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One Tiny Bubble: The Story of Our Last Universal Common Ancestor
Par Karen Krossing. 2022
The graves are walking: The great famine and the saga of the irish people
Par John Kelly. 2012
It started in 1845 and lasted six years. Before it was over, more than one million men, women, and children…
starved to death and another million fled the country. Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was one of the worst disasters in the nineteenth century-it claimed twice as many lives as the American Civil War. A perfect storm of bacterial infection, political greed, and religious intolerance sparked this catastrophe. But even more extraordinary than its scope were its political underpinnings, and The Graves Are Walking provides fresh material and analysis on the role that nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism played in shaping British policies and on Britain's attempt to use the famine to reshape Irish society and character.Perhaps most important, this is ultimately a story of triumph over perceived destiny: for fifty million Americans of Irish heritage, the saga of a broken people fleeing crushing starvation and remaking themselves in a new land is an inspiring story of exoneration.Based on extensive research and written with novelistic flair, The Graves Are Walking draws a portrait that is both intimate and panoramic, that captures the drama of individual lives caught up in an unimaginable tragedy, while imparting a new understanding of the famine's causes and consequencesNormal women: Nine hundred years of making history
Par Philippa Gregory. 2024
"Lively, timely and gloriously energetic. Each page bursts with life, and every chapter swirls with personalities left out of traditional…
narratives of Britain's past. Philippa Gregory has produced something rare and wonderful: a genuinely new history of [Britain], with women at its beating heart." —Dan Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Plantagenets "Stunning. . . . Full of surprises. . . . A brilliant, essential read." —The Independent (UK) The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus—a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history and "should be included in every history lesson" (Glamour UK) Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they'd evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory's Normal Women. In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women—some fifty per cent of the population—center stage. Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records, newspapers, and journals to find highwaywomen and beggars, murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The "normal women" you will meet in these pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills and houses. They committed crimes or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted. A lot. A landmark work of scholarship and storytelling, Normal Women chronicles centuries of social and cultural change—from 1066 to modern times—powered by the determination, persistence, and effectiveness of womenEvery Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
Par Jason Roberts. 2024
From the bestselling author of A Sense of the World comes this dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific…
rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth.In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible—how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet and on humanity itself. The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called "apostles" (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens—but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn.With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, featuring appearances by Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us
Par Keith Lowe. 2017
Bestselling historian Keith Lowe's The Fear and the Freedom looks at the astonishing innovations that sprang from WWII and how…
they changed the world.The Fear and the Freedom is Keith Lowe’s follow-up to Savage Continent. While that book painted a picture of Europe in all its horror as WWII was ending, The Fear and the Freedom looks at all that has happened since, focusing on the changes that were brought about because of WWII—simultaneously one of the most catastrophic and most innovative events in history. It killed millions and eradicated empires, creating the idea of human rights, and giving birth to the UN. It was because of the war that penicillin was first mass-produced, computers were developed, and rockets first sent to the edge of space. The war created new philosophies, new ways of living, new architecture: this was the era of Le Corbusier, Simone de Beauvoir and Chairman Mao. But amidst the waves of revolution and idealism there were also fears of globalization, a dread of the atom bomb, and an unexpressed longing for a past forever gone. All of these things and more came about as direct consequences of the war and continue to affect the world that we live in today. The Fear and the Freedom is the first book to look at all of the changes brought about because of WWII. Based on research from five continents, Keith Lowe’s The Fear and the Freedom tells the very human story of how the war not only transformed our world but also changed the very way we think about ourselves.Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
Par Paul Mason. 2016
We know that our world is undergoing seismic change—but how can we emerge from the crisis a fairer, more equal…
society?Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone profound changes—economic cycles that veer from boom to bust—from which it has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism argues that we are on the brink of a change so big and so profound that this time capitalism itself, the immensely complex system within which entire societies function, will mutate into something wholly new. At the heart of this change is information technology, a revolution that is driven by capitalism but, with its tendency to push the value of much of what we make toward zero, has the potential to destroy an economy based on markets, wages, and private ownership. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Vast numbers of people are changing how they behave and live, in ways contrary to the current system of state-backed corporate capitalism. And as the terrain changes, new paths open. In this bold and prophetic book, Mason shows how, from the ashes of the crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable economy. Although the dangers ahead are profound, he argues that there is cause for hope. This is the first time in human history in which, equipped with an understanding of what is happening around us, we can predict and shape the future.How to Survive the Titanic: Or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay
Par Frances Wilson. 2011
A brilliantly original and gripping new look at the sinking of the Titanic through the prism of the life and…
lost honor of J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s ownerBooks have been written and films have been made, we have raised the Titanic and watched her go down again on numerous occasions, but out of the wreckage Frances Wilson spins a new epic: when the ship hit the iceberg on April 14, 1912, and one thousand men, lighting their last cigarettes, prepared to die, J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner and inheritor of the White Star fortune, jumped into a lifeboat filled with women and children and rowed away to safety.Accused of cowardice and of dictating the Titanic’s excessive speed, Ismay became, according to one headline, “The Most Talked-of Man in the World.” The first victim of a press hate campaign, he never recovered from the damage to his reputation, and while the other survivors pieced together their accounts of the night, Ismay never spoke of his beloved ship again.In the Titanic’s mail room was a manuscript by that great narrator of the sea, Joseph Conrad, the story of a man who impulsively betrays a code of honor and lives on under the strain of intolerable guilt. But it was Conrad’s great novel Lord Jim, in which a sailor abandons a sinking ship, leaving behind hundreds of passengers in his charge, that uncannily predicted Ismay’s fate. Conrad, the only major novelist to write about the Titanic, knew more than anyone what ships do to men, and it is with the help of his wisdom that Wilson unravels the reasons behind Ismay’s jump and the afterlives of his actions.Using never-before-seen letters written by Ismay to the beautiful Marion Thayer, a first-class passenger with whom he had fallen in love during the voyage, Frances Wilson explores Ismay’s desperate need to tell his story, to make sense of the horror of it all, and to find a way of living with the consciousness of lost honor. For those who survived the Titanic, the world was never the same. But as Wilson superbly demonstrates, we all have our own Titanics, and we all need to find ways of surviving them.The Unmaking of Israel
Par Gershom Gorenberg. 2011
Prominent Israeli journalist GershomGorenbergoffers a penetrating and provocativelook at how the balance of power in Israel has shifted toward extremism,threatening…
the prospects for peace and democracy as the Israeli-Palestinianconflict intensifies. Informing his examination using interviews in Israel andthe West Bank and with access to previously classified Israeli documents, Gorenberg delivers an incisive discussion of the causes andtrends of extremism in Israel’s government and society. Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The AmazingAdventures of Kavalier and Clay, writes, "until I read The Unmaking of Israel, I didn't think it could bepossible to feel more despairing, and then more terribly hopeful, about Israel,a place that I began at last, under the spell of GershomGorenberg's lucid and dispassionate yet intenselypersonal writing, to understand."One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies and Their Lovers Changed the Course of American History
Par Larry Flynt, David Eisenbach. 2011
“Americans often like to think that extramarital sex—or even a strong libido—is somehow a sign of poor character in our…
presidents. One Nation Under Sex explodes that myth...You don’t have to agree with all of Larry Flynt’s and David Eisenbach’s readings of history to enjoy this sex-filled tour through more than 200 years of scandal.”—David Greenberg, author of Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American PresidencyBen Franklin saved the American Revolution by seducing French Women. A gay love affair between President James Buchanan and Senator William King aided the secession movement. Woodrow Wilson’s girlfriend dictated his letters to the German Kaiser. And lesbian relationships inspired Eleanor Roosevelt to become a revolutionary crusader for equal rights. The colorful sex lives of America’s most powerful leaders have influenced social movements, government policies, elections and even wars, yet they are so whitewashed by historians that people think Thomas Jefferson and Abe Lincoln were made of marble, not flesh and blood.But the truth is about to come out. In One Nation Under Sex, free speech activist and notorious Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt teams up with Columbia University history professor David Eisenbach to peek behind the White House bedroom curtains and document how hidden passions have shaped public life. They unpack salacious rumors and outright scandals, showing how private affairs have driven pivotal decisions—often with horrific consequences. Along the way, they explore the origins of America’s fascination with sex scandals and explain how we can put aside out political moralism and begin focusing on the real problems that threaten our nation.Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization
Par Robert A. Williams Jr.. 2012
From one of the world's leading experts on Native American law and indigenous peoples' human rights comes an original and…
striking intellectual history of the tribe and Western civilization that sheds new light on how we understand ourselves and our contemporary society. Throughout the centuries, conquest, war, and unspeakable acts of violence and dispossession have all been justified by citing civilization's opposition to these differences represented by the tribe. Robert Williams, award winning author, legal scholar, and member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, proposes a wide-ranging reexamination of the history of the Western world, told from the perspective of civilization's war on tribalism as a way of life. Williams shows us how what we thought we knew about the rise of Western civilization over the tribe is in dire need of reappraisal.The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-Ups, and Courage
Par Graham A. Rayman. 2013
In May 2010, NYPD officer Adrian Schoolcraft made national headlines when he released a series of secretly recorded audio tapes…
exposing corruption and abuse at the highest levels of the police department. But, according to a lawsuit filed by Schoolcraft against the City of New York, instead of admitting mistakes and pledging reform Schoolcraft's superiors forced him into a mental hospital in an effort to discredit the evidence. In The NYPD Tapes, the reporter who first broke the Schoