Drawn from the Victoria and Albert Museum's world-famous collection, these garments display skills that are now lost, yet continue to inspire today's leading designers.Much of the finery seen here is too fragile to be on permanent display, or its detail too intricate to be captured in conventional photography. Jacobean blackwork, neoclassical tambour work, exquisite stitching, and knife-sharp pleats are pictured in stunning photographs, alongside such unusual techniques as stamping, pinking, and slashing--many of which are rarely employees in the modern world, as they require labor-intensive handwork impossible to replicate by machine.With line drawings showing the construction of the complete garment and a text that sets each in the context of its time, this book is a visual feast for all fashion lovers, and an essential resource for curators, collectors, students, costumers and designers.

    Reflecting the political craft of a leading statesman and the urbane wit of a man who associated with Pope, Addison, and Swift, Lord Chesterfield's Letters reveal the author's political cynicism, his views on good breeding, and instruction to his son in etiquette and the worldly arts. The only annotated selection of this breadth available in paperback, these entertaining letters illuminate the fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century life and manners.

    The theory provides a broad set of principles and a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of classical form, from individual ideas, phrases, and themes to the large-scale organization of complete movements. It emphasizes the notion of formal function, that is, the specific role a given formal unit plays in the structural organization of a classical work.

    But this was not always the popular response to murder. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen explores the changing view of murder from early New England sermons read at the public execution of murderers, through the nineteenth century, when secular and sensational accounts replaced the sacred treatment of the crime, to today's true crime literature and tabloid reports.The early narratives were shaped by a strong belief in original sin and spiritual redemption, by the idea that all murders were natural manifestations of the innate depravity of humankind. In a dramatic departure from that view, the Gothic imagination--with its central conventions of the fundamental horror and mystery of the crime--seized upon the murderer as a moral monster, separated from the normal majority by an impassable gulf. Halttunen shows how this perception helped shape the modern response to criminal transgression, mandating criminal incarceration, and informing a social-scientific model of criminal deviance.The Gothic expression of horror and inhumanity is the predominant response to radical evil today; it has provided a set of conventions surrounding tales of murder that appear to be natural and instinctive, when in fact they are rooted in the nineteenth century. Halttunen's penetrating insight into her extraordinary treasure trove of creepy popular crime literature reveals how our stories have failed to make sense of the killer and how that failure has constrained our understanding and treatment of criminality today.

    On 17 January 1781, Daniel Morgan's force of Continental troops and militia routed British regulars and Loyalists under the command of Banastre Tarleton. The victory at Cowpens helped put the British army on the road to the Yorktown surrender and, ultimately, cleared the way for American independence. Here, Lawrence Babits provides a brand-new interpretation of this pivotal South Carolina battle. Whereas previous accounts relied on often inaccurate histories and a small sampling of participant narratives, Babits uses veterans' sworn pension statements, long-forgotten published accounts, and a thorough knowledge of weaponry, tactics, and the art of moving men across the landscape. He identifies where individuals were on the battlefield, when they were there, and what they saw--creating an absorbing common soldier's version of the conflict. His minute-by-minute account of the fighting explains what happened and why and, in the process, refutes much of the mythology that has clouded our picture of the battle.Babits put the events at Cowpens into a sequence that makes sense given the landscape, the drill manual, the time frame, and participants' accounts. He presents an accurate accounting of the numbers involved and the battle's length. Using veterans' statements and an analysis of wounds, he shows how actions by North Carolina militia and American cavalry affected the battle at critical times. And, by fitting together clues from a number of incomplete and disparate narratives, he answers questions the participants themselves could not, such as why South Carolina militiamen ran toward dragoons they feared and what caused the mistaken order on the Continental right flank.An exceptionally well-researched and richly detailed treatment of one of the most important battles of the American Revolution.--Military History of the WestA superb example of the 'new military history'. . . . Babits comes closer than any previous historian to reconstructing the eighteenth-century soldier's experience of combat and has given us as close to a definitive account of the battle of Cowpens as we are ever likely to have.--Virginia Magazine of History and BiographyOne of Babits's purposes was the hope that the Cowpens veterans would not be forgotten. The masterful work that he has produced goes far towards achieving that purpose.--Journal of Southern HistoryOn January 17, 1781, in a pasture near present-day Spartanburg, South Carolina, Daniel Morgan's army of Continental troops and militia routed an elite British force under the command of the notorious Banastre Tarleton. Using documentary evidence to reconstruct the fighting at Cowpens, now a national battlefield, Lawrence Babits provides a riveting, minute-by-minute account of the clash that turned the tide of the Revolutionary War in the South and helped lead to the final defeat of the British at Yorktown.

    Although his entire lifetime (1729-1800) was spent under the czars, such was his fame that the Order of Suvorov was one of Soviet Russia's highest decorations. The dramatic campaign in Switzerland and italy of 1799-1800 was his last, and one of his finest, performances.Out of favor with the eccentric Czar Paul, the seventy-year-old Suvorov was recalled to active duty during the War of the Second Coalition (1799-1800). The most active theater of the War was northern Italy where Russian and Austrian forces faced the French. Both sides were hampered by unreliable allied contingents and political interference.Despite his age, Suvorov planned to defeat several separate French armies before they could combine, by a series of forced marches across some of the most difficult terrain in Europe. Plagued by less-than-able Austrian generals and constant interference from Vienna. Suvorov nevertheless won some brilliant victories. An Austrian defeat at Zurich, however, eventually made his situation untenable and he was forced to withdraw. A convenient scapegoat for the failure of the campaign, he was dismissed by Czar Paul and died in disgrace the following year.Upstart French Revolutionary generals lead a ragtag army across the Swiss and Italian Alps to do battle with the armies of the far-flung Austrian and Russian empires in this dramatic story. Special maps, complete orders of battle, and fulldetails of the military units involved back up the gripping main narrative.

    During the Revolutionary War, 13-year-old Hope, seized by a band of Tories who attack her Connecticut home, finds herself enslaved in a Tory Household on Long Island.

    His flamboyant cascades of blossoms, fruits, foliage, birds, and fish dominate late 17th-century English interiors -- at Windsor Castle, Hampton Court Palace, St. Paul's Cathedral, and numerous great country houses. This is the first book to illustrate Gibbons' spectacular work in color and the first to examine his unique construction methods and formidable carving techniques.Author David Esterly, a professional woodcarver, sets Gibbons in historical context and relates the dramatic events of his early life. He then explains the heretofore mysterious layering method by which Gibbons built up his work and describes his tools, materials, and finishing processes in detail. Specially commissioned photographs depict several Gibbons works in a disassembled state, and lush colorplates display the carvings in their full glory.

    In 1759, in an effort to end infant mortality, Louis XV commissioned Madame Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to travel throughout France teaching the art of childbirth to illiterate peasant women. For the next thirty years, this royal emissary taught in nearly forty cities and reached an estimated ten thousand students. She wrote a textbook and invented a life-sized obstetrical mannequin for her demonstrations. She contributed significantly to France's demographic upswing after 1760.Who was the woman, both the private self and the pseudonymous public celebrity? Nina Rattner Gelbart reconstructs Madame du Coudray's astonishing mission through extensive research in the hundreds of letters by, to, and about her in provincial archives throughout France. Tracing her subject's footsteps around the country, Gelbart chronicles du Coudray's battles with finance ministers, village matrons, local administrators, and recalcitrant physicians, her rises in power and falls from grace, and her death at the height of the Reign of Terror. At a deeper level, Gelbart recaptures du Coudray's interior journey as well, by questioning and dismantling the neat paper trail that the great midwife so carefully left behind. Delightfully written, this tale of a fascinating life at the end of the French Old Regime sheds new light on the histories of medicine, gender, society, politics, and culture.

    The authors examine virtually all aspects of women's lives: female life-stages from birth to death; the separate culture of women, including female friendship and feminist consciousness; the diverse roles of women in the religious and political movements of the day; and the effect of prevailing perceptions of gender differences. Comparisons are made between the makeshift economy of poor women and the occupational identities, and preoccupations, of the middling and elite classes. This fascinating and well-illustrated book reconstructs the mental and material world of Tudor and Stuart women, and is sure to become the standard text on the subject.

    It introduces students to important metaphysical and epistemological issues including the theory of ideas, personal identity and skepticism, through the best of contemporary scholarship.

    -- An electronic voyage through time offering hours of fascinating thought-provoking reading for history lovers and students of all ages-- Flashing lights guide you through a quiz with electronic sounds signaling 'victory' or 'try again'-- Detailed timelines also provide a picture of the interrelationships of events at different places and times

    This book examines the spaces and identities which characterized the changing metropolis. From excursions into institutions like Bedlam, Bridewell, and the Theatre, as well as exploring the less formal places and practices of London, such as prostitution, the suburbs, and the fashion parades at St Paul's Walk, a new way of seeing the city becomes open to us.

    The Aboriginal peoples of the Woodlands were the first in North America to experience economic and social marginalization and, in consequence, the first to rely on the production of commodities for the tourist trade. These hybrid art forms combine indigenous materials and techniques such as quillwork, moosehair embroidery, birchbark, and basketry with Euro-American genres and styles. Tourist art of the period is generally of high quality and great aesthetic interest. Yet scholars have largely ignored these objects because of their incorporation of Euro-North American influences.Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the production, sale, and consumption of tourist art constituted a system for the circulation of objects within which images of Indianness were negotiated. To produce marketable commodities, Aboriginal people constructed images of themselves that mediated European notions of the savage, the natural, and the primitive. By accepting this imagery, colonizers and settlers naturalized their own identities as the rightful successors to the "Indians." While stereotypes of Indianness were being transported into parlors and bedchambers, the objects made for sale were also influencing things Aboriginal people made for their own use. The beaded purses, pincushions, and shopping baskets carried Euro-American styles and concepts into aboriginal communities, together with associated ideas of gender roles and domestic organization.An innovative combination of fieldwork, art historical analysis, and historical contextualization, this study for the first time rigorously compares a Native souvenir production to a wide range of Euro-American decorative arts and home crafts. It identifies the sources of object types and styles and reveals the innovative differences displayed by Aboriginal trade wares. Images newly uncovered in archives and travel literature--including depictions of Native vendors and makers--illustrate the book, along with never before displayed or published objects from museum collections in Europe and North America.

    The selections translated here illustrate in colorful detail how the experiences and the composition of Russian society and culture evolved from the late eighteenth century through the 1917 revolution, in response to economic, technological, and political changes. Fortunetelling and etiquette manuals, thieves' tales, children's literature, popular songs, war stories, women's novels, satires of life in America, and vaudeville skits are just a few of the genres represented.

    Wilfrid Prest investigates this remarkable transformation from domestic instability and external weakness to global, economic, and military predominance. Geographically, the main focus is on England and Wales, but Prest also analyses the broader British context, discussing the role played by Ireland and Scotland, as well as the interrelations between England, Europe, and the wider world. He examines the lives of ordinary people as well as the ruling elite, and explores the distinctive nature of women's experiences; allowing the voices of the past to speak directly to the modern reader. The result is a lively, up-to-date, and comprehensive overview of Britain's long eighteenth century. It will remain a standard text on the subject for many years to come.

    Johnston portrays a Wordsworth different in crucial ways from the one that the poet intended us to know. Taking advantage of unprecedented access to government archives in England and France, family papers, school and university records, and intimate letters, he brings little-known aspects of Wordsworth's life and character to the fore. With its urban revolutions and Alpine scenery, French mistresses and passionate sisters, secret agents, aristocratic ogres, and furious guardian uncles, The Hidden Wordsworth unfolds a life that Byron might have envied. Johnston relates Wordsworth's attempt to cover up these personal details, his systematic and successful efforts to hide his "juvenile errors" from his contemporaries and from history. But they did not disappear: many of them stare us in the face from the lines of his greatest poetry, like purloined letters we have not seen because they are too obvious.

    Often derided as the buffoon who hated all boets and bainters, George II was fortunate to be served by Prime Ministers Sir Robert Walpole and William Pitt, and was wise enough to leave the business of government to them. His wife, generally regarded as the ablest of British queens between Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, used her influence in politics and patronage so that she and Walpole effectively ruled the kingdom between them. Her death in 1737 was seen as a national calamity. Illustrated throughout, this new biography provides a much-needed reevaluation of these monarchs and the times in which they ruled.