Best of
18th-Century

2003

Vive la Revolution: A Stand-up History of the French Revolution


Mark Steel - 2003
    Brilliantly funny and insightful, it puts individual people back at the center of the story of the French Revolution, telling this remarkable story as it has never been told before.For the Haymarket edition, Steel has added a new preface for North American readers and revised the book to address parallel themes in US history.

Warrior Woman: The Exceptional Life Story of Nonhelema, Shawnee Indian Woman Chief


James Alexander Thom - 2003
    Now he and his wife, Dark Rain, have created a magnificent portrait of an astonishing woman–one who led her people in war when she could not persuade them to make peace.Her name was Nonhelema. Literate, lovely, imposing at over six feet tall, she was the Women’s Peace Chief of the Shawnee Nation–and already a legend when the most decisive decade of her life began in 1774. That fall, with more than three thousand Virginians poised to march into the Shawnees’ home, Nonhelema’s plea for peace was denied. So she loyally became a fighter, riding into battle covered in war paint. When the Indians ran low on ammunition, Nonhelema’s role changed back to peacemaker, this time tragically.Negotiating an armistice with military leaders of the American Revolution like Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark, she found herself estranged from her own people–and betrayed by her white adversaries, who would murder her loved ones and eventually maim Nonhelema herself.Throughout her inspiring life, she had many deep and complex relationships, including with her daughter, Fani, who was an adopted white captive . . . a pious and judgmental missionary, Zeisberger . . . a series of passionate lovers . . . and, in a stunning creation of the Thoms, Justin Case–a cowardly soldier transformed by the courage he saw in the female Indian leader.Filled with the uncanny period detail and richly rendered drama that are Thom trademarks, Warrior Woman is a memorable novel of a remarkable person–one willing to fight to avoid war, by turns tough and tender, whose heart was too big for the world she wished to tame.From the Hardcover edition.

The '45: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Untold Story of the Jacobite Rising


Christopher Duffy - 2003
    Christopher Duffy’s original research reveals evidence of a wider plot against the Hanoverians and more support for the risings in Scotland, than had been suspected before. Filled with maps and a guide to the key sites, it provides an eye-opening perspective.

Prussia's Glory: Rossbach & Leuthen 1757


Christopher Duffy - 2003
    Prussian military prowess became legendary.But the Franco-German army swept away at Rossbach, and the Austrian army routed at Leuthen, were not only larger and had a fair share of professional soldiers, but the Austrians had beaten the Prussians not long before. So how were they so humiliated? What made Frederick Great?For more than a century people believed it was because the Prussians were just naturally suited for war. Until 1945 many Germans, and their foes, remembered how Frederick miraculously saved Prussia against overwhelming odds, by marching through the snow towards Leuthen church.As always it was not so simple. The expert on 18th century armies, Christopher Duffy, shows why French, Austrian and Reichsarmee soldiers, though often enough brave and skilful, marched to defeat, and how Frederick, often unaware of the legend he was creating, won these famous battles. But it is no longer left to myth, but to reliable accounts of hard fighting, quick decisions, and the fate of the soldiers and civilians swept up by the fighting.

Discoveries: The Voyages Of Captain Cook


Nicholas Thomas - 2003
    As he sailed into Hawaii in January 1778 he made contact with the last of the human civilizations to grow up independently of the rest of the world. But equally for the Polynesians and Melanesians of the Pacific, Cook's arrival in their midst merely marked a further (if disastrous) twist in diverse histories already many centuries old. In this immensely enjoyable and absorbing book Cook's journeys are reimagined, attempting toleave behind (or master) our later preoccupations to let us see what Cook and his associates experienced and what the societies he encountered experienced - from the Beothuks of Newfoundland to the Tongans of the Friendly Islands.

Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen


Dena Goodman - 2003
    This volume explores the many struggles by various individuals and groups to put right Marie's identity, and it simultaneously links these struggles to larger destabilizations in social, political and gender systems in France.Looking at how Marie was represented in politics, art, literature and journalism, the contributors to this volume reveal how crucial political and cultural contexts were enacted "on the body of the queen" and on the complex identity of Marie. Taken together, these essays suggest that it is precisely because she came to represent the contradictions in the social, political and gender systems of her era, that Marie remains such an important historical figure.

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination


Barbara Taylor - 2003
    Examining in detail Wollstonecraft's writings, Barbara Taylor provides an alternative reading of her as a writer steeped in the utopianism of Britain's radical Enlightenment. Her feminist principles are shown to have arisen within a revolutionary program for universal equality and moral perfection that reached its zenith during the political upheavals of the 1790s but had its roots in the radical-Protestant Enlightenment. Locating Wollstonecraft within her literary and political milieus, and tracing the relationship between her feminist radicalism and her troubled personal history, the book draws a compelling portrait of this fascinating and profoundly influential thinker. Barbara Taylor, a reader in History in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of East London, is an intellectual and cultural historian specializing in the history of feminism from 1750-1850. Her first book, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Pantheon, 1983) is a study of the feminist dimension of British Utopian Socialism. It was published to widespread acclaim and she has been awarded many research grants, including fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, the British Academy and the Guggenheim Foundation.

