Best of
18th-Century

2012

Georgian London: Into the Streets


Lucy Inglis - 2012
    Travel back to the Georgian years, a time that changed life expectancy and the expectation of what life could be. Peek into the gilded drawing rooms of the aristocracy, walk down the quiet avenues of the new middle class, and crouch in the damp doorways of the poor. But watch your wallet - tourists make perfect prey for the thriving community of hawkers, prostitutes and scavengers.Visit, if you dare, the madhouses of Hackney, the workshops of Soho and the mean streets of Cheapside. Have a coffee in the city, check the stock exchange, and pop into St Paul's to see progress on the new dome.This book is about the Georgians who called London their home, from dukes and artists to rent boys and hot air balloonists meeting dog-nappers and life-models along the way. It investigates the legacies they left us in architecture and art, science and society, and shows the making of the capital millions know and love today.

The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America


Scott Weidensaul - 2012
    But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier—the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground—when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories—like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America’s tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.

A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century


Jerry White - 2012
    The century that followed was an era of vigorous expansion and large-scale projects, of rapidly changing culture and commerce, as huge numbers of people arrived in the shining city, drawn by its immense wealth and power and its many diversions. Borrowing a phrase from Daniel Defoe, Jerry White calls London this great and monstrous thing, the grandeur of its new buildings and the glitter of its high life shadowed by poverty and squalor."A Great and Monstrous Thing" offers a street-level view of the city: its public gardens and prisons, its banks and brothels, its workshops and warehouses and its bustling, jostling crowds. White introduces us to shopkeepers and prostitutes, men and women of fashion and genius, street-robbers and thief-takers, as they play out the astonishing drama of life in eighteenth-century London. What emerges is a picture of a society fractured by geography, politics, religion, history and especially by class, for the divide between rich and poor in London was never greater or more destructive in the modern era than in these years.Despite this gulf, Jerry White shows us Londoners going about their business as bankers or beggars, reveling in an enlarging world of public pleasures, indulging in crimes both great and small amidst the tightening sinews of power and regulation, and the hesitant beginnings of London democracy."

The Demon's Sermon on the Martial Arts: And Other Tales


William Scott Wilson - 2012
    The tales are concerned with themes such as perception of conflict, self-transformation, the cultivation of chi (life energy), and understanding yin and yang. Some of the parables seem light and fanciful, but they offer the reader valuable lessons on the fundamental principles of the martial arts; “The Mysterious Technique of the Cat” is iconic. The “demon” in the title story refers to the mythical tengu, who guard the secrets of swordsmanship. A swordsman travels to Mt. Kurama, famous for being inhabited by tengu, and in a series of conversations he learns about mushin (no-mind), strategy, the transformation of chi, and how the path of the sword leads to the understanding of life itself. The author, Issai Chozanshi, had a deep understanding of Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto, as well as insight into the central role of chi in the universe—points that are succinctly explained in William Scott Wilson’s fine introduction and extensive endnotes. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to truly understand the philosophical underpinnings of martial arts, and how these principles relate to our existence.

The Mathnawi of Jalalu'ddin Rumi: Volume 6 (English Translation)


Rumi - 2012
    Nicholson's critical edition is based on the oldest known manuscripts, including the earliest, dated 1278 and preserved in the Mevlana Museum at Konya. It remains the standard text and is provided with diacritical marks to assist the student. The prose translation, similarly, is intended to be an exact and faithful guide to the Persian. The three volumes of English translation can either be bought as a set, or individually; together they comprise a complete translation. Volume 6 comprises a translation of Books V and VI.

Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way: 18th-Century Methods for Today's Organic Gardeners


Wesley Greene - 2012
    Findinginspiration and value in 18th-century plants, tools, and techniques, the gardeners at Colonial Williamsburg have discovered that these traditional vegetable-growing methods are perfectly at home in today's modern organic gardens. After all, in the 18th century, organic gardening was the only type of gardening and local produce the only produce available.Author Wesley Greene founded the Colonial Garden in Colonial Williamsburg's Historic Area in 1996. He and his colleagues have painstakingly researched the ways the colonists planted and tended their vegetable and herb beds, most of which are more relevant than ever. Along with historical commentary and complete growing instructions for 50 delicious vegetables, including colonial varieties still available today, gardeners and folklorists will find weather-watching guidelines, planting techniques, and seedsaving advice for legumes, brassicas, alliums, root crops, nightshades, melons, squash, greens, and other curious and tender produce.

From Marie Antoinette's Garden: An Eighteenth-Century Horticultural Album


Elisabeth de Feydeau - 2012
    Plants, flowers, and trees were Marie-Antoinette’s passion; she transformed the Petit Trianon’s gardens into an enchanted escape from the oppressive shackles of Versailles. Based on archival documents, this book meanders through Marie-Antoinette’s estate as the queen herself would have walked it: traversing hyacinths, buttercups, and anemones in the French Gardens, via winding paths in the Anglo-Chinese Gardens, through the conifers of the Belvedere Gardens—where fabulous nocturnal parties were hosted—past the entrancing aromas of the shrubs surrounding the Temple of Love, to the wildflowers of the Garden of Solitude. This fascinating reconstruction includes descriptions of the cosmetic and medicinal uses of the garden’s plants, anecdotes from the royal court, and watercolors of the herbarium.

Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America


Jennifer L. Anderson - 2012
    This exotic wood, imported from the West Indies and Central America, quickly displaced local furniture woods as the height of fashion. Over the next century, consumer demand for mahogany set in motion elaborate schemes to secure the trees and transform their rough-hewn logs into exquisite objects. But beneath the polished gleam of this furniture lies a darker, hidden story of human and environmental exploitation."Mahogany" traces the path of this wood through many hands, from source to sale: from the enslaved African woodcutters, including skilled "huntsmen" who located the elusive trees amidst dense rainforest, to the ship captains, merchants, and timber dealers who scrambled after the best logs, to the skilled cabinetmakers who crafted the wood, and with it the tastes and aspirations of their diverse clientele. As the trees became scarce, however, the search for new sources led to expanded slave labor, vicious competition, and intense international conflicts over this diminishing natural resource. When nineteenth-century American furniture makers turned to other materials, surviving mahogany objects were revalued as antiques evocative of the nation's past.Jennifer Anderson offers a dynamic portrait of the many players, locales, and motivations that drove the voracious quest for mahogany to adorn American parlors and dining rooms. This complex story reveals the cultural, economic, and environmental costs of America's growing self-confidence and prosperity, and how desire shaped not just people's lives but the natural world.

Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment


Daniela Bleichmar - 2012
    While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now.In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.

Mozart's Grace


Scott Burnham - 2012
    But few of us ask why. Why does the beautiful in Mozart stand apart, as though untouched by human hands? At the same time, why does it inspire intimacy rather than distant admiration, love rather than awe? And how does Mozart's music create and sustain its buoyant and ever-renewable effects? In Mozart's Grace, Scott Burnham probes a treasury of passages from many different genres of Mozart's music, listening always for the qualities of Mozartean beauty: beauty held in suspension; beauty placed in motion; beauty as the uncanny threshold of another dimension, whether inwardly profound or outwardly transcendent; and beauty as a time-stopping, weightless suffusion that comes on like an act of grace.Throughout the book, Burnham engages musical issues such as sonority, texture, line, harmony, dissonance, and timing, and aspects of large-scale form such as thematic returns, retransitions, and endings. Vividly describing a range of musical effects, Burnham connects the ways and means of Mozart's music to other domains of human significance, including expression, intimation, interiority, innocence, melancholy, irony, and renewal. We follow Mozart from grace to grace, and discover what his music can teach us about beauty and its relation to the human spirit. The result is a newly inflected view of our perennial attraction to Mozart's music, presented in a way that will speak to musicians and music lovers alike.

British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution


Donald N. Hagist - 2012
    Far less literature, however, has been devoted to their adversaries. The professional soldiers that composed the British army are seldom considered on a personal level, instead being either overlooked or inaccurately characterized as conscripts and criminals. Most of the British Redcoats sent to America in defense of their government’s policies were career soldiers who enlisted voluntarily in their late teens or early twenties. They came from all walks of British life, including those with nowhere else to turn, those aspiring to improve their social standing, and all others in between. Statistics show that most were simply hardworking men with various amounts of education who had chosen the military in preference to other occupations. Very few of these soldiers left writings from which we can learn their private motives and experiences. British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution is the first collection of personal narratives by British common soldiers ever assembled and published. Author Don N. Hagist has located first-hand accounts of nine soldiers who served in America in the 1770s and 1780s. In their own words we learn of the diverse population—among them a former weaver, a boy who quarelled with his family, and a man with wanderlust—who joined the army and served tirelessly and dutifully, sometimes faithfully and sometimes irresolutely, in the uniform of their nation. To accompany each narrative, the author provides a contextualizing essay based on archival research giving background on the soldier and his military service. Taken as a whole these true stories reveal much about the individuals who composed what was, at the time, the most formidable fighting force in the world.

Mr Foote's Other Leg


Ian Kelly - 2012
    By 1777 it was almost unmentionable. Samuel Foote, friend of David Garrick and Dr Johnson, is the greatest lost figure of the eighteenth century; his story defies belief and has only been forgotten for reasons both laughable and shocking. Foote’s rise to fame was based on three unrelated accidents: the loss of his leg after a disastrous practical joke, his extraordinary gifts as an impressionist, and a murder within his family which he turned into a true-crime bestseller. Out of this was born the most singular career in stage history. He flouted convention in transvestite roles, evaded the censors by selling his scurrilous satires as ‘tea parties’, wrote a series of plays for one-legged actors – accordingly not much revived – and established London’s Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Then came two scandalous trials that rocked Georgian high society. From Sheridan to Dickens to Dudley Moore, Foote’s influence continues, but Mr Foote’s Other Leg is not just a tragicomic biography of this Oscar Wilde of the eighteenth century, it is also the story of the first media storm, the first true-crime bestseller, the first victim of celebrity culture and a joyous hop around the mad theatre of London life – high and low.

