Includes alphabetical lists of titles and first lines.

    But Marietta and Elena, two dear friends at the Ospedale della Pietà, a world-famous orphanage and music school for girls, know little of that milieu–until they come of age. Elena is forced to wed the head of the Celano clan, a jealous, brutal man, while Marietta marries Domenico Torrisi, whose family vendetta with the Celanos is centuries old. Tradition dictates that the friends should never speak again, but their bond is too strong to break. As the French Revolution unsettles all of Europe, Elena’s husband frames Domenico and he becomes a political prisoner. Marietta and Elena plot to save him, and the women discover that Venetian masks have noble purposes, too–but will their efforts put their own lives at risk?Embodying the glitter and the treachery of the city it portrays, The Venetian Mask will keep you turning pages long into the night.

    Viewed from the perspective of Princesse Marie Adelaide, this book captures the events of the day and the political maneuvering of the times. Photographs.

    Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values.

    His masterpiece is Candide, a brilliant satire on the theory that 'the world is the best of all possible worlds.' The book traces the picaresque adventures of the guileless Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated from his beloved Cunegonde, tortured by the Inquisition, etc., all without losing his resilience and will to live.

    John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves' environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves' own point of view.The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture in the South.Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but rarely for those of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers' houses, finally reaching the slave quarters. To evoke a firsthand sense of what it was like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers' Project collections.

    The popular fashion for Indian calicos in the seventeenth century and the genesis of the British cotton industry in the eighteenth century reflected new consumer forces at work withinBritain. The East India trade encouraged new patterns of domestic demand, patterns which were not eradicated even with the prohibition of most Indian fabrics in 1721. Parliamentarians and clergy decried the spread of popular fashions that diminished visible social distinctions and undercuttraditional manufactures. Nevertheless, the demand for cottons persisted, supporting Britain's cotton manufacturers. Beginning with the East Indian commerce and ending with the thriving industrial production of British manufacturers, this study assesses the social and economic factors of fashionand commerce which sustained the cotton trade for over 140 years.

    Established as a class at the beginning of the Meiji period, the kazoku ranked directly below the emperor and his family. Officially dissolved in 1947, this group of social elites is still generally perceived as nobility. Lebra gained entry into this tightly knit circle and conducted more than one hundred interviews with its members. She has woven together a reconstructive ethnography from their life histories to create an intimate portrait of a remote and archaic world.As Lebra explores the culture of the kazoku, she places each subject in its historical context. She analyzes the evolution of status boundaries and the indispensable role played by outsiders.But this book is not simply about the elite. It is also about commoners and how each stratum mirrors the other. Revealing previously unobserved complexities in Japanese society, it also sheds light on the universal problem of social stratification.

    395 to a.d. 1185, recounts desperate attempts against barbarians, palace revolutions and assassinations, theological controversy, and lecheries and betrayals, all in a magnificent setting.

    Describes life in colonial times, including family life, education, religion, transportation, leisure activities, and childhood.

    In this study, Mary Vidal shows that conversation was central to Watteau's images of sociability, providing the framework for figural and formal relationships even in his military, mythological, theatrical and religious works. Vidal argues that Watteau's painted conversations were not mere literal descriptions of social behaviour but repesented conversation as part of an aesthetic, linguistic and ethical system, as an art of living. Vidal shows that Watteau's focus on cnverstion was related to developments in the 17th- and 18th-century France: the rise and elaboration of an art of conversation, the connection between polite discourse and the redefinition of the nobility, the flourishng of women's salons in Paris and the development of the literary genre of the written conversation. Watteau recognised speech as the central sign system in French society and he identified the characteristics of fine conversation in his new manner of painting. Through this analogy, he presented the artistic process itself as the main concern of the elite artist, in contrast to the scholarly, text-dependent image of the Academy. In choosing conversation as his subject, Watteau associated his art with polite society. In his conversational artmaking, Watteau set up dialogic relationships between spoken words and images, art and society, viewer and painting. Often regarded as merely erotic and decorative, this books shows his painted conversations to be also works of substance, ideas and morals.

    The porcelain is catalogued in chronological order by factory. Each entry provides a complete bibliography and provenance, as well as details on factory listing, artist, date, measurements, distinguishing marks, and much more. The catalogue is beautifully and extensively illustrated. Each work is shown in color with a selection of black and white details. Incised and painted marks are also illustrated.

    In his introduction, John C Ewers considers the influence of Secoy's book on scholars since its original publication in 1953.

    In Debt to Shays takes a fresh perspective on the rebellion by challenging existing understandings of late eighteenth-century America and restoring the rebellion to its historical context

    Smith's analysis went beyond economics to embrace a larger "civilizing project" designed to create a more decent society.

    LeidnerThe Soldiers / Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz ; translated by William E. YuillThe Childmurderess / Heinrich Leopold Wagner ; translated by Betty Senk WaterhouseStorm and Stress / Friedrich Maximilian Klinger ; translated by Betty Senk WaterhouseThe Robbers / Friedrich Schiller ; translated by F.J. LamportPreface to The robbers / translated by Alan C. Leidner.

    Authors and readers, great and small, all shared the impression that they were caught between truth and falsehood, and moreover that the 'probable-improbable' they relished so much was being manipulated by the complex strategies of the court, the police and the petty hordes of the evil-minded. We cannot understand the curiosity of the Parisian public without realizing that they did at least know one thing: the extent they were being made fools of."The eighteenth century was awash with rumor and talk. The words and opinions of ordinary people filled the streets of Paris. But were these simply the isolated grumblings and gossip of the crowd, or is it possible to speak of genuine "public opinion" among the common people? This is the subject of Subversive Words, the newest book by French historian Arlette Farge. Farge begins with Jurgen Habermas's notion of a bourgeois public sphere. However, whereas Habermas was concerned mostly with the "cultured classes," Farge focuses on the uneducated common people.Drawing on chronicles, newspapers, memoirs, police reports, and news sheets from the time, she finds that by the second half of the eighteenth century ordinary Parisians had come to assert their right to hold and declare clear opinions on what was happening in their city--visible, real, everyday events such as executions, price rises, and revolts. Yet the government preferred to regard ordinary Parisians as unsophisticated, impulsive, or inept. In the years leading up to the Revolution, however, the administration increasingly feared the mobilization of these people. Officially, it denied the existence of any distinct popular public opinion, but in practice it kept the streets of Paris under regular surveillance through a system of spies, inspectors, and observers.Amid this curious tension between denial and action, Farge argues, popular rumors arose and gained a life of their own. Wise and filled with vivid descriptions of everyday life, Subversive Words is cultural and intellectual history at its best.