Brits: The War Against The IRA


Peter Taylor - 2001
    Third part of trilogy documenting modern-day Northern Ireland, by the author of Provos and Loyalists

Trautmann's Journey: From Hitler Youth to FA Cup Legend


Catrine Clay - 2010
    He is famed as the Manchester City goalkeeper who broke his neck in the 1956 FA Cup final and played on. But his early life was no less extraordinary. He grew up in Nazi Germany, where first he was indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth, before fighting in World War Two in France and on the Eastern Front. In 1945 he was captured and sent to a British POW camp where, for the first time, he understood that there could be a better way of life. He embraced England as his new home and before long became an English football hero. 'Brilliant' Observer 'A remarkable story, well worth reading' The Times 'A gripping story of an unlikely redemption through football' Sunday Times 'This poignant book is a tribute to the depth of both Clay's research and her compassion' Independent

Waverley


Walter Scott - 1814
    It relates the story of a young dreamer and English soldier, Edward Waverley, who was sent to Scotland in 1745. He journeys North from his aristocratic family home, Waverley-Honour, in the south of England (alleged in an English Heritage notice to refer to Waverley Abbey in Surrey) first to the Scottish Lowlands and the home of family friend Baron Bradwardine, then into the Highlands and the heart of the 1745 Jacobite uprising and aftermath.

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory


David W. Blight - 2001
    In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial. Blight's sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today.

The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.


Marc Bloch - 1949
    What is the value of history? What is the use of history? How do scholars attempt to unpack it and make connections in a responsible manner? While the topics of historiography and historical methodology have become increasingly popular, Bloch remains an authority. He argues that history is a whole; no period and no topic can be understood except in relation to other periods and topics. And what is unique about Bloch is that he puts his theories into practice; for example, calling upon both his experience serving in WWI as well as his many years spent in peaceful study and reflection. He also argues that written records are not enough; a historian must draw upon maps, place-names, ancient tools, aerial surveys, folklore, and everything that is available. This is a work that argues constantly for a wider, more human history. For a history that describes how and why people live and work together. There is a living, breathing connection between the past and the present and it is the historian’s responsibility to do it justice.

Philadelphia: A 300-Year History


Russell F. Weigley - 1982
    In this, the definitive comprehensive history of Philadelphia, the reader will discover a rich and colorful portrait of one of America's most vital, interesting, and illustrious cities.

Breakfast on Pluto


Patrick McCabe - 1998
    With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr. Patrick "Pussy" Braden, the enduringly and endearingly hopeful hero(ine) whose gutsy survival and yearning quest for love resonate in and drive the glimmering, agonizing narrative in which the troubles are a distant and immediate echo and refrain. Twenty years ago, her ladyship escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother Whiskers (prodigious Guinness-guzzler, human chimney) and her mad household, to begin a new life in London. There, in blousey tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb amongst the flotsam and jetsam that fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus. But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Pussy. It is the 1970's and fear haunts the streets of London and Belfast as the critical mass of history builds up, and Pussy is inevitably drawn into a maelstrom of violence and tragedy destined to blow his fragile soul asunder. Brilliant, startling, profound and soaring, Breakfast on Pluto combines light and dark, laughter and pain, with such sensitivity, directness and restraint that the dramatic impact reverberates in our minds and hearts long after the initial impression.

The Last September


Elizabeth Bowen - 1929
    Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending. The Last September depicts the tensions between love and the longing for freedom, between tradition and the terrifying prospect of independence, both political and spiritual.

Blue Remembered Hills


Dennis Potter - 1971
    In a woods, a field and a barn, they play, fight, fantasize and swagger. Their aggressions, fears, hostilities and rivalries are a microcosm of adult interaction. Easy going Willie tags along as burly Peter bullies Raymond and is challenged by fair minded Paul. Plain Audrey is overshadowed by Angela's prettiness and wreaks her anger on the boys. All of them gang up on the terrified "Donald Duck" who, abused by his mother and ridiculed by his peers, plays a dangerous game of pyromania with tragic results.

The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West


Patricia Nelson Limerick - 1987
    But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded in primary economic reality; in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. In The Legacy of Conquest, she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: the trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business" in more ways than one, and their descendents mean business today."Written with extraordinary grace and understanding…[this book] returns the Western American past to the mainstream of national history. …Most important of all is her eloquent plea for Westerners, whether Anglo, Hispanic, Indian, Asian, or black, to see the West as a shared place, a splendid whole which each has helped create." -- Howard R. Lamar

European Architecture 1750-1890


Barry Bergdoll - 2000
    Never before had the functional requirements and expressive capacities of architecture been tested so thoroughly and with such diversity of invention. Bergdoll traces this experimentation in a broad range of contexts, focusing in particular on the relation of architectural design to new theories of history, new categories of scientific inquiry, and the broadening audience for architecture in this period of transformation. Unlike traditional surveys with long lists of buildings and architects, the themes are elucidated by in-depth coverage of key buildings which in turn are situated in both their local and European context.

Civilisation


Kenneth Clark - 1969
    Art

Salomé


Oscar Wilde - 1891
    Symbolist poets and writers — Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck among them — defended the play's literary brilliance. Beyond its notoriety, the drama's haunting poetic imagery, biblical cadences, and febrile atmosphere have earned it a reputation as a masterpiece of the Aesthetic movement of fin de siècle England.Written originally in French in 1892, this sinister tale of a woman scorned and her vengeance was translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas. The play inspired some of Aubrey Beardsley's finest illustrations, and an abridged version served as the text for Strauss' renowned opera of the same name. This volume reprints the complete text of the first English edition, published in 1894, and also includes "A Note on Salomé" by Robert Ross, Wilde's lifelong friend and literary executor. Students, lovers of literature and drama, and admirers of Oscar Wilde and his remarkable literary gifts will rejoice in this inexpensive edition.

How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate


Wendy Moore - 2013
    Pure and virginal like an English country maid yet tough and hardy like a Spartan heroine, she would live with him in an isolated cottage, completely subservient to his whims. But after being rejected by a number of spirited young women, Day concluded that the perfect partner he envisioned simply did not exist in frivolous, fashion-obsessed Georgian society. Rather than conceding defeat and giving up his search for the woman of his dreams, however, Day set out to create her.So begins the extraordinary true story at the heart of How to Create the Perfect Wife, prize-winning historian Wendy Moore’s captivating tale of one man’s mission to groom his ideal mate. A few days after he turned twenty-one and inherited a large fortune, Day adopted two young orphans from the Foundling Hospital and, guided by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the principles of the Enlightenment, attempted to teach them to be model wives. After six months he discarded one girl, calling her invincibly stupid,” and focused his efforts on his remaining charge. He subjected her to a number of cruel trials—including dropping hot wax on her arms and firing pistols at her skirts—to test her resolve but the young woman, perhaps unsurprisingly, eventually rebelled against her domestic slavery. Day had hoped eventually to marry her, but his peculiar experiment inevitably backfired—though not before he had taken his theories about marriage, education, and femininity to shocking extremes.Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism—and deep contradictions—at the heart of the Enlightenment.

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market


Walter Johnson - 1999
    Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders' letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market's slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by "feeding them up," dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage.Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the "peculiar institution" in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.