One Colonial Woman's World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit


Michelle Marchetti Coughlin - 2012
    A native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who later moved to Connecticut, she began her diary at the age of fifteen and kept it intermittently until she was well into her seventies. A previously overlooked resource, the diary contains entries on a broad range of topics as well as poems, recipes, folk and herbal medical remedies, religious meditations, and financial accounts. An extensive collection of letters by Coit and her female relatives has also survived, shedding further light on her experiences.Michelle Marchetti Coughlin combs through these writings to create a vivid portrait of a colonial American woman and the world she inhabited. Coughlin documents the activities of daily life as well as dramas occasioned by war, epidemics, and political upheaval. Though Coit's opportunities were circumscribed by gender norms of the day, she led a rich and varied life, not only running a household and raising a family, but reading, writing, traveling, transacting business, and maintaining a widespread network of social and commercial connections. She also took a lively interest in the world around her and played an active role in her community.Coit's long life covered an eventful period in American history, and this book explores the numerous -- and sometimes surprising -- ways in which her personal history was linked to broader social and political developments. It also provides insight into the lives of countless other colonial American women whose history remains largely untold.

A History of St Lucia


Jolien Harmsen - 2012
    

Blood Brothers in Louisbourg


Philip Roy - 2012
    In the spring of 1744, at the age of fifteen, Jacques and his father leave France for Louisbourg, the French capital of Île Royale, where Jacques is to learn the military arts – a far cry from his books and music and the comforts of his mother’s home.In the Acadian forests that surround the French fortress of Louisbourg, a young Mi’kmaw man named Two-feathers watches the strange comings and goings of soldiers and citizens. Two-feathers is hoping to find his father who, he has been told, is an important man among the French – they have never met. From his discreet camp outside the walls of the fortress, Two-feathers watches, believing that he will know his father when he sees him. At night, he moves silently about the city, including the Governor’s apartments, where he befriends a beautiful young French woman.Jacques’ life in Louisbourg is a curious mixture of military duties and his visits to the Governor’s apartments where he teaches the daughter of a visiting merchant to play the violoncello.The two young men follow very different paths – one formally educated and refined, the other curious and skilful – both seeking to understand their father. Their paths and their worlds collide during the violent siege by British forces in 1745.

My Mozart


Juliet Waldron - 2012
    ..At dawn, in the marble palace of a Prince, a nine-year-old sings for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then at the peak of his career. Always delighted by musical children, he accepts Nanina as a pupil. Gifted, intense and imaginative, she sees the great "Kapellmeister Mozart” as an avatar of Orpheus and her own, personal divinity.His lessons are irregular and playful, but the teacher/pupil bond grows strong. Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro premieres, and Nanina, now twelve, is given a solo part. For her, this is the beginning of a long stage career. For Mozart, it marks the start of his ruin. His greatest works will be composed in poverty and obscurity.During the composer’s last summer, his wife has left him. Chronically in debt and suffering the emotional isolation of genius, he takes refuge with his disreputable Volksoper friends, who want him to write a “peasant opera” for their audience. Nanina, now grown, and still in love with Mozart, is among their number. As he seeks solace among the women of the Volksoper, the charms of his young fan become increasingly alluring. No one, least of all the composer, understands the depth of her obsession or how a brief affair will permanently alter her life.

To the Fair Land


Lucienne Boyce - 2012
    The woman is ill and in her delirium cries out the name "Miranda”. Weeks later an anonymous novel about the voyage of the Miranda to the fabled Great Southern Continent causes a sensation. Ben decides to find the author everyone is talking about. He is sure the woman can help him – but she has disappeared.It is soon clear that Ben is involved in something more dangerous than the search for a reclusive writer. Who is the woman and what is she running from? Who is following Ben? And what is the Admiralty trying to hide? Before he can discover the shocking truth Ben has to get out of prison, catch a thief, and bring a murderer to justice.

Buckinghamshire Murders


Jonathan Oates - 2012
    Covering the length and breadth of Buckinghamshire, the featured cases include the brutal slaying of a family of seven in Denham in 1870, the killing of a butcher's wife in Victorian Sloughfor which no one was ever found guilty, an apparent suicide in Chesham which turned out to be murder, and the doctor who disappeared in 1933 and whose decomposed corpse was found in Buckinghamshire woods the following year. This well-illustrated and enthralling text will appeal to everyone interested in true-crime history and the shadier side of Buckinghamshire's past.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume C: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century


M.H. AbramsKatharine Eisaman Maus - 2012
    Firmly grounded in the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies--thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible--the Ninth Edition breaks exciting new ground: much-requested new major works, contextual clusters, images, expanded instructor media, and a rich, free supplemental ebook with over 1,000 additional texts make the most-trusted undergraduate survey of English literature an even better teaching tool for instructors and an unmatched value for students.

Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century


Fiona Ritchie - 2012
    Published editions, dramatic performances and all kinds of adaptations of his works proliferated and his influence on authors and genres was extensive. By the second half of the century Shakespeare's status had been fully established, and since that time he has remained central to English culture. Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century explores the impact he had on various aspects of culture and society: not only in literature and the theatre, but also in visual arts, music and even national identity. The eighteenth century's Shakespeare, however, was not our Shakespeare. In recovering the particular ways in which his works were read and used during this crucial period in his reception, this book, with its many illustrations and annotated bibliography, is the clearest way into understanding this key phase in the reception of the playwright.

Clarissa: or The History of a Young Lady, Volume 1


Samuel Richardson - 2012
    When beautiful Clarissa Harlowe is forced to marry the rich but repulsive Mr. Solmes, she refuses, much to her family's chagrin. She escapes their persecution with the help of Mr. Lovelace, a dashing and seductive rake, but soon finds herself in a far worse dilemma. Terrifying and enlightening, Clarissa weaves a tapestry of narrative experimentation into a gripping morality tale of good versus evil. The recording is divided into three volumes.

Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760


E.C. Spary - 2012
    Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners—from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights—E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the draughts-playing café owner Charles Manoury, the “Turkish envoy” Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d’Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, Eating the Enlightenment will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.

London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750


Robert O. Bucholz - 2012
    This book is a history of London during this crucial period of its rise to world-wide prominence, during which it dominated the economic, political, social and cultural life of the British Isles as never before nor since. London: A Social and Cultural History incorporates the best recent work in urban history, accounts by contemporary Londoners and tourists, and fictional works featuring the city in order to to trace London's rise and explore its role as a harbinger of modernity as well as how its citizens coped with those achievements. This book covers the full range of life in London, from the splendid galleries of Whitehall to the damp and sooty alleyways of the East End. Along the way, readers will brave the dangers of plague and fire, witness the spectacles of the Lord Mayor's Pageant and the hangings at Tyburn, and take refreshment in the city's pleasure gardens, coffeehouses, and taverns.

The Red Chamber


Pauline A. Chen - 2012
    When orphaned Daiyu leaves her home in the provinces to take shelter with her cousins in the Capital, she is drawn into a world of opulent splendor, presided over by the ruthless, scheming Xifeng and the prim, repressed Baochai. As she learns the secrets behind their glittering façades, she finds herself entangled in a web of intrigue and hidden passions, reaching from the petty gossip of the servants’ quarters all the way to the Imperial Palace. When a political coup overthrows the emperor and plunges the once-mighty family into grinding poverty, each woman must choose between love and duty, friendship and survival. In this dazzling debut, Pauline A. Chen draws the reader deep into the secret, exquisite world of the women’s quarters of an aristocratic household, where the burnish of wealth and refinement mask a harsher truth: marriageable girls are traded like chattel for the family’s advancement, and to choose to love is to risk everything.

The Looshaus


Christopher Long - 2012
    It represented a stark rejection of the contemporary preference for ornamentation, though its architect, Adolf Loos (1870–1933), had intended it to preserve Viennese tradition within a new modernist language. The heated debate that ensued among critics and the public set the project apart, distinguishing it as one of the most important and contentious buildings of the early 20th century.In celebration of the Looshaus's centennial year, Christopher Long, a leading authority on Viennese architectural history, brings to light extensive new research and careful analysis that dispel long-held myths about Loos, his building, and its critical reception. The book, which features new color photography and a vast array of archival materials in print for the first time, tells the remarkable story of the Looshaus's design and construction, the political and social restlessness it reflected, and the building's fundamental role in defining the look of modernism.

The Highland Furies: The Black Watch 1739-1899


Victoria Schofield - 2012
    On the strength of her acclaimed biography of Field Marshal Earl Wavell, the regimental trustees commissioned Victoria Schofield to write this, the first volume of her magisterial history of the The Black Watch, and have fully cooperated with her as she traces the story of the Regiment from its early 18th-century beginnings through to the eve of the South African War at the end of the 19th-century. Originating as companies of highland men raised to keep a 'watch' over the Highlands of Scotland, they were formed into a regiment in 1739. Its soldiers would go on to fight with extraordinary bravery and élan in almost every major engagement fought by the British Army during this period, from the American War of Independence, the Peninsular Wars, Waterloo, the Crimea, Indian Mutiny to Egypt and the Sudan. Drawing on diaries, letters and memoirs, Victoria Schofield skilfully weaves the multiple strands of this story into an epic narrative of a valiant body of officers and men over one-and-a-half centuries. In her sure hands, the story of The Black Watch is no arid recitation of campaigns, dates and battle honours, but is instead a rich and compelling record of the soldier's experience under fire and on campaign. It is also a celebration of the deeds of a regiment that has played a unique role in British history and a vivid insight into the lives of the many remarkable figures who have marched and fought so proudly under its Colours.

Whispers Through Time


Barry Homan - 2012
    Initially refusing to believe in the validity of the regressions, Jill is drawn back to them over and over again by the man she believes may be her soul mate. From her time as an Irish wife in the 1600's, to the streets of 18th Century London, and finally experiencing an exciting affair in 19th Century Boston, Jill finds her one true love over and over again; so where is he now?Opening her mind to places she had always refused to go, Jill visits a spiritualist church, meets psychic mediums, and attends channeling sessions where the spirit of Saint Martin de Porres verifies her regressions. Finally believing her past lives were real, Jill discovers that life doesn't end when the divorce is final, and love may find you when you least expect it.

