In Bonifacio's Bolo, Ambeth Ocampo adds even more interesting bits to another scrapbook of history.

    In any room. On any occasion. That’s a promise. Attention fashionistas, glamourattis, and twirling enthusiasts everywhere: The Party Dress Book is the book you’ve been waiting for. Get an inside look at the inspiration, work, and techniques of creative dressmaking of celebrated New York designer Mary Adams. A unique combination of striking and wearable, Mary’s gorgeous dresses are a glam departure from the norm. In this book, you’ll learn the secrets to designing her trademark wearable decadence and how to sew your own delicious creations.  Start with Mary’s influences, process as a creative dressmaker, and essential techniques, and then move into step-by-step instruction on how to produce a scene-stealer of your own. With Mary’s straightforward, self-taught techniques, classic and customizable pattern, and inspired whimsy, making jaw-dropping dresses is simple and fun. The real work will be feigning modesty when you say, “Oh, this dress? I made it myself.”

    Born into the financial bourgeoisie that was a world apart from the royal court, the beautiful Jeanne Antoinette nonetheless fulfilled this prophecy by becoming Madame de Pompadour, the most famous and influential mistress of Louis XV. In this sumptuous biography, Evelyne Lever traces the enduring friendship between the monarch and his favorite, and the far-reaching implications-both personal and political-of their relationship. Pompadour was devoted to Louis XV, and her contribution to the culture of the age was significant: she was an outstanding singer and actress, entertaining the King and the court in impressive stage productions, and was a longtime patron of the visual arts. She commissioned paintings by Boucher, Nattier, Van Loo, La Tour, and Pigalle, and she formed friendships with many of the philosophers and writers of the period, including Fontenelle, Crebillon, and Voltaire. In effect, she was France's minister of culture at a time when no such position existed. But she was loathed for her role in France's disastrous military losses, and was the victim of persistent court gossip and intrigues. This vibrant biography sheds new light on the talented and resilient woman who influenced, for better and worse, the fate of a nation.

    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.

    What happened at Peshtigo makes Johnstown look like a birdbath." – Bill Lutz, co-author of Firestorm at Peshtigo "The air burned hotter than a crematorium and the fire traveled at 90 mph. I read an account of a Civil War veteran who had been through some of the worst battles of the war. He described the sound - the roar - during the fire as 100 times greater than any artillery bombardment.” – Bill Lutz In arguably the most famous fire in American history, a blaze in the southwestern section of Chicago began to burn out of control on the night of October 8, 1871. It had taken about 40 years for Chicago to grow from a small settlement of about 300 people into a thriving metropolis with a population of 300,000, but in just two days in 1871, much of that progress was burned to the ground. Due to the publicity generated by a fire that reduced most of a major American city to ash, the Peshtigo Fire of 1871 might fairly be called America’s forgotten disaster. Overshadowed by the much better covered and publicized Great Chicago Fire that occurred on the same evening, the fire that started in the Wisconsin logging town of Peshtigo generated a firestorm unlike anything in American history. In addition to destroying a wide swath of land, it killed at least 1,500 people and possibly as many as 2,500, several times more than the number of casualties in Chicago. While people marveled at the fact that the Great Chicago Fire managed to jump a river, the Peshtigo fire was so intense that it was able to jump several miles across Green Bay. While wondering aloud about the way in which the Peshtigo fire has been overlooked, Bill Lutz noted, "Fires are normally very fascinating to people, but people seem resistant to Peshtigo. Maybe Peshtigo is on such a large scale that people can't comprehend it." Ironically, while Peshtigo is widely forgotten, the fire there is often cited as proof that the Great Chicago Fire was caused by natural phenomena, such as a comet or meteor shower. Those advocating such a theory think it’s too coincidental that such disastrous fires were sparked in the same region on the same night, and they point to other fires across the Midwest. Of course, as with the Great Chicago Fire, contemporaries of the Peshtigo fire faulted human error and didn’t necessarily link the two fires, if only because fires were a common problem in both Peshtigo and Chicago during the 19th century. The Peshtigo Fire of 1871 chronicles the story America’s deadliest fire. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Peshtigo fire like never before, in no time at all.

    It rejoices in men and women made of the Wrong Stuff: writers who believed in the power of words, but could never quite find the rights ones; artists and performers who indulged their creative impulse with a passion, if not a sense of the ridiculous, an eye for perspective or the ability to hold down a tune; scientists and businessmen who never quite managed to quit while they were ahead; and sportsmen who seemed to manage always to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Like Walter Oudney, one of three men chosen to find the source of the River Niger in Africa, who could not ride a horse, nor speak any foreign languages and who had never travelled more than 30 miles beyond his native Edinburgh; or the explorer-priest Michel Alexandre de Baize, who set off to explore the African continent from east to west equipped with 24 umbrellas, some fireworks, two suits of armor, and a portable organ; or the Scottish army which decided to invade England in 1349 - during the Black Death. Entries include: briefest career in dentistry; least successful bonding exercise; most futile attempt to find a lost tribe; most pointless lines of research by someone who should have known better; least successful celebrity endorsement; least convincing excuse for a war; worst poetic tribute to a root vegetable; least successful display of impartiality by a juror; Devon Loch - sporting metaphor for blowing un unblowable lead; least dignified exit from office by a French president; and least successful expedition by camel.

