To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World


Arthur Herman - 1975
    From the navy's beginnings under Henry VIII to the age of computer warfare and special ops, historian Arthur Herman tells the spellbinding tale of great battles at sea, heroic sailors, violent conflict, and personal tragedy -- of the way one mighty institution forged a nation, an empire, and a new world.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Jackie: The Clothes of Camelot


Jay Mulvaney - 2001
    Jay Mulvaney, author of Kennedy Weddings, celebrates her unique style in this lavishly illustrated book.JACKIE: The Clothes of Camelot is a richly illustrated history of those magical years when the Kennedys captivated a nation and the world. Her glamour was electric, her style imaginative, and the effect was brilliant. Jacqueline Kennedy's fashions from the White House years, over two hundred outfits, are illustrated with three hundred photographs, in both black and white and color, many previously unpublished or rarely seen. Also included are photographs of jewelry and accessories as well as memorabilia, all exploring the continuing impact of Jackie's fashion sensibility on our culture.The range of illustrations and text is broad, including:Early Fashion InfluencesThe Inauguration EnsemblesGowns for State EventsThe Wardrobe for State Visits AbroadPrivate Living and Casual WearFrench Designers: Haute Couture in the White HouseNovember 1963Mrs. Onassis and the Post-Camelot YearsJACKIE: The Clothes of Camelot is a striking portrait of an unforgettable fashion legend.

The Narrowboat Girls


Rosie Archer - 2018
    From farms to factories, no job is too back-breaking, and for many women it offers their first real chance at independence.Two such women from very different backgrounds find themselves working on the narrowboats - piloting freights round southern England's network of canals. One is a solicitor's wife, still smarting from the humiliation of her husband leaving her for his secretary. The other is a young working-class woman glad to find an excuse to get away from her violent boyfriend.Life on the canals is hard, and breaking into such a close-knit community can be tough - especially when the remaining male works are sure women aren't up to the job. But though these women start out as strangers, they will forge a bond of friendship that will take them through the darkest hours.

Ross Poldark


Winston Graham - 1945
    But instead, he discovers that his father has died, his home is overrun by livestock and drunken servants, and Elizabeth, having believed Ross dead, is now engaged to his cousin. Ross must start over, building a completely new path for his life, one that takes him in exciting and unexpected directions....Thus begins an intricately plotted story spanning loves, lives, and generations. The Poldark series is the masterwork of Winston Graham, who evoked the period and people like only he could, and created a world of rich and poor, loss and love, that listeners will not soon forget.

Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives


Katie Hickman - 1999
    Unstuffy it is. Hickman, whose writing is graceful and sprightly, describes the unusual and often difficult lives of Foreign Service spouses. Tracking these feisty transplants from the 17th century to the present, she shows how these very significant others coped with everything from tropical epidemics to kidnappings to small household budgets. Warm-weather reading.

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America


Wendy Warren - 2016
    Morgan, whose American Slavery, American Freedom revolutionized colonial history, a new generation of historians is fundamentally rewriting America’s beginnings. Nowhere is this more evident than in Wendy Warren’s explosive New England Bound, which reclaims the lives of so many long-forgotten enslaved Africans and Native Americans in the seventeenth century. Based on new evidence, Warren links the growth of the northern colonies to the Atlantic slave trade, demonstrating how New England’s economy derived its vitality from the profusion of slave-trading ships coursing through its ports. Warren documents how Indians were systematically sold into slavery in the West Indies and reveals how colonial families like the Winthrops were motivated not only by religious freedom but also by their slave-trading investments. New England Bound punctures the myth of a shining “City on a Hill,” forcefully demonstrating that the history of American slavery can no longer confine itself to the nineteenth-century South.

The Secret Years


Judith Lennox - 1994
    Nicholas and Lally were the children of the great house, set in the bleak and magical Fen country; Thomasine was the unconventional niece of two genteel maiden aunts in the village; Daniel was the son of the local blacksmith, a fiercely independent, ambitious boy who longed to break away from the stifling confines of his East Anglian upbringing. As the drums of war sounded in the distance, the Firedrake, a mysterious and ancient Blythe family heirloom disappeared, setting off an uncontrollable chain of events.The Great War changed everything, and both Nicholas and Daniel returned from the front damaged by their experiences. Thomasine, freed from the narrow disciplines of her childhood, and enjoying the new hedonism which the twenties brought, thought that she could escape from the ties that bound her to both Nicholas and Daniel. But the passions and enmities of their youth had intensified in the passing years, and the four friends had to experience tragedy and betrayal before the Firedrake made its reappearance and, with it, a new hope for the future.

Six Years at the Russian Court


Margaret Eager - 2015
    Originally published in 1906, the book captures Eager’s years as governess to the four daughters of the Emperor and Empress Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna: the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. All of whom would be executed during the Russian civil war just over a decade later.This first-person account provides a fascinating insight into what was everyday life for the Romanov family. From religious celebrations and family illness to assassination attempts and life during the war; Eager’s central role gained her access to some of the family’s most precious and testing times. In addition to documenting the time spent with her royal employers, Eager also reveals intriguing aspects of Russian society as whole. Through a series of anecdotal references she includes recollections of her time in Russia regarding such things as the tough life of the peasantry, criminal activity and even the national post service.This classic, written from the unsuspecting eyes of a foreign nanny, shows early twentieth century Russia and the last Russian royal family like you’ve never seen before. Margaret Eager (1863-1936) left the Russia in 1904 and returned to Ireland where she received a pension from the Russian government for her time as a nurse. She kept in contact with the family she had known so well right up to their brutal deaths in 1918. Eager’s family stated that she never fully recovered from the news.Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

The English: A Social History, 1066-1945


Christopher Hibbert - 1987
    Based on diaries, letters, memoirs, official reports, the works of modern social historians and the literature of every period, The English traces the development of English society over nine hundred years.The chapters range far and wide over life in castles, palaces and monasteries, in the homes of rich merchants and in the hovels of peasants, describing the work and play of the inhabitants, their clothes and food and possessions, their servants and animals, their pleasures and suffering, their beliefs and attitudes, their schools, fairs, shops and markets, hospitals and prisons, theatres and churches, farms and factories, taverns and brothels. Every aspect of medieval and modern life is covered in detail. We learn about medieval meals and games, poachers and priests, tournaments and pageants; fifteenth-century universities; sixteenth-century plagues and seventeenth-century libraries, music rooms, nurseries, and witch-hunts; eighteenth-century parsons, coachmen and doctors; nineteenth-century noblemen, factory girls and cricketers; twentieth-century maidservants, landladies and motorists.

How to be a Brit: How to be an Alien, How to be Inimitable, How to be Decadent


George Mikes - 1986
    The first of these came out in 1946: the ever famous "How to be an Alien." Later he enlarges the picture with "How to be inimitable" and "How to be Decadent." All three books were illustrated by the master of the cartoonists' art, the late Nicolas Bentley. Here they are, all in one volume, which will make life much easier for today's would-be Brits than it was for those who pervaded them. It is said that a few of the latter actually failed to become indistinguishable from the genuine British article because they found it too tiresome to seek out three separate books: a misfortune that need never again occur to anyone.

Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770


Emily Cockayne - 2007
    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.

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History, Vol. I)


David Hackett Fischer - 1989
    It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins.From 1629 to 1775, North America was settled by four great waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts (1629-1640). The second was the movement of a Royalist elite and indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia (ca. 1649-75). The third was the "Friends' migration,"--the Quakers--from the North Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675-1725). The fourth was a great flight from the borderlands of North Britain and northern Ireland to the American backcountry (ca. 1717-75).These four groups differed in many ways--in religion, rank, generation and place of origin. They brought to America different folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the United States. They spoke distinctive English dialects and built their houses in diverse ways. They had different ideas of family, marriage and gender; different practices of child-naming and child-raising; different attitudes toward sex, age and death; different rituals of worship and magic; different forms of work and play; different customs of food and dress; different traditions of education and literacy; different modes of settlement and association. They also had profoundly different ideas of comity, order, power and freedom which derived from British folk-traditions. Albion's Seed describes those differences in detail, and discusses the continuing importance of their transference to America.Today most people in the United States (more than 80 percent) have no British ancestors at all. These many other groups, even while preserving their own ethnic cultures, have also assimilated regional folkways which were transplanted from Britain to America. In that sense, nearly all Americans today are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnic origins may be; but they are so in their different regional ways. The concluding section of Albion's Seed explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still control attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.Albion's Seed also argues that the four British folkways created an expansive cultural pluralism that has proved to the more libertarian than any single culture alone could be. Together they became the determinants of a voluntary society in the United States.

The Way of the World


William Congreve - 1700
    With Mirabell? You call my blood into my face with mentioning that traitor. She durst not have the confidence. I sent her to negotiate an affair, in which if I'm detected I'm undone. If that wheedling villain has wrought upon Foible to detect me, I'm ruined. O my dear friend, I'm a wretch of wretches if I'm detected.

American Colonies: The Settling of North America


Alan Taylor - 2001
    It ends in around 1800 when the rough outline of the contemporary North America could be perceived.Dropping the usual Anglocentric description of North America's fate, Taylor brilliantly conveys the far more vivid and startling story of the competing interests--Spanish, French, English, Native, Russian--that over the centuries shaped and reshaped both the continent and its 'suburbs' in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is one of the greatest of all human stories.

Daughters of the Witching Hill


Mary Sharratt - 2010
    Bess Southerns, an impoverished widow living in Pendle Forest, is haunted by visions and gains a reputation as a cunning woman. Drawing on the Catholic folk magic of her youth, Bess heals the sick and foretells the future. As she ages, she instructs her granddaughter, Alizon, in her craft, as well as her best friend, who ultimately turns to dark magic. When a peddler suffers a stroke after exchanging harsh words with Alizon, a local magistrate, eager to make his name as a witch finder, plays neighbors and family members against one another until suspicion and paranoia reach frenzied heights. Sharratt interweaves well-researched historical details of the 1612 Pendle witch-hunt with a beautifully imagined story of strong women, family, and betrayal. Daughters of the Witching Hill is a powerful novel of intrigue and revelation.