The Jewish Enlightenment


Shmuel Feiner - 2003
    By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions. Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity.The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive treatment of this major cultural movement.

Naporra's Omweg


Roelof van Gelder - 2003
    The first part of Naporra’s hand-written autobiography, covering his youth and his life as a sailor in the service of the Dutch East India Company, was discovered a few years ago by the historian, Roelof van Gelder, in the Rotterdam Maritime Museum. The detailed descriptions provide a probing look into life on board an East Indiaman, seen through the eyes of a crewmember.Naporra was just twenty-five, but he had already seen more than most people in an entire lifetime. Born into a free farming family in East Prussia, he had left for Amsterdam and joined the East India Company. He had sailed to the Dutch East Indies and, unlike many of his comrades, had survived both the outbound and the homeward voyage.Based on Naporra’s life story, embellished with information from numerous other sources, in Naporra’s omweg Van Gelder reconstructs the task division on board, the sickness and dangers that threatened the crew and the mutual relationships between officers and men. Naporra was an accurate observer and even noted down the complete week’s menu served to the crew. He is discrete about the regular incidence of sodomy, but Van Gelder even succeeds in describing the scope of this phenomenon and the strict punishments it carried.Like many another seaman, Georg Naporra continually cursed his lot in life. How someone nevertheless ends up joining the merchant navy is described in the first part of Naporra’s chronicle. Superfluous on his father’s farm, too good for the life of a lackey and a failure as a merchant’s assistant, he is seduced by the mystery of the Orient and the promise of getting rich quick.He finally succeeded in the latter. Naporra ends up in Danzig as a well-to-do merchant, probably trading in spices. For the last part of the story, Van Gelder could not draw on Naporra’s autobiography, as the second part is still missing. Thanks to his great knowledge of history, local research and, above all, his lively pen, he still manages to steep the reader in the rich details of his later life. In this book, Naporra’s voice from the past sounds as if he is recounting his own life story to us personally.

London 1753


Sheila O'Connell - 2003
    This is a selection of quotations, poems, anecdotes and extracts about London over its long history, illustrated with specially commissioned location photography and a variety of scenes from rarely exhibited watercolours, prints and drawings in the collection of the British Museum.

57 Stories Of Saints


Anne Eileen Heffernan - 2003
    Wonderfully written biographies and illustrations of Saints Lucy, Monica, Augustine, Benedict, Francis Xavier, Edith Stein, Juan Diego, Katharine Drexel, and many others. Each story highlights a saint or related saints in a short-story format. The stories are organized chronologically and include biographical information and the saints' feast days. Many stories also include wonderful illustrations of the profiled saints. The stories are written in lively, accessible language and each conclude with a summary thought or reflection. Perfect for intermediate readers and school or church libraries. Ages 8-12

The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Concise Edition


Paul Lauter - 2003
    While other one-volume texts continue to anthologize primarily canonical works, the new Heath Concise offers a fresh perspective for the course, based on the successful hallmarks of the two-volume set.

In the 18th Century Style


Fine Woodworking Magazine - 2003
    Divided into three parts -- Style and Design, Projects and Techniques, and Inspiration -- the book offers background on the style, detailed instructions, and inspiring photos of finished pieces.

Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720-1780


Daniel Heartz - 2003
    It tells of events in Naples, where Vinci and Pergolesi went beyond their pre-1720 models to cultivate opera in a simpler, more direct manner, soon after christened the galant style. No less central was Venice, where Vivaldi perfected the concerto, on which were patterned the early symphonies and the newer kind of sonata. Dresden profited first from all these achievements and became, under Hasse's direction, the foremost center of Italian opera in Germany. Mannheim with its great orchestra did much to shape the modern symphony. A few years later, Paris became paramount, especially for its Opéra-Comique; during the 1770s the Opéra provided Gluck with a stage on which to cap his long international career. The book concludes with a description of Christian Bach in London, Paisiello in Saint Petersburg, and Boccherini in Madrid.This long-awaited book offers a view of eighteenth-century music that is broad and innovative while remaining sensitive to the values of those times and places. One comes away from it with an understanding of the European context behind the triumphs of Haydn and Mozart.Lavishly illustrated with music examples and reproductions, both in black-and-white and color, this master study will be of inestimable importance to scholars, cultural historians, performers, and all music lovers.

