This first book-length study of the tie-on pocket combines materiality and gender to provide new insight into the social history of women’s everyday lives—from duchesses and country gentry to prostitutes and washerwomen—and explore their consumption practices, work, sociability, mobility, privacy, and identity. The authors draw on an unprecedented study of surviving pockets in museums and private collections to identify their materials, techniques, and decoration; their use is investigated through sources as diverse as criminal trials, letters, diaries, inventories, novels, and advertisements. Richly illustrated with paintings, satirical prints, and photographs of artifacts in detail, this innovative book reveals the unexpected story of these deeply evocative and personal objects.

    Laboriously written by hand and often sumptuously decorated, they have always been highly valued and remain as brilliant, fascinating and popular as ever.Christopher de Hamel vividly describes the circumstances in which such books were created - from the earliest monastic Gospel Books to the most lavish Books of Hours. For the second edition of this book, the text has been revised and updated and the whole volume completely redesigned with a striking wealth of new colour illustrations.

    A valuable and compelling portrait of the daily life of Americans during the Victorian era; the fourth volume in the Everyday Life in America series.

    The two shots that rang out at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods echo still.Frederic Morton, author of the bestselling Rothschilds, deftly tells the haunting story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of only ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong." In Rudolf's Vienna moved other young men with striking intellectual and artistic talents—and all as frustrated as the Prince. Among them were: young Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, whose La Ronde was the great erotic drama of the fin de siecle. Morton studies these and other gifted young men, interweaving their fates with that of the doomed Prince and the entire city through to the eve of Easter, just after Rudolf's body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf Hitler is born to Frau Klara Hitler.

    Award-winning author Mary Cable recreates - in all its human and natural drama - the three-day debacle that began on the night of Sunday, March 11, 1888. We meet the heroes and villains alike as they struggle through the mounting snow and icy winds to keep the wheels of civilization from grinding to a halt. The Blizzard of 88 is a moving and dramatic history in the tradition of David McCullough's classic The Johnstown Flood.

    Since the first thread was spun, the need for textiles has driven technology, business, politics, and culture.In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world. Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo's David and the Taj Mahal. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code.Assiduously researched and deftly narrated, The Fabric of Civilization tells the story of the world's most influential commodity.

    Start with simple, easy-to-make projects, such as embellishing clothing you may already have, and proceed to more complicated alterations. Included are projects for steampunk jewelry, accessories, and clothing.

    This unique selection of illustrations with commentaries and source texts guides us on a fascinating journey through the representations of the secret arts.

    Jacqueline Kennedy’s selection of Oleg Cassini to design her personal wardrobe as First Lady was not only fashion history, but political history as well. As the creator of the "Jackie look," Cassini made the First Lady one of the best-dressed women in the world and a glamorous icon of the Kennedy era. During the 1000 days of the Kennedy administration, Cassini designed over 300 outfits for Jackie Kennedy—coats, dresses, evening gowns, suits, and day wear—and coordinated every aspect of her wardrobe, from shoes and hats to gloves and handbags. In this book, Cassini offers a fascinating and comprehensive view of his role as Jackie’s personal couturier, a position that allowed him unprecedented access to both Jackie and John Kennedy as a designer and a trusted friend. From the details of his first meetings with the First Lady to his thoughts on Jackie’s clothes and their legacy, Cassini’s recollections are far-ranging and informative. Also included are Cassini's original sketches accompanied by 200 color and black-and-white photographs of the First Lady as she tours India, France, England, and Italy, shows off the White House, and hosts state dinners and family gatherings. Public moments as well as private ones capture the great elegance and charm of one of the most admired and emulated women in the world.

    The nineteenth century experienced an explosion of epidemics such as cholera and diphtheria, driven by industrialization, urbanization and poor hygiene. In this pre-color-photography era, accurate images were relied upon to teach students and aid diagnosis. The best examples, featured here, are remarkable pieces of art that attempted to elucidate the mysteries of the body, and the successive onset of each affliction. Bizarre and captivating images, including close-up details and revealing cross-sections, make all too clear the fascinations of both doctors and artists of the time. Barnett illuminates the fears and obsessions of a society gripped by disease, yet slowly coming to understand and combat it. The age also saw the acceptance of vaccination and the germ theory, and notable diagrams that transformed public health, such as John Snow's cholera map and Florence Nightingale's pioneering histograms, are included and explained. Organized by disease, "The Sick Rose" ranges from little-known ailments now all but forgotten to the epidemics that shaped the modern age. It is a fascinating "Wunderkammer" of a book that will enthrall artists, students, designers, scientists and the incurably curious everywhere.

    People are waking up to the seedy history of the world's art collections, and are starting to ask difficult questions about what the future of museums should look like. In The Whole Picture, art historian and Uncomfortable Art Tour guide Alice Procter provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art, and fills in the blanks with the stories that have been left out of the art history canon for centuries. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space:The Palace The Classroom The Memorial The Playground Each section tackles the fascinating and often shocking stories of five different art pieces, including the propaganda painting that the East India Company used to justify its control in India; the Maori mokomokai skulls that were traded and collected by Europeans as 'art objects'; and Kara Walker's controversial contemporary sculpture A Subtlety, which raised questions about 'appropriate' interactions with art. Through these stories, Alice brings out the underlying colonial narrative lurking beneath the art industry today, and suggests different ways of seeing and thinking about art in the modern world.The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

    She introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lodgings, genteel spinsters keeping up appearances in two rooms with yellow wallpaper, servants with only a locking box to call their own.Vickery makes ingenious use of upholsterer’s ledgers, burglary trials, and other unusual sources to reveal the roles of house and home in economic survival, social success, and political representation during the long eighteenth century.

    When Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé entered 3, rue Tronson du Coudray, he expected nothing but a delightful assignation with the comely young Gabrielle Bompard. Instead, he was murdered—hanged!—by her and her companion Michel Eyraud. The body was then stuffed in a trunk and dumped on a riverbank near Lyon.As the inquiry into the guilt or innocence of the woman the French tabloids dubbed the "Little Demon" escalated, the most respected minds in France debated whether Gabrielle Bompard was the pawn of her mesmerizing lover or simply a coldly calculating murderess. And, at the burning center of it all: Could hypnosis force people to commit crimes against their will?

    This is the first book-length study in English to investigate what women did in the Viking age, both at home in Scandinavia and in the Viking colonies from Greenland to Russia. [Text taken from the back cover of the book]

    It looks at the differing political sympathies of the couple, revealed through letters, and re-examines the prevailing view that the domineering Vicky never bothered to conceal her distaste for everything Prussian and flaunting her sense of British superiority. In many ways ahead of her time, she was something of a pioneer feminist, refusing to accept the oft-accepted maxim that women were second-class citizens. Insufficient consideration has been given to her health and the possibility that her judgement and reason may sometimes have been affected, albeit mildly, by the family's inheritance of porphyria that led to the 'madness' of her great-grandfather George III.