Instead of settling on a small estate, as he had hoped, Martin must embark on a seven-year odyssey which will lead him, Bratchet and a mysterious Highlander from London's stews back to the battlefields of Flanders, the court of the Sun King, the perils of piracy on the high seas and the horrors of Jamaica's sugar plantations. Yet did they but know it, the answer to Effie's death, Bratchet's safety and Defoe's commission lies closer to home - in the apartments of Queen Anne, dying with no Protestant heir in view...

    Iroquois Indians visit London in the early part of the eighteenth century and give birth to the "feathered people" in the British popular imagination.What do these seemingly disparate strands of culture share over three hundred years and several thousand miles of ocean? Artfully interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance from the eighteenth century to the present in London and New Orleans, Cities of the Dead takes a look at a rich continuum of intercultural exchange that reinvents, recreates, and restores history.Complemented with fifty-five illustrations, including spectacular photos of the famed Mardi Gras Indians, this fascinating work employs an entirely unique approach to the study of culture. Rather than focusing on one region, Cities of the Dead explores broad cultural connections over place and time, showing through myriad examples how performance can revise the unwritten past.

    Defiantly independent Claire Lacombe tests her theory: if men can make things happen, perhaps women can too. . . . Manon Philipon finds she has a talent for politics--albeit as the ghostwriter of her husband's speeches. . . . And Pauline Léon knows one thing for certain: the women must apply the pressure or their male colleagues will let them starve. While illuminating the lives of Robespierre, Danton, and Condorcet, Piercy also opens to us the minds and hearts of women who change their world, live their ideals--and are prepared to die for them.

    How did it arise? Why did French men and women become revolutionaries? To answer these questions, Tackett focuses on the experiences of the 1200 members of the first French National Assembly. Drawing upon on a wide range of sources, including contemporary letters and diaries, Tackett shows that the deputies were a group of practical men, whose ideas were governed more by concrete subjects than by abstract philosophy. Though it may seem surprising now, most of the deputies were actually in support of the king. Instead of being initiated as a result of a specific ideology founded on Enlightenment principles, the ideas that eventually led to the French Revolution were, instead, a direct result of the actual process of the Assembly.First published in 1996 and hailed as an "exemplary product of the historian's craft," Becoming a Revolutionary is now available in paperback for the first time.

    John Suchet journeys through Beethoven's early years as child prodigy to his later life as a musical master, haunted by personal tragedies. Based firmly on fact, this novel is sure to capture an audience of classical music devotees as well as history buffs.

    Darnton offers a reasoned defense of what the French revolutionaries were trying to achieve and urges us to look beyond political events to understand the idealism and universality of their goals.

    The lore and the legends, the lawmen and the bad men, the rise of the cattle barons and the tragic demise of the Plains Indians, the pioneers and the forty-niners, Little Big Horn and the Alamo, Calamity Jane and Crazy Horse -- from the Alleghenies to the Rockies the events that shaped the West and the people who tamed it are featured in this vivid anecdotal history, which draws upon firsthand testimony and contemporary documents to provide a compelling and comprehensive account of a land as it became a nation.

    Patriarchy—the social and cultural dominance of the male—has long been a fundamental feature of western civilization yet has only recently begun to be systematically investigated by historians. This book is the first attempt to provide a rounded portrait of its workings over a long stretch of the English past.Anthony Fletcher's account draws from a vast range of sources—literary, medical, religious, and historical—to investigate the mechanisms through which men and women interpreted and understood their social worlds. He explores the early modern view of the body, of sexual desire and appetites, and of gender difference. He looks at the nature of marital relationships and shows how subordination was implemented and consolidated through church, school, home, and community. And in a text that is poignant, humane, and beautifully written, he exposes patriarchy's tragic consequences: smothered opportunity, crushed sexuality, and a pall across many women's lives.Yet, over these three centuries, the conventional foundations of male superiority came under acute pressure. Fletcher reveals the depth of male anxiety in the face of women's volatility, verbal assertiveness, and alleged vibrant sexuality, and he shows how the gender system began to be transformed as men sought to detach it from its biblical foundations and inculcate gender identities on something like their modern ideological basis. This revolution in the entire premise upon which gender was grounded is fundamental to an understanding of the structure of English society today.

    But this mixed world did not last, and it eventually gave way to nineteenth-century commercial and industrial development. How the West Was Lost tracks the overlapping conquest, colonization, and consolidation of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Not a story of paradise lost, this is a book about possibilities lost. It focuses on the common ground between Indians and backcountry settlers which was not found, the frontier customs that were not perpetuated, the lands that were not distributed equally, the slaves who were not emancipated, the agrarian democracy that was not achieved, and the millennium that did not arrive. Seeking to explain why these dreams were not realized, Stephen Aron shows us what did happen during Kentucky's tumultuous passage from Daniel Boone's world to Henry Clay's.

    In accounts of her role as an artist, she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified as monstrously unfeminine. In The Exceptional Woman, Mary D. Sheriff uses Vigée-Lebrun's career to explore the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional, and medical debates about women in eighteenth-century France. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigée-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women.Engaging ancien-régime philosophy, as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vigée-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work and the world of this controversial woman artist.

    This elegant book is essential reading for anyone interested in plants and science." -- Londa Schiebinger, NatureIn Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, Ann B. Shteir explores the contributions of women to the field of botany before and after the dawn of the Victorian Age. She shows how ideas during the eighteenth century about botany as a leisure activity for self-improvement and a "feminine" pursuit gave women unprecedented opportunities to publish their findings and views. By the 1830s, however, botany came to be regarded as a professional activity for specialists and experts -- and women's contributions to the field of botany as authors and teachers were viewed as problematic. Shteir focuses on John Lindley, whose determination to form distinctions between polite botany -- what he called "amusement for the ladies" -- and botanical science -- "an occupation for the serious thoughts of man" -- illustrates how the contributions of women were minimized in the social history of science. Despite such efforts, women continued to participate avidly in botanical activities at home and abroad, especially by writing for other women, children, and general readers.At a time of great interest in the role of women in science, this absorbing, interdisciplinary book provides a new perspective on gender issues in the history of science. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science rediscovers the resourceful women who used their pens for their own social, economic, and intellectual purposes."Her lively assortment of womenspeaks to the diversity of a scientific world in some ways more pervasive of everyday society than our own, and... a complex ecology of women in science."--Abigail Lustig, William and Mary Quarterly"Shteir's book bears reading and rereading, not merely because it is filled with a wide array of detail, but because it attempts to suggest a texture of women's lives in the nineteenth century that is far too poorly known."--Alan Rauch, Nineteenth Century Studies

    The early romantics had an ambition still relevant today: to find a middle path between conservatism and liberalism, between a community ethic and individual freedom. Frederick Beiser's edition comprises all kinds of texts, from essays to jottings from notebooks. All have been translated anew, many for the first time.

    Dale Carson, an Abenaki Indian, captures the growing interest in native cuisine, bringing her heritage to your table with a collection of delicious recipes, each accompanied by notes on its historical background and traditional preparation, as well as ingredient substitution and menu planning tips.

    From the late 1790s to the early 1840s a succession of revivals transformed the spiritual prospects of the nation.

    Now Diana Donald presents the first major study of these caricatures, which challenges many assumptions about them. She shows that they were a widely disseminated form of political expression and propaganda as subtle and eloquent as the written word.Donald analyzes the meanings of the prints, applying current perspectives on the eighteenth century about the changing roles of women and constructions of gender, the alleged rise of a consumer society, the growth of political awareness outside aristocratic circles, and the problems of defining "class" values in the later Georgian era. She discusses, for example, the social position of the Georgian satirist within the hierarchy of high and low art production; the relation between the shifting styles of political prints and the antagonisms of different political cultures; caricatures of fashion as expressions of ambivalent attitudes to luxury and "high society"; treatment of the crowd in the prints and the light this sheds on the myth of the freeborn Englishman; and what caricatures reveal about British reactions to the French Revolution in the 1790s. Donald concludes by describing the demise of the Georgian satirical print in the early nineteenth century, which she attributes in part to the new and urgent political purposes of radicals in the post-Napoleonic era. Illustrated with works by Gillray, Rowlandson, and other artists, many of which have never been published before, the book will be an enlightening and enjoyable reference for scholars and the general reader.

    A boy from a small village, with little formal education, he became the official flower painter to Queen Marie Antoinette and the Empress Josephine. In sparkling words and colorful pictures, Croll tells the story of this remarkable artist.

    A real-life family saga which spans two continents, several centuries and more than thirty generations to link Scotland's clans with the native peoples of the American West.

    “McCurdy’s finely etched illustrations, with their careful attention to detail and old-fashioned flavor, urge upon readers a commanding vision of American history.”--Publishers Weekly

    Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors.Briton Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano told their stories as Afro-Britons who recognized the sovereignty of George III; Johnson Green, Belinda, Benjamin Banneker, and Venture Smith spoke and wrote as African Americans n the United States; Phillis Wheatley, initially an Afro-British poet, later chose an African American identity; Francis Williams and George Liele wrote in Jamaica; David George and Boston King, having served with the British forces in the American Revolution and later lived in Canada, composed their narratives as British subjects in the newly established settlement in Sierra Leone, Africa.In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of African literature written in English.