Classic Poems for Boys


Felicia HemansEdward Lear - 2012
    From rousing favourites like Felicia Dorothea Hemans's 'Casabianca' and John Keats's 'A Song About Myself', to dreamy, thoughtful poems by Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, this is a collection to be treasured.

Dunmore's War: The Last Conflict of America's Colonial Era


Glenn F. Williams - 2012
    Led by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, a force of colonials including George Rogers Clark, Daniel Morgan, Michael Cresap, Adam Stephen, and Andrew Lewis successfully drove the Indians from the territory south of the Ohio River in parts of present-day West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. Although it proved to be the last Indian conflict of America’s colonial era, it is often neglected in histories, despite its major influence on the conduct of the Revolutionary War that followed. In Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era, award-winning historian Glenn F. Williams explains the course and importance of this fascinating event. Supported by primary source research, the author describes each military operation and illustrates the transition of the Virginia militia from a loyal instrument of the king to a weapon of revolution. In the process, he corrects much of the folklore concerning the war and frontier fighting in general, demonstrating that the Americans did not adopt Indian tactics for wilderness fighting as is popularly thought, but rather adapted European techniques to the woods.As an immediate result of Dunmore’s War, the frontier remained quiet for two years, giving the colonies the critical time to debate and declare independence before Britain convinced its Indian allies to resume attacks on American backcountry settlements. Ironically, at the same time Virginia militiamen fought the biggest battle of Dunmore’s War under command of a king’s officer, delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia decided on a united resistance to Parliament’s heavy-handed Coercive, or “Intolerable” Acts that threatened representative government in all the colonies. Before another nine months passed, Virginia became one of the leading colonies in the move toward American independence. Although he was hailed as a hero at the end of the Indian campaign, Lord Dunmore’s attempt to maintain royal authority put him in direct opposition to many of the subordinates who followed him on the frontier. Before being driven from Virginia in 1776, he notably organized the “Royal Ethiopian Regiment” composed of slaves who were promised freedom if they deserted their rebel masters and entered military service to the crown.

Fables of the Flag


Ethan Coffee - 2012
    Finding a world without cars, phones and other conveniences of modern life takes some getting used to, but he's even more surprised to meet a young Founding Father, Ben Franklin.Being a righteous fellow, Ben befriends the confused and tattered Jack and offers him a place to stay. When Jack overhears a seedy plan that will most certainly ruin Ben's brother's printing business, Jack vows to help find the culprit before it's too late.From the streets of Colonial Boston, to the cargo hold of a huge galleon, Jack realizes he's on the most bizarre, but important, adventure of his life. As Jack is thrown into a whirlwind of conspiracy, he realizes that much more than a printing company is at stake. An adventure is one thing, but being stuck hundreds of years in the past is quite another.

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana


Sophie White - 2012
    Intended to turn Indians into Catholic subjects of the king, it also carried with it the belief that Indians could become French through religion, language, and culture. This fluid and mutable conception of identity carried a risk: while Indians had the potential to become French, the French could themselves be transformed into Indians. French officials had effectively admitted defeat of their policy by the time Louisiana became a province of New France in 1682. But it was here, in Upper Louisiana, that proponents of French-Indian intermarriage finally claimed some success with Frenchification. For supporters, proof of the policy's success lay in the appearance and material possessions of Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen.Through a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to the material sources, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians offers a distinctive and original reading of the contours and chronology of racialization in early America. While focused on Louisiana, the methodological model offered in this innovative book shows that dress can take center stage in the investigation of colonial societies--for the process of colonization was built on encounters mediated by appearance.

Émile Ou de L'Éducation, Volume 4


Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 2012
    This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Emile Ou De L'�ducation, Volume 4; Emile Ou De L'�ducation; Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau J. N�aulme, 1765

Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786-1945


Katie Halsey - 2012
    Employing an innovative approach made possible by new research in the field of the history of reading, the volume discusses Austen's own ideas about books and readers, the uses she makes of her reading, and the relationship of her style to her readers' responses. It considers the role of editions and criticism in directing readers' responses, and presents and analyses a variety of source material related to readers who read Austen's works between 1786 and 1945.Previous studies of Austen's influence on her readers and literary successors have either presupposed a hypothetical reader, or focused on the texts of the critical tradition, ignoring the views, reactions and thoughts of the common reader. This volume discusses the responses of ordinary readers to Austen's novels, responses that offer insights into both Jane Austen's particular appeal, and the nature of the act of reading itself.

A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820


John K. Thornton - 2012
    John K. Thornton provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the Atlantic Basin before 1830 by describing political, social, and cultural interactions between the continents' inhabitants. He traces the backgrounds of the populations on these three continental landmasses brought into contact by European navigation. Thornton then examines the political and social implications of the encounters, tracing the origins of a variety of Atlantic societies and showing how new ways of eating, drinking, speaking, and worshipping developed in the newly created Atlantic World. This book uses close readings of original sources to produce new interpretations of its subject.

