Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds marked the moment, the first "field guide" for ordinary people, illustrated with woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. But his work was far more than a mere guide, for in the vivid vignettes scattered through the book, Bewick captured the vanishing world of rural English life.In this superb biography, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer's son from Tyneside who influenced book illustration for a century to come. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life, and the beauty of the wild -- a journey to the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world.

    With a wealth of previously unused primary accounts, Mark Urban reveals the inner life of the regiment - and, through it, of the British army as a whole - as it fought one of the pivotal campaigns of world history. With his customary narrative flair Urban describes how British troops adopted new tactics and promoted new leaders, and shows how the foundations were laid for the redcoats' subsequent performance against Napoleon. Fighting in the climactic battles of the Revolution in the American South, the Fusiliers became one of the crack regiments of the army. They never believed themselves to have been defeated.Mark Urban's bestseller Rifles was an account of the campaign of a brave band of men which had remained untold for too long. Bernard Cornwell said of it, if you like Sharpe, then this book is a must, whle for Frank McLynn in the Daily Express it was deeply researched, beautifully crafted and captivating. Now that searing and completely original account is joined by Fusiliers, sure to delight all readers of the best military history and adventure.Jacket illustration: Angus McBride

    Haynes, a veteran of the movement, describes a vision of the future that involves improvisation, rhetorical expression, and composition.

    Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the galant style.

    Singapore and Malaysia are particular victims of this historical paradox, and Carl Trocki's account of the history of Johor and Singapore marks a decided advance in Malaysian scholarship. A study of the Temenggongs of Johor, Prince of Pirates offers an original and highly provocative reinterpretation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Malaysian history, revealing continuities between pre-colonial and colonial periods that have been obscured by attention given to the European intrusion. This new edition includes a fresh introduction by the author that positions the study within subsequent literature on Malaysian history, the Chinese migration, the opium trade, and the history of the British Empire in Asia.

    Focusing on offenses to the eyes, ears, noses, taste buds, and skin of inhabitants of England’s pre-Industrial Revolution cities, Hubbub transports us to a world in which residents were scarred by smallpox, refuse rotted in the streets, pigs and dogs roamed free, and food hygiene consisted of little more than spit and polish. Through the stories of a large cast of characters from varied walks of life, the book compares what daily life was like in different cities across England from 1600 to 1770.Using a vast array of sources, from novels to records of urban administration to diaries, Emily Cockayne populates her book with anecdotes from the quirky lives of the famous and the obscure—all of whom confronted urban nuisances and physical ailments. Each chapter addresses an unpleasant aspect of city life (noise, violence, moldy food, smelly streets, poor air quality), and the volume is enhanced with a rich array of illustrations. Awakening both our senses and our imaginations, Cockayne creates a nuanced portrait of early modern English city life, unparalleled in breadth and unforgettable in detail.

    She was a dedicated patron of the arts, a lively and talented intellectual, a victim of violence and adultery, and a passionate advocate for the rights of women. Above all she is portrayed as a woman of reason in the Age of Reason.

    With contributions by well-known experts in the field, this book studies not only Pompeii, but also for the first time the buried surrounding cities of Campania. The World of Pompeii includes the latest understanding of the region, based on the up-to-date findings of recent archaeological work.Accompanied by a CD with the most detailed map of Pompeii so far, this book is instrumental in studying the city in the ancient world and is an excellent source book for students of this fascinating and tragic geographic region.

    His contemporaries called Arnold the American Hannibal after he successfully led more than 1,000 men through the savage Maine wilderness in 1775. The objective of Arnold and his heroic corps was the fortress city of Quebec, the capital of British-held Canada. The epic campaign is the subject of Benedict Arnold s Army, a fascinating campaign to bring Canada into the war as the 14th colony. The initiative for the assault came from George Washington who learned that a fast moving detachment could surprise Quebec by following a chain of rivers and lakes through the Maine wilderness. Washington picked Col. Benedict Arnold, an obscure and controversial Connecticut officer, to command the corps who signed up for the secret mission. Arnold believed that his expedition would reach Quebec City in twenty days. The route turned out to be 270 miles of treacherous rapids, raging waterfalls, and trackless forests that took months to traverse. At times Arnold s men were up to their waists in freezing water dragging and pushing their clumsy boats through surging rapids and hauling them up and over waterfalls. In one of the greatest exploits in American military history, Arnold led his famished corps through the early winter snow, up and over the Appalachian Mountains, and on to Quebec. Benedict Arnold s Army covers a largely unknown but important period of Arnold s life. Award-winning author Arthur Lefkowitz provides important insights into Arnold s character during the earliest phase of his military career, showing his aggressive nature, need for recognition, experience as a competitive businessman, and his obsession with honor that started him down the path to treason. Lefkowitz extensively researched Arnold s expedition and made numerous trips along the same route that Arnold s army took. Benedict Arnold s Army also contains a closing chapter with detailed information and maps for readers who wish to follow the expedition s route from the coast of Maine to Quebec City. There is a growing interest in the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War as a source of national pride and identity and the Arnold Expedition as told through Benedict Arnold s Army is one of the greatest adventure stories in American history. Arthur S. Lefkowitz lives in central New JerseyREVIEWS In short, BENEDICT ARNOLD S ARMY is brilliant. The prose sparkles, the research shines, and the historical fog enveloping this obscure expedition lifts to reveal the military gamble across a barely-charted wilderness... hard to put down. Magweb.com 05/2008 highly recommended to American History shelves and anyone who would want to learn more about this enigmatic figure of American History. Midwest Book Review, 05/2008 an excellent campaign history that is difficult to put down a fine narrative that is certain to find a wide audience among scholars of the War of Independence and more popular audiences as well. On Point, 01/2009"

    At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain was an important European power, but few would have predicted her global pre-eminence by 1760. As Brendan Simms shows with great flair and originality, Britain had a crucial card to play. It was the joining of the British crown to Hanover that gave Britain two empires: one scattered around the world and another - the more important of the two - firmly locked into Germany. Having created a new empire Britain then spectacularly lost it, this time because of its chaotic failure to maintain its European alliances. This is an epic and often unexpected story, and Simms tells it brilliantly.

    She was a child prodigy who frequented the salon circuit, discussing mathematics, philosophy, history, and music in multiple languages. She wrote one of the first vernacular textbooks on calculus and was appointed chair of mathematics at the university in Bologna. In later years, however, she became a prominent figure within the Catholic Enlightenment, gave up the academic world, and devoted herself to the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the homeless. Indeed, the life of Maria Agnesi reveals a complex and enigmatic figure—one of the most fascinating characters in the history of mathematics.Using newly discovered archival documents, Massimo Mazzotti reconstructs the wide spectrum of Agnesi's social experience and examines her relationships to various traditions—religious, political, social, and mathematical. This meticulous study shows how she and her fellow Enlightenment Catholics modified tradition in an effort to reconcile aspects of modern philosophy and science with traditional morality and theology.Mazzotti's original and provocative investigation is also the first targeted study of the Catholic Enlightenment and its influence on modern science. He argues that Agnesi's life is the perfect lens through which we can gain a greater understanding of mid-eighteenth-century cultural trends in continental Europe.

    In this history, Platt explores the captivating story of smuggling in 18th & 19th century Britain.

    Rose brings to life the legendary hero of the New England Militia during America s War of Independence. Born in Colonial New Hampshire to Scotch Irish immigrants, John Stark survived Indian captivity, and later fought alongside the British in the French and Indian War as part of Rogers Rangers, a legendary militia company which pioneered the tactics of modern guerilla warfare. General Stark s Scotch Irish roots, first hand exposure to second class citizenship in the British army and his desire to prove his talent as a general drove him to achieve victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Later, his surprise attack against British hired mercenaries at the Battle of Bennington turned the tide of the war in favor of the young American army. Staunchly independent, John Stark disdained politics and was considered something of a renegade, even among his friends. Like General George Patton of later years, Stark was brash, outspoken and suspicious of politicians who meddled in military affairs. Stark would live to the age of 94, outlasting al but one general of the Revolutionary War

    . .You are a British soldier, sent to fight for England against the American rebels, OR . . .You are a Boston civilian trying to make sense of the chaos overtaking your city.

    But few people know that Bligh was the centre of a later, much larger mutiny, when he lost not just a ship but an entire colony. On January 26, 1808, the British army corps stationed in Australia rose up and deposed the British governor. Locking him up, a cabal of military officers and colonists ran Australia as their private kingdom for the next two years. The deposed, imprisoned governor was none other than William Bligh, by this time famous for the Bounty affair and for fighting heroically under Admiral Nelson. The British Government had thought Bligh's reputation as a tough, no-nonsense man and war hero equipped him for the job in Australia. But it was Bligh's reputation as the 'Bounty Bastard' that preceded him to the colony. John Macarthur and his friends among the officers of the New South Wales Corps joked about it, and prepared to send yet another inept governor (number 4) home in disgrace. CAPTAIN BLIGH'S OTHER MUTINY shares the story of two powerful and colourful men - Captain Bligh and John Macarthur - bent on mutual destruction, a goal both achieved. Stephen Dando-Collins shares the story of Bligh's house arrest for a year on the site that is now the Museum of Sydney, his blockade on a ship off the coast of Tasmania for another twelve months, his rescue by Colonel Macquarie and Bligh's pursuit of justice through the London courts.

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

    The author examines the social and cultural forces generated within the Sulu Sultanate by the China trade, namely the advent of organized, long distance maritime slave raiding and the assimilation of captives on a hitherto unprecedented scale into a traditional Malayo-Muslim social system. His work analyzes the dynamics of the last autonomous Malayo-Muslim maritime state over a long historical period and describes its stunning response to the world capitalist economy and the rapid "forward movement" of colonialism and modernity. It also shows how the changing world of global cultural flows and economic interactions caused by cross-cultural trade and European dominance affected men and women who were forest dwellers, highlanders, and slaves, people who worked in everyday jobs as fishers, raiders, divers and traders. Often neglected by historians, the responses of these members of society are a crucial part of the history of Southeast Asia.

    From the Middle Ages until the late 18th century, European courts expended vast sums on tapestries, which were made with precious materials after designs by the leading artists of the day. Yet, this spectacular medium is still often presented as a decorative art of lesser importance. Tapestry in the Baroque challenges this notion, demonstrating that tapestry remained among the most prestigious figurative mediums throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, prized by the rich for its artistry and as a propaganda tool.The book features forty-five of the finest surviving examples from collections in more than fifteen countries, as well as a number of related designs and oil sketches. Through these it examines the stylistic developments of tapestry between 1590 and 1720, when such masters as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, Simon Vouet, Charles Le Brun, Pietro da Cortona, and Giovanni Romanelli responded to the challenges and opportunities of the medium in the context of contemporary artistic developments.

    Take a journey through centuries of local crime and conspiracy, meeting villains of all sorts along the way—cut-throats and poisoners, murderous lovers, assassins, prostitutes and suicides. Among the many tales of wickedness and despair the author records in this fascinating book are: Robbery and revenge in Roman timesThe brutal uncertainties of Bath in the dark agesThe highwaymen, gamblers, and duelists of the Georgian periodThe Victorian underworld and its notorious cases of prostitution, infanticide, and murderOutbreaks of mob violencePolitical corruption Kirsten Elliott’s chronicle of the history the town would prefer to forget is compelling reading for anyone who is interested in the dark side of human nature.