Joseph Haydn: His Life and Works


Jeremy Siepmann - 2003
    Jeremy Siepmann tells the story of the man and his work in this lively audio biography, enhanced by numerous examples of the music itself, taken from the Naxos Music Library. There is no better program with which to mark the 200th anniversary of the composer's death.

The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730


Daniel R. Woolf - 2003
    Based on a wide variety of manuscript and printed sources from local and central repositories, it focuses on the social framework within which historical knowledge was generated, modified, and preserved, rather than on historiography or historical method. Woolf begins his study by examining the ways in which early modern people acclimatized themselves to accelerating changes in their physical, social, religious, and economic environments. A developing, if uneasy, accommodation to change went hand in hand with shifting attitudes to the acceptability of novelty and innovation. The family was the central social unit throughout most of this time, and Woolf examines views of ancestry and heredity with a particular emphasis on the circulation of genealogical knowledge and its status relative to other forms of knowledge about the past.

The Making of Pennsylvania


Sydney George Fisher - 2003
    

Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self


Patricia Meyer Spacks - 2003
    But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity.In Privacy, Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat—one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.

Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in York


Keith Henson - 2003
    Once England's second city, it is built on a thousand years of bloodshed, from war to noble rebellion, death has tracked the city's footsteps.The foul deeds and suspicious deaths that are included in these pages, start with the details of the early history of punishment in York and close with the city's only unsolved murder. From 1800–1946 covers the period that saw York slide from Georgian splendor to an overpopulated, seething walled slum, before re-emerging after World War Two. 'Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in York' tells the story of some of the city's darkest moments: from Hanging Bishops to Sweet Toothed Poisoners; Insane Arsonists to Murder of the most foul kind.Take a journey into the darker and unknown side of your area as you read 'Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in York'.

Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France


Mary D. Sheriff - 2003
    Yet it was also thought this same passionate enthusiasm, if taken to unreasonable extremes, could lead to sexual deviance, mental illness, and even death. Women and artists were seen as especially susceptible to these negative consequences of creative enthusiasm—and women artists doubly so. Mary D. Sheriff uses these very different visions of artistic enthusiasm to explore the complex interrelationships among creativity, sexuality, the body, and the mind in eighteenth-century France. Drawing on evidence from the visual arts, literature, philosophy, and medicine, she scrutinizes the different forms of deviance ascribed to male and female artists. Sheriff also demonstrates that the perceived connections among sexuality, creativity, and disease also opened artistic opportunities for women—and creative women took full advantage of them.

The Rudiments of Genteel Behavior: Facsimile Reprint of the First Edition of 1737


François Nivelon - 2003
    The text is remarkably direct, precise and informative. Exactly how you should doff your hat and "retire gracefully from a room" and execute a curtsey are all explained both in theory and practice.Seriously, there is a great deal here of interest for dancers and performers, students of all human behaviour, historians (obviously) of all kinds - of art, of society, of costume; this book gives a vivid insight into a lost world of elegance, only half-captured in modern costume drama. What it has to say about 'genteel behaviour' reveals a mentality profoundly different from our expectations.Technically, this is a 'courtesy book', though, unusually, it inculcates manners with the morals that usually accompanied them. Its historical importance is known to specialists but it is exceedingly rare: only nine copies are known, only two of them, apart from the copy used for this facsimile edition, in public libraries. Nevertheless the book was beautifully and grandly printed and illustrated with engravings of high quality. The copy used for this edition was recently acquired for Gainsborough's House, Sudbury, Suffolk, and the price includes a donation to the museum and gallery at Gainsborough's House.

The Battle of Trenton


Wendy Vierow - 2003
    In this book, students will see how this now-legendary event occurred. Readers will be able to follow along as Washington crosses the Delaware and surprises the unwitting Hessians, who were still recovering from their Christmas celebrations.

Conserving the Enlightenment: French Military Engineering from Vauban to the Revolution


Janis Langins - 2003
    In Conserving the Enlightenment, Janis Langins gives us a history of this prototypical technical bureaucracy, using as his point of entry a pivotal dispute on the respective merits of two methods of engineering military fortifications. The story he tells of the tribulations of military engineers at the end of the Old Regime sheds light not only on the evolution of modern engineering but also on the difficulty of innovation in a technical bureaucracy.From the days of Louis XIV and his great military engineer Vauban, engineers in France had a reputation for competence and intellectual superiority. (This respect for engineers survived the Revolution; two engineers sat on the new Republic's ruling Committee of Public Safety with Robespierre.) Langins argues that French engineers saw themselves as men of the Enlightenment, with a steadfast faith in science and its positive effects on society; they believed that their profession could improve and civilize even warfare. When Marc-Rene, marquis de Montalembert, a cavalry officer and an amateur engineer, challenged the prevailing wisdom with a new method of fortification, the subsequent factional struggle became a crucible of self-definition for the profession. In the end, Langins shows, Vauban's science won out over Montalembert's inspiration, reinforcing and predicting the essentially conservative nature of French engineering.

