas Vineyard. She began to write a column for the local paper about the comings and goings of island residents and visitors. It was her column in the Gazette that drew the attention of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who, on one of her island visits, met the author and expressed her admiration. Onassis, at the time, just happened to be an editor at Doubleday. When Onassis learned of a decades-old manuscript that had been laid aside, she urged West to pick up the work again. West later dedicated this book "To the memory of my editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Though there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance, we were perfect partners." The authors selected from the Gazette columns that West wrote over the three decades, those on people, events, and nature that seemed to have the greatest historic, artistic, or philosophical import.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, the center of black social and business life in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the area known as Vinegar Hill. But in 1960, noting the prevalence of aging frame houses and ""substandard"" conditions such as outdoor toilets, voters decided that Vinegar Hill would be redeveloped. Charlottesville's black residents lost a cultural center, largely because they were deprived of a voice in government. Vinegar Hill's displaced residents discuss the loss of homes and businesses, and the impact of the project on black life in Charlottesville. The interviews raise questions about motivations behind urban renewal.

On 5 June 1975, voters went to the polls in Britain's first national referendum to decide whether the UK should remain in the European Community. As in 2016, the campaign shattered old political allegiances and triggered a far-reaching debate on Britain's place in the world. The campaign to stay in stretched from the Conservative Party - under its new leader, Margaret Thatcher - to the Labour government, the farming unions and the Confederation of British Industry. Those fighting to 'Get Britain Out' ranged from Enoch Powell and Tony Benn to Scottish and Welsh nationalists. Footballers, actors and celebrities joined the campaign trail, as did clergymen, students, women's groups and paramilitaries. In a panoramic survey of 1970s Britain, this volume offers the first modern history of the referendum, asking why voters said 'Yes to Europe' and why the result did not, as some hoped, bring the European debate in Britain to a close.

This book draws connections between Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher and works of classic American literature. Chapter I explores the horrors of the Civil War as conveyed in Mosher's Walking to Gatlinburg and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Major characters escape the battlefield and then feel a need to redeem themselves for what could be a cowardly act. Chapter II analyses how Mosher and three classic authors explore the physical and moral dangers of industrialisation, especially women's safety. Chapter III compares Mosher's Walking to Gatlinburg to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in terms of the quest for Heaven. In Chapter IV, Melville's novels are used to address evil as it appears in Mosher's Disappearances. Chapter V explores black men with white women in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Mosher's A Stranger in the Kingdom. Humour is at the core of Chapter VI, comparing Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to Mosher's The True Account. In Chapter VII, the disappearing wilderness is the issue in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and several of Mosher's works. Chapter VIII offers romantic love as a shield against other human beings. A conclusion draws on Steinbeck, Twain and Mosher to elaborate on how one should explore as much of the world as possible.

The Second Reform Act, passed in 1867, created a million new voters, doubling the electorate and propelling the British state into the age of mass politics. It marked the end of a twenty year struggle for the working class vote, in which seven different governments had promised change. Yet the standard works on 1867 are more than forty years old and no study has ever been published of reform in prior decades. This study provides the first analysis of the subject from 1848 to 1867, ranging from the demise of Chartism to the passage of the Second Reform Act. Recapturing the vibrancy of the issue and its place at the heart of Victorian political culture, it focuses not only on the reform debate itself, but on a whole series of related controversies, including the growth of trade unionism, the impact of the 1848 revolutions and the discussion of French and American democracy.

Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial figures of modern times. Her governments inspired hatred and veneration in equal measure, and her legacy remains fiercely contested. Yet assessments of the Thatcher era are often divorced from any larger historical perspective. This book draws together leading historians to locate Thatcher and Thatcherism within the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain. It explores the social and economic crises of the 1970s; Britain's relationships with Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States; and the different experiences of Thatcherism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The book assesses the impact of the Thatcher era on class and gender, and situates Thatcherism within the Cold War, the end of Empire and the rise of an Anglo-American 'New Right'. Drawing on the latest available sources, it opens a wide-ranging debate about the Thatcher era and its place in modern British history.

Oliver Lewis was champion jockey of the Kentucky Derby in 1875 with a winning race time of two minutes and 37 seconds. Jockey Willie Simms won in 1896, bringing his horse in at two minutes and seven seconds. James Winkfield was the winning jockey in both 1901 and 1902 with winning race times of two minutes and seven seconds and two minutes and eight seconds, respectively. Each of these men possessed the skill and power necessary to spur a horse to glorious victory. All are members of the small, select group of Derby-winning jockeys who were African Americans. The stakes were high: Black jockeys who won a race in the late 1700s and 1800s sometimes won freedom from slavery as well. This work examines the presence of black jockeys in the Kentucky Derby, from the first instance of slaves working as stable hands and tending their masters horses to the first black jockey to win the prestigious Kentucky Derby in 1875 and the continued participation of black jockeys in the Kentucky Derby. Black owners and trainers in the Kentucky Derby are also discussed. Three appendices list black winning jockeys, black trainers and black owners of Kentucky Derby horses.