    These were spectacular times that witnessed the most extraordinary urban expansion and building explosion in the history of the city. Showing how architecture and urban form became involved in the representation and construction of a changing social order, Shirine Hamadeh reassesses the dominance of the paradigm of Westernization in interpretations of this period and challenges the suggestion that change in the eighteenth century could only occur by turning toward a now superior West. Drawing on a genre of Ottoman poetry written in celebration of the built environment and on a vast array of related textual and visual sources, Hamadeh demonstrates that architectural change was the result of a dynamic synthesis between internal and external factors, and closely mirrored the process of decloisonnement of the city's social landscape.Examining novel forms, spaces, and decorative vocabularies; changing patterns of patronage; and new patterns of architectural perception; The City's Pleasures shows how these exposed and reinforced the internal dynamics that were played out between a society in flux and a state anxious to recreate an ideal system of social hierarchies. Profoundly hybrid in nature, the new architectural idiom reflected a growing permeability between elite and middle-class sensibilities, an unprecedented degree of receptivity to Western and Eastern foreign traditions, and a clear departure from the parameters of the classical canon. Innovation became the new operative doctrine. As the built environment was experienced, perceived, and appreciated by contemporary observers, it increasingly revealed itself as a perpetual source of sensory pleasures.

    Paul Kelton scrupulously traces the pathology of early European encounters with Native peoples of the Southeast and concludes that, while indigenous peoples suffered from an array of ailments before contact, Natives had their most significant experience with new germs long after initial contacts in the sixteenth century. In fact, Kelton places the first region-wide epidemic of smallpox in the 1690s and attributes its spread to the Indian slave trade. From 1696 to 1700, Native communities from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi Valley suffered catastrophic death tolls because of smallpox. The other diseases that then followed in smallpox’s wake devastated the indigenous societies. Kelton found, however, that such biological catastrophes did not occur simply because the region’s Natives lacked immunity. Over the last half of the seventeenth century, the colonies of Virginia and South Carolina had integrated the Southeast into a larger Atlantic world that carried an unprecedented volume of people, goods, and ultimately germs into indigenous villages. Kelton shows that English commerce in Native slaves in particular facilitated the spread of smallpox and made indigenous peoples especially susceptible to infection and mortality as intense violence forced malnourished refugees to huddle in germ-ridden, compact settlements. By 1715 the Native population had plummeted, causing a collapse in the very trade that had facilitated such massive depopulation.

    This interest sparked demand for both the latest hits of the London stage and a body of plays centered on patriotic (and often partisan) British themes. As relations between the crown and the colonies soured, the texts of these plays evolved into a common frame of reference for political arguments over colonial policy. Making the transition to print, these arguments deployed dramatic texts and theatrical metaphors for political advantage. Eventually, with the production of American propaganda plays during the Revolution, colonists began to develop a patriotic drama of their own, albeit one that still stressed the "British" character of American patriotism."Performing Patriotism" examines the role of theatrical performance and printed drama in the development of early American political culture. Building on the eighteenth-century commonplace that the theater could be a school for public virtue, Jason Shaffer illustrates the connections between the popularity of theatrical performances in eighteenth-century British North America and the British and American national identities that colonial and Revolutionary Americans espoused. The result is a wide-ranging survey of eighteenth-century American theater history and print culture.

    Szabo presents a scholarly but eminently readable and stimulating reassessment of the continental war - the first in nearly a century.Professor Szabo challenges the well-established myth that the Seven Years War was won through the military skill and tenacity of the King of Prussia, often styled Frederick 'the Great.' Instead he argues that Prussia did not win, but merely survived the Seven Years War and did so despite and not because of the actions and decisions of its king. The Seven Years War was not the 'cabinet war' that history has written it to be but a war that drove all participants to near collapse and, in doing so, changed the face of Europe.With balanced attention to all the major participants and to all conflict zones on the European continent, the book describes the strategies and tactics of the military leaders on all sides, analyzes the major battles of the war and illuminates the diplomatic, political and financial aspects of the conflict. By providing a clear analysis of English, French and Prussian, as well as Austrian, Russian, and Swedish policies and actions, the book offers a new perspective on the war as a whole.

    She explores how the opera participated in the patronage culture and urban sociability of the British elite prior to the Reform Act of 1832 when the opera served as the central meeting place for the ruling class during parliamentary session. The vertical tiers of boxes at the opera highlighted not only the gendered nature of elite political culture, but also those features of aristocratic society most vulnerable to critique by political and moral reformers. Hall-Witt shows how the elite adjusted its behavior in public venues, like the opera,

    When the British effort to subdue the Colonies moved to the southern provinces, the men of Appalachia sought to protect their homes and families. In the winter of 1780-81, the turning point of the southern war occurred in the Carolina back country. A trio of battles occurred at Kings Mountain, Cowpens, and Guilford Court House. These clashes proved pivotal to American independence, destroying British army capability in the south and facilitating the American victory at Yorktown.

    Not until 1748 did it emerge from its layer of volcanic rock, and the impact of that discovery was immediate and far-reaching. The evocative story of Pompeii's awakening lies not just in its uniquely preserved classical remains but also in the powerful impact it made on Western cultural imagination. Judith Harris brings the doomed city vibrantly to life. In her rich account of those who sifted through its artefacts, we read of Nelson, Napoleon and Mussolini. Of poets who sought melancholy fulfilment from Pompeii's shattered walls. Of tub-thumping Victorian preachers who likened it to Sodom and Gomorrah. And of the many others -- engineers and architects, artists and filmmakers -- for whom the city has never ceased to resonate. Harris has delved into ancient diaries and descended deep underground to assess the latest excavations.  As the sleeping city re-awakens at her hands, Pompeii casts its spell once more, bewitching those who seek to unearth its buried secrets. Her website is: www.judith-harris.com

    These tours were exercises in political theater that took the Manchu emperor through one of the Qing empire's most prosperous regions.This study elucidates the tensions and the constant negotiations characterizing the relationship between the imperial center and Jiangnan, which straddled the two key provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Politically, economically, and culturally, Jiangnan was the undisputed center of the Han Chinese world; it also remained a bastion of Ming loyalism and anti-Manchu sentiment. How did the Qing court constitute its authority and legitimate its domination over this pivotal region? What were the precise terms and historical dynamics of Qing rule over China proper during the long eighteenth century?In the course of addressing such questions, this study also explores the political culture within and through which High Qing rule was constituted and contested by a range of actors, all of whom operated within socially and historically structured contexts. The author argues that the southern tours occupied a central place in the historical formation of Qing rule during a period of momentous change affecting all strata of the eighteenth-century polity.

    Of the many sites of entertainment, the most celebrated (and often notorious) were the Carlisle House club, the Pantheon, and the Ladies Club or Coterie. In this major study of these institutions and the fashionable sociability they epitomised, Gillian Russell examines how they transformed metropolitan cultural life. Associated with lavish masquerades, excesses of fashion, such as elaborate hairstyles, and scandalous intrigues, these venues suggested a feminisation of public life which was profoundly threatening, not least to the theatre of the period. In this highly illustrated and original contribution to the cultural history of the eighteenth century, Russell reveals fresh perspectives on the theatre and on canonical plays such as The School for Scandal, as well as suggesting a prehistory for British Romanticism.

    Paul Getty Museum to be held from May 1 to September 2, 2007--is the first to focus on the series of life-size portraits painted by the eighteenth-century artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry of the animals in Louis XV's royal menagerie at Versailles. A tiger, a lion, a leopard, and, most impressive of all, the famous rhinoceros known as Clara joined a group of other exotic animals in Oudry's "painted menagerie," which was purchased in 1750 by his German patron, the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. The book's insightful essays situate this suite of paintings within the context of Oudry's career; discuss Oudry's remarkable drawings of animals; and present a fascinating history of menageries and of the phenomenon known as "Claramania"--when the real rhinoceros, Clara, traveled through Europe and caused a public sensation.