    They are born, they thrive, and they eventually die. In Atlas of Lost Cities, Aude de Tocqueville tells the compelling narrative of the rise and fall of such notable places as Pompeii, Teotihuacán, and Angkor. She also details the less well known places, including Centralia, an abandoned Pennsylvania town consumed by unquenchable underground fire; Nova Citas de Kilamba in Angola, where housing, schools, and stores were built for 500,000 people who never came; and Epecuen, a tourist town in Argentina that was swallowed up by water. Beautiful, original artwork shows the location of the lost cities and depicts how they looked when they thrived.

    This revelatory volume tells for the first time Earp’s entire astonishing story.

    From the 100 Years War to the Gulf Wars, and from the wisdom of Aristotle to the Civil Rights movement, this book distils the major events in human history into easily digestible chunks. Each essay is accompanied by an image - or a clear diagram to illustrate complex ideas - and will plug the gaps in your knowledge of the most important eras, movements and events in the history of humankind. World History in Minutes is the perfect introduction to this expansive subject. Contents include: Neanderthals, Babylonians, Attilla the Hun, Abyssinian Empire, Magna Carta, Black Death, Inca, Henry VIII Reformation, Ulster Plantations, Rousseau and the Enlightenment, Declaration of Independence, French Revolution, Tonga Civil War, Universal Suffrage, Spanish Influenza, Great Depression, Pearl Harbour, The Space Age, Civil Rights, Environmentalism, Oligarchs and Tiger Economies.

    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."

    He has not only given us a fresh, clear-eyed, and often startling new look at the life of the last Romanovs, but also lived up to the promise of his title. He has shown us how the whole enterprise worked, from Tsar Nicholas to his lowest cook and chambermaid. This book is a great work of scholarship--and a wonderful read."--Peter Kurth, author of Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra and Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson"A mammoth, monumental achievement. No other book captures the essence and the entire scope of life at the court of Nicholas II. It's a thoroughly enjoyable and encyclopedic masterpiece that will be a major source for historians and biographers for years to come."--Marlene A. Eilers, author of Queen Victoria's Descendants and publisher of Royal Book News"Greg King has truly written a tour de force. The book is extremely well researched, has over 100 illustrations and is, quite simply, marvelous."--Coryne Hall, author of Little Mother of Russia, Once a Grand Duchess, and Imperial Dancer"Greg King is emerging as one of the leading authorities in today's liveliest field of Russian studies, and this is a major contribution to the study of late Imperial Russia."--Joseph T. Fuhrmann, author of Rasputin and the editor of The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra

    In this fascinating book, vintage accessories’ expert, Madeleine Marsh, discusses just what makes compacts so desirable and reveals their hidden secrets from cameras to cigarettes. Madeleine shows what to buy and where, what to spot when buying and how to make the most of your compacts, vintage cosmetics or beauty accessories.

    Their first biographer, Mrs Gaskell, transformed their story of literary ambition into one of the great legends of the 19th century, a dramatic tale of three lonely sisters playing out their tragic destiny on top of a windswept moor. Lucasta Miller reveals where this image came from and how it took such a hold on the popular imagination.Each generation has rewritten the Brontës to reflect changing attitudes - towards the role of the woman writer, towards sexuality, towards the very concept of personality. The Brontë Myth gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture. It is a witty, erudite and refreshingly unsentimental unravelling of what Henry James described as "the most complete intellectual muddle ever achieved on a literary question by our wonderful public."

    In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women.Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture.Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods—methods she herself helped to fashion.

    . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudson’s first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New York’s own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution, causing the ire of the invading British army . . . the Catskills as a popular attraction in the 1800s, with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House and its rugged imitators that offered WASP guests “one-hundred percent restricted” accommodations (“Hebrews will knock vainly for admission”), a policy that remained until the Catskills became the curative for tubercular patients, sending real-estate prices plummeting and the WASP enclave on to richer pastures . . . Here are the gangsters (Jack “Legs” Diamond and Dutch Schultz, among them) who sought refuge in the Catskill Mountains, and the resorts that after World War II catered to upwardly mobile Jewish families, giving rise to hundreds of hotels inspired by Grossinger’s, the original “Disneyland with knishes”—the Concord, Brown’s Hotel, Kutsher’s Hotel, and others—in what became known as the Borscht Belt and Sour Cream Alps, with their headliners from movies and radio (Phil Silvers, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, et al.), and others who learned their trade there, among them Moss Hart (who got his start organizing summer theatricals), Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Joan Rivers. Here is a nineteenth-century America turning away from England for its literary and artistic inspiration, finding it instead in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and his childhood recollections (set in the Catskills) . . . in James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure-romances, which provided a pastoral history, describing the shift from a colonial to a nationalist mentality . . . and in the canvases of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, and others that caught the grandeur of the wilderness and that gave texture, color, and form to Irving’s and Cooper’s imaginings. Here are the entrepreneurs and financiers who saw the Catskills as a way to strike it rich, plundering the resources that had been likened to “creation,” the Catskills’ tanneries that supplied the boots and saddles for Union troops in the Civil War . . . and the bluestone quarries whose excavated rock became the curbs and streets of the fast-growing Eastern Seaboard.  Here are the Catskills brought fully to life in all of their intensity, beauty, vastness, and lunacy.