Unveiling the Harem: Elite Women and the Paradox of Seclusion in Eighteenth-Century Cairo


Mary Ann Fay - 2012
    Stereotypical views of Middle Eastern women today maintain that they are without legal rights, do not attend universities or have jobs outside their homes, and are not full citizens of their countries because they cannot vote or hold public office. Similar misinformation circulated in the eighteenth century when European male travelers to Egypt, documenting their observations, depicted harem women as sexual objects, deprived of autonomy, and held captive by their husbands. Fay’s Unveiling the Harem offers a persuasive corrective to this distorted view of Middle Eastern women.Instead of the odalisque of nineteenth-century painting and the fevered imaginings of European travelers, historical research reveals that elite women in powerful, wealthy households exercised their rights under Islamic law, property rights in particular, to become owners of lucrative real estate in Cairo as well as influential members of their families and the wider society. One such woman, Sitt Nafisa, who was literate in several languages, commissioned a public water fountain and a Qur’ anic school that still stands today. She played a pivotal role as the intermediary between French officials and her husband, who was leading the revolt against the French from Upper Egypt. Based on documents from various archives in Cairo, including records of women’ s property ownership, repeated visits to eighteenth-century palaces and their family quarters, and textual reconstructions of the elite residential neighborhoods of the city, Unveiling the Harem presents a lucid and historically grounded portrait of Egyptian women, stripped of the powerless victim narrative that is still with us today.

Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth


Serhii Plokhy - 2012
    The Russian victory at Poltava contributed to the decline of Sweden as a Great Power and was a major setback to Ukrainian independence. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish king Charles XII against Tsar Peter I, remains a controversial figure even today.In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from many fields of study--history, military affairs, philology, linguistics, literature, art history, music--to mark the 300th anniversary of the battle. This book is a collection of their papers on such topics as the international, Russian, and Ukrainian contexts of the battle; Mazepa in European culture; the language and literature of the period; art and architecture; history and memory; and fact, fiction, and the literary imagination. Mazepa himself is the focus of many of the articles--a hero to Ukrainians but a treacherous figure to Russians. This book provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle's major players.Part of a series: Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies

The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt - Spanish Passions: Volume Six of Six of the Complete and Unabridged English Translation - Illustrated with Old Engravings


Giacomo Casanova - 2012
    These memoires were not written for children. ..".these Memoirs are perhaps the most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality, one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they are more entertaining than Gil Blas, or Monte Cristo, or any of the imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been written in imitation of them." Arthur Symons Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (April 1725 - 4 June 1798) was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. His autobiography is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century. He was so famous as a womanizer that his name remains synonymous with the art of seduction. He associated with European royalty, popes and cardinals, along with luminaries such as Voltaire, Goethe and Mozart. He spent his last years in Bohemia as a librarian in Count Waldstein's household, where he also wrote the story of his life.

Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1500-1800


Brian L. Davies - 2012
    Contributors include specialists in Russian, Polish, Ottoman, Habsburg, Cossack, and Crimean Tatar history. The essays engage military history understood in the broadest sense and treat such subjects as taxation, recruitment, the sociology and culture of officer corps, logistics, command-and-control, and ideology as well as technology and tactics. The volume aims at facilitating comparative study of Eastern European military development across Eastern Europe and its points of divergence from military practice in the West. Contributors are Virginia H. Aksan, Brian J. Boeck, Peter B. Brown, Brian Davies, Dariusz Kupisz, Erik Lund, Janet Martin, Oleg Nozdrin, Victor Ostapchuk, Geza Palffy and Carol Belkin Stevens.

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World


Agnes Lugo-Ortiz - 2012
    While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, "slave" and "portraiture" as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. The essays in this volume address this apparent paradox of "slave portraits" from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. They probe the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and explore their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.

A Grim Almanac of Herefordshire (Grim Almanacs)


Nicola Sly - 2012
    Full of dreadful deeds, strange disappearances and a multitude of mysteries, this almanac explores the darker side of Herefordshire's past.

A Companion to the French Revolution


Peter McPhee - 2012
    Examines the origins, development and impact of the French Revolution Features original contributions from leading historians, including six essays translated from French.

Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740-1840


Amy R.W. Meyers - 2012
    However, as the groundbreaking essays in Knowing Nature demonstrate, the examination of nature stimulated not only forms of artistic production traditionally associated with scientific practice of the day, but processes of making not ordinarily linked to science. The often surprisingly intimate connections between and among these creative activities and the objects they engendered are explored through the essays in this book, challenging the hierarchy that is generally assumed to have been at play in the study of nature, from the natural sciences through the fine and decorative arts, and, ultimately, popular and material culture. Indeed, the many ways in which the means of knowing nature were reversed—in which artistic and artisanal culture informed scientific interpretations of the natural world—forms a central theme of this pioneering publication.

The Battle of Bennington: Soldiers and Civilians


Michael P. Gabriel - 2012
    This laid the foundation for the American victory at Saratoga two months later. Historian Michael P. Gabriel has collected over fifty firsthand accounts from the people who experienced this engagement, including veterans from both sides and civilians—women and children who witnessed the horrors of the battle. Gabriel also details a virtually unknown skirmish between Americans and Loyalists. These accounts, along with Gabriel’s overviews of the battle, bring to life the terror, fear and uncertainty that caused thousands to flee the British army as loved ones departed to fight for the fledgling United States.

British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution


Don N. Hagist - 2012
    Far less literature, however, has been devoted to their adversaries. The professional soldiers that composed the British army are seldom considered on a personal level, instead being either overlooked or inaccurately characterized as conscripts and criminals. Most of the British Redcoats sent to America in defense of their government’s policies were career soldiers who enlisted voluntarily in their late teens or early twenties. They came from all walks of British life, including those with nowhere else to turn, those aspiring to improve their social standing, and all others in between. Statistics show that most were simply hardworking men with various amounts of education who had chosen the military in preference to other occupations. Very few of these soldiers left writings from which we can learn their private motives and experiences.British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution is the first collection of personal narratives by British common soldiers ever assembled and published. Author Don N. Hagist has located first-hand accounts of nine soldiers who served in America in the 1770s and 1780s. In their own words we learn of the diverse population—among them a former weaver, a boy who quarelled with his family, and a man with wanderlust—who joined the army and served tirelessly and dutifully, sometimes faithfully and sometimes irresolutely, in the uniform of their nation. To accompany each narrative, the author provides a contextualizing essay based on archival research giving background on the soldier and his military service. Taken as a whole these true stories reveal much about the individuals who composed what was, at the time, the most formidable fighting force in the world.

Man's Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities, 1660-1900


Henry French - 2012
    Man's Estate is the first book to focus on a particular social group, the English landed gentry, and to cover a time span of several hundred years. The authors move beyond the study of printed conduct literature, which dominated earlier accounts, by examining the values expressed in family correspondence in order to get closer to social practices. Letters between parents, children, siblings, and other relatives reveal the ways in which masculine norms were produced through everyday interactions and judgements, and help to reconstruct the subjective experiences of elite masculinity in this period. Man's Estate concentrates on four important periods in the life-course for the reproduction of these masculine values: schooling, university, foreign travel, and marriage and family life. These illustrate that there is only limited evidence of sharp-edged differences in values between generations in these families, and that these changes appear not to correspond to the deep 'hegemonic shifts' so often emphasized in existing accounts. French and Rothery suggest that the fundamental distributions of power and authority within Gentry families remained fairly constant. Conventional ideas of male honour, virtue, reputation, and autonomy were remarkably tenacious, and the continued stress on family heritage, dynastic traditions, and the future security of the family patrimony acted as a brake on changes in the training of young English gentlemen. The research is based on over 4,000 letters drawn from 19 landed families across England between c. 1680 and c. 1900, and is the result of a three-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America


Elaine G. Breslaw - 2012
    The food was plentiful, the air and water were clean, and people tended to enjoy strong constitutions as a result of this environment. Practitioners of traditional forms of health care enjoyed high social status, and the cures they offered—from purging to mere palliatives—carried a powerful authority. Consequently, most American doctors felt little need to keep up with Europe's medical advances relying heavily on their traditional depletion methods. However, in the years following the American Revolution as poverty increased and America's water and air became more polluted, people grew sicker. Traditional medicine became increasingly ineffective. Instead, Americans sought out both older and newer forms of alternative medicine and people who embraced these methods: midwives, folk healers, Native American shamans, African obeahs and the new botanical and water cure advocates. In this overview of health and healing in early America, Elaine G. Breslaw describes the evolution of public health crises and solutions. Breslaw examines "ethnic borrowings" (of both disease and treatment) of early American medicine and the tension between trained doctors and the lay public. While orthodox medicine never fully lost its authority, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic argues that their ascendance over other healers didn't begin until the early twentieth century, as germ theory finally migrated from Europe to the United States and American medical education achieved professional standing.

Highland Hearts


Eva Maria Hamilton - 2012
    Now he's returned to Scotland, ready to redeem the secret promise from Sheena Montgomery's father—that five years as a servant would earn him Sheena's hand in marriage. But when he arrives home, he learns that Sheena's father has died, his contract has been lost…and Sheena is engaged to another man.Sheena has spent the past five years trying to forget Logan, the man who abandoned her with no explanation. She won't listen to his protests that he loves her—has always loved her. It'll take more than empty promises to win her back…and to prove that his highland heart is hers forever.

Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century


Tiffany Potter - 2012
    This collection illustrates how ideas of the popular and the feminine were assumed to be equally naturally intertwined in the eighteenth century, and the ways in which that association facilitates the ongoing trivialization of both.Top scholars in eighteenth-century studies examine the significance of the parallel devaluations of women's culture and popular culture by looking at theatres and actresses; novels, magazines, and cookbooks; and populist politics, dress, and portraiture. They also assess how eighteenth-century women have been re-imagined in contemporary historical fiction, films, and television, from the works of award-winner Beryl Bainbridge to Darcymania and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. By reconsidering the cultural and social practices of eighteenth-century women, this fascinating volume reclaims the ostensibly trivial as a substantive cultural contribution.