Breaking The Backcountry: The Seven Years' War In Virginia And Pennsylvania 1754-1765


Matthew C. Ward - 2003
    Most accounts tell the story as a military struggle between British and French forces, with shifting alliances of Indians, culminating in the British conquest of Canada. Scholarly and popular works alike, including James Fennimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, focus on the action in the Hudson River Valley and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Matthew C. Ward tells the compelling story of the war from the point of view of the region where it actually began, and whose people felt the devastating effects of war most keenly-the backcountry communities of Virginia and Pennsylvania.   Previous wars in North America had been fought largely on the New England and New York frontiers. But on May 28, 1754, when a young George Washington commanded the first shot fired in western Pennsylvania, fighting spread for the first time to Virginia and Pennsylvania. Ward's original research reveals that on the eve of the Seven Years' War the communities of these colonies were isolated, economically weak, and culturally diverse. He shows in riveting detail how, despite the British empire's triumph, the war brought social chaos, sickness, hunger, punishment, and violence, to the backcountry, much of it at the hands of Indian warriors. Ward's fresh analysis reveals that Indian raids were not random skirmishes, but part of an organized strategy that included psychological warfare designed to make settlers flee Indian territories. It was the awesome effectiveness of this “guerilla” warfare, Ward argues, that led to the most enduring legacies of the war: Indian-hating and an armed population of colonial settlers, distrustful of the British empire that couldn't protect them. Understanding the horrors of the Seven Years' War as experienced in the backwoods thus provides unique insights into the origins of the American republic.

A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780


Carl P. Borick - 2003
    Clinton and his officers believed that the capture of Charleston, South Carolina, would change both the seat of the war and its character. The British were correct on both counts, but the effect of the charge was defeat. In this comprehensive study of the 1780 siege and surrender of Charleston, Carl P. Borick offers a full examination of the strategic and tactical elements of Clinton's operations." "Suggesting that scholars traditionality have underestimated its importance, Borick contends that the siege was one of the most wide-ranging, sophisticated, and critical campaigns of the war. While striking a devastating blow to American morale, it transformed the war in South Carolina from a conventional eighteenth-century conflict into a partisan war." Drawing on letters, journals, and other records kept by American, British, and Hessian participants, Borick relies on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources relating to the siege. He includes contemporaneous and modern maps that depict the British approach to the city and the complicated military operations that led to the patriots' greatest defeat of the American Revolution.

Austria's Wars of Emergence, 1683-1797: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy


Michael Hochedlinger - 2003
    Yet the military aspects of Austria's emergence as a European great power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have remained obscure. This book shows that force of arms and the instruments of the early modern state were just as important as its marriage policy in creating and holding together the Habsburg Monarchy.Drawing on an impressive up-to-date bibliography as well as on original archival research, this survey is the first to put Vienna's military back at the centre stage of early modern Austrian history.

The Battle of Bunker Hill


Scott P. Waldman - 2003
    The Battle of Bunker Hill was where American troops first deployed European battle strategies, such as the building of small forts known as redoubts. Readers will be thrilled to learn how the people of Charlestown watched from their rooftops as their troops drove back several British advances, and then retreated over Charlestown neck to the mainland.

Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma


Mary P. Callahan - 2003
    The persistence of this government-even in the face of long-term nonviolent opposition led by activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991-has puzzled scholars. In a book relevant to current debates about democratization, Mary P. Callahan seeks to explain the extraordinary durability of the Burmese military regime. In her view, the origins of army rule are to be found in the relationship between war and state formation.Burma's colonial past had seen a large imbalance between the military and civil sectors. That imbalance was accentuated soon after formal independence by one of the earliest and most persistent covert Cold War conflicts, involving CIA-funded Kuomintang incursions across the Burmese border into the People's Republic of China. Because this raised concerns in Rangoon about the possibility of a showdown with Communist China, the Burmese Army received even more autonomy and funding to protect the integrity of the new nation-state.The military transformed itself during the late 1940s and the 1950s from a group of anticolonial guerrilla bands into the professional force that seized power in 1962. The army edged out all other state and social institutions in the competition for national power. Making Enemies draws upon Callahan's interviews with former military officers and her archival work in Burmese libraries and halls of power. Callahan's unparalleled access allows her to correct existing explanations of Burmese authoritarianism and to supply new information about the coups of 1958 and 1962.

The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford - Volume 3


Horace Walpole - 2003
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.