    Its broad acres has had more than its fair share of highprofile murders, especially though not exclusively in its burgeoning urban centres. Now there is a reference work to bring together most of the principal murders, from the mid-eighteenth century when Dick Turpin went to the York gallows, through to the end of hanging in 1964.In a time-span of two centuries, Yorkshire has witnessed a range of tragic narratives including husbands killing their wives, homicidal attacks in the night alleys and courts, gangs at work looking for vulnerable victims on dark streets and country lanes.Many of these tales are from the countryside too. Revenge and jealousy on and around farms, clashes between poachers and gamekeepers and shootings in rolling hills and valleys.Other factors in the social scene are also recounted, including legal and historical features, definitions, explanations, even short accounts of lives of murderers and of course the enigmatic hangmen.STEPHEN WADE specialises in writing criminal and military history. He hasauthored several volumes in Wharncliffes Foul Deeds Series as well as Unsolved Yorkshire Murders. He teaches courses in crime writing and crime history at the University of Hull and also works as a writer in prisons.

    The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity.This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

    One was nonconsummation owing to the sexual impotency of one of the partners. Even then, an annulment was granted only after a church court had conducted a lengthy investigation of the case, soliciting testimony from numerous witnesses as well as from the aggrieved couple, and had subjected the allegedly impotent spouse (and sometimes both spouses) to an intimate physical examination. Edward J. Behrend-Martinez has studied the transcripts of eighty-three impotency trials conducted by the ecclesiastical court of Calahorra (La Rioja), a Spanish diocese with urban and rural parishes, both Basque and Castilian. From these records, he draws a detailed, fascinating portrait of private life and public sexuality in early modern Europe. These trials were far more than a salacious inquiry into the intimate details of other people’s lives. The church valued marital sex as a cornerstone of stable society, intended not only for procreation but also for maintaining domestic harmony. Every couple’s sex life, however private in practice or intention, was a matter of public and ecclesiastical concern.Unfit for Marriage offers vivid accounts of marital sex and the role that property, gender, and personal preference played in marriage in early modern Europe. It is essential reading for anyone interested in social history, sexuality, gender studies, canon law, legal history, and the history of divorce in western Europe.

    In the process he goes beyond biography to provide a window on the King's world and a clear assessment of a difficult period of consolidation in British history.

    Gathering the work of more than 100 poets-including many poems never previously anthologized and some published here for the first time-it is the most comprehensive collection of its kind ever assembled, a celebration of the rich, varied, and often surprising beginnings of American poetry. The range of voices is unprecedented: broadside and newspaper satires, epitaphs, children's verse, popular songs, ballads, and Christian hymns evoke the vital currency of poetry in the daily lives of average people; exhortatory elegies for public figures and historical epics declaimed on occasions of state stand alongside intricate meditative lyrics and private epistolary verses. The dramatic unfolding of American history is made immediate and vivid in the words of the participants: William Bradford reflects on the growth of New England's first colonies; Roger Wolcott recounts the incidents of the Pequot War; Thomas Paine hails the victories of the American Revolution; Ann Eliza Bleecker describes her flight from General Burgoyne's invading army; loyalist Jonathan Odell bitterly mocks the new Continental Congress. The first comprehensive anthology of early American poetry in more than a generation, this volume incorporates recent scholarly discoveries that have altered our understanding of the early American literary landscape. Alongside generous selections from long-admired New England poets such as Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Michael Wigglesworth are poets from the Middle Colonies and the South, newly emerged from the archives. Along with familiar favorites by Phillis Wheatley, celebrated pioneer of the African-American tradition in poetry, are little-known verses by Benjamin Banneker, known as "the Sable Astronomer," and African-American Minuteman Lemuel Haynes. The anthology includes hymns recently attributed to Mohegan preacher Samson Occom and the earliest known translation of a traditional Native American chant, Henry Timberlake's Cherokee "War-Song." The unpublished poems of Henry Brooke, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, Joseph Green, Hannah Griffitts, Margaret Lowther Page, and Annis Boudinot Stockton, among others, reflect the rediscovered vitality and importance of manuscript exchange as a form of publication in an era when it was sometimes considered indecorous, especially for women, to appear in print. Unprecedented in its textual authority and unrivaled in its scope, the anthology includes newly researched biographical sketches of each poet and extensive notes.