Imperial Identity in Mughal Empire: Memory and Dynastic Politics in Early Modern Central Asia


Lisa Balabanlilar - 2012
    The Timurids traveled south, establishing themselves as the new rulers of a region roughly comprising modern Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India, and founding what would become the Mughal Empire (1526-1857). The last survivors of the House of Timur, the Mughals drew invaluable political capital from their lineage, which was recognized for its charismatic genealogy and court culture, the features of which are examined here. By identifying Mughal loyalty to Turco-Mongol institutions and traditions, Lisa Balabanlilar here positions the Mughal dynasty at the center of the early modern Islamic world as the direct successors of a powerful political and religious tradition.

George Washington's Eye: Landscape, Architecture, and Design at Mount Vernon


Joseph Manca - 2012
    More than one million people visit Mount Vernon each year—drawn to the stature and beauty of Washington’s family estate.Art historian Joseph Manca systematically examines Mount Vernon—its stylistic, moral, and historical dimensions—offering a complete picture of this national treasure and the man behind its enduring design. Manca brings to light a Washington deeply influenced by his wide travels in colonial America, with a broader architectural knowledge than previously suspected, and with a philosophy that informed his aesthetic sensibility. Washington believed that design choices and personal character mesh to form an ethic of virtue and fulfillment and that art is inextricably linked with moral and social concerns. Manca examines how these ideas shaped the material culture of Mount Vernon.Based on careful study of Washington’s personal diaries and correspondence and on the lively accounts of visitors to his estate, this richly illustrated book introduces a George Washington unfamiliar to many readers—an avid art collector, amateur architect, and leading landscape designer of his time.

Mr. Collier's Letter Racks: A Tale of Art & Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age


Dror Wahrman - 2012
    One unusually perceptive man, an obscure Dutch/Britishstill life painter named Edward Collier, understood the full significance of these momentous changes and embedded in his work secret warnings about the inescapable slippages between author and print, meaning and text, viewer and canvas, perception and reality.Working around 1700, Collier has been neglected, even forgotten, precisely because his secret messages have never been noticed, let alone understood. Until now. In Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, Dror Wahrman recovers the tale of an extraordinary illusionist artist who engaged in a wholly original waywith a major transformation of his generation. Wahrman shows how Collier developed a hidden language within his illusionist paintings--replete with minutely coded messages, witty games, intricate allusions, and private jokes--to draw attention to the potential and the pitfalls of this newinformation age. A remarkably shrewd and prescient commentator on the changes unfolding around him, not least the advent of a new kind of politics following the Glorious Revolution, Collier performed a post-modernist critique of modernity long before the modern age. His trompe l'oeil paintings arefilled with seemingly disconnected, enigmatic objects--letters, seals, texts of speeches, magnifying glasses, title pages--and with teasingly significant details that require the viewer to lean in and peer closely. Wahrman does just that, taking on the role of detective/cultural historian to unravelthe layers of deceptions contained within Collier's extraordinary paintings.Written with passionate enthusiasm and including more than 70 color illustrations, Mr. Collier's Letter Racks is a spell-binding feat of cultural history, illuminating not only the work of an eccentric genius but the media revolution of his period, the birth of modern politics, and the nature of artitself.

Love Among the Rabble


Lauren Laviolette - 2012
    South Carolina is ready to fight and Charles Town belle Liliana Dunmore is prepared to do her part. Her heart is dedicated solely to the patriot cause until she meets one man...Lieutenant Bennett Davenport is a faithful servant to His Majesty's Royal Navy. Poised for greatness and a life of titles and honor, the last thing on his mind is love. But when a tantalizing young colonial crosses his path, Bennett must decide where his true loyalties lie.

Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain


Catherine Molineux - 2012
    For two hundred years, as Britain shipped over three million Africans to the New World, popular images of blacks as slaves and servants proliferated in London art, both highbrow and low. Catherine Molineux assembles a surprising array of sources in her exploration of this emerging black presence, from shop signs, tea trays, trading cards, board games, playing cards, and song ballads to more familiar objects such as William Hogarth's graphic satires. By idealizing black servitude and obscuring the brutalities of slavery, these images of black people became symbols of empire to a general populace that had little contact with the realities of slave life in the distant Americas and Caribbean.The earliest images advertised the opulence of the British Empire by depicting black slaves and servants as minor, exotic characters who gazed adoringly at their masters. Later images showed Britons and Africans in friendly gatherings, smoking tobacco together, for example. By 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade and thousands of people of African descent were living in London as free men and women, depictions of black laborers in local coffee houses, taverns, or kitchens took center stage.Molineux's well-crafted account provides rich evidence for the role that human traffic played in the popular consciousness and culture of Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and deepens our understanding of how Britons imagined their burgeoning empire.