Professor Spufford, who has made a lifelong study of these changes, here brings together a vast amount of material from archives all over the world - letters, account books, legal documents, civil records - to build up a comprehensive general picture. He has also personally travelled many of the roads, rivers and mountain passes that were the arteries of medieval trade, bringing the whole subject to vivid life. The eight chapters of the book cover the financial revolutions of the 13th century that led to the rise of modern banking, borrowing and insurance; the market in luxuries and the role of the great courts; international fairs; trade routes and the hazards of transport; raw materials; manufactured goods; the wealth of cities and nations; and the balance of trade between countries.

    In Ohio Is My Dwelling Place , American decorative arts expert Sue Studebaker documents the samplers created in Ohio prior to 1850, the girls who made them, their families, and the teachers who taught them to stitch. In this lavishly illustrated book, these now highly prized works are coupled with the stories behind their creations and the circumstances under which they were sewn. Ohio Is My Dwelling Place also includes an extensive chart of known pioneer teachers and schools in Ohio, as well as maps depicting the counties where the samplers were made. These samplers serve as a tangible and enduring legacy of Ohio's history, and readers will be intrigued and fascinated by the stories presented in this extraordinary keepsake volume.

    Yet signs are complex pieces of design, serving not only as physical markers but also as cultural, political, and economic ones. In American Signs, Lisa Mahar traces the evolution of motel signs on Route 66 in a distinctive visual approach that combines text, images, and graphics. American Signs reveals the rich vernacular traditions of motel sign-making in five eras, spanning from the late 1930s through the 1970s. The motel signs of the early 1940s, for instance, reflect vernacular traditions dating back at least a century, while examples from the later years of the decade reveal a culture newly obsessed with themes. America's fascination with newness and technological progress is manifested in 1950s motel signs. Finally, in the 1960s, a turn toward simplicity and the use of new, modular technologies allowed motel signs to address the needs of a mass society and the beginnings of a national, rather than regional, aesthetic for motel signs.

    With arresting clarity, Journeys of Simplicity offers vignettes of forty travelers and the few, ordinary things they carried with them-from place to place, from day to day, from birth to death.

    He assembles modern-day curiosity cabinets, or reliquaries, out of everyday items that have been touched by fame. From such bizarre celebrity-owned articles as Madonna's panties, Bill Clinton's throat lozenge, O. J. Simpson's glove, Larry Hagman's gallstone, and glass from the car crash in which Princess Diana died, Barton Benes creates an art that is as arresting as it is unique.Whether his creativity is fueled by discards with the pedigree of fame or infamy, such as a Frank Sinatra finger-nail clipping or the Son of Sam's hair, or by unusual and strange objects from human and natural history, such as mummy dust, Benes, mounts and labels the items and assembles them into mini-museums that are, as this book shows, alternately provocative, disturbing, and amusing, but always compelling. Benes supplies humorous captions that tell the quirky history of each piece, and John Berendt, best-selling author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, writes an insightful introduction on Benes's art and discusses his own fascination with it.

    An exploration of domestic lighting from the middle ages to the 1990s, ranging from the practical considerations to the influence of lighting upon the clothes people wore and the way that they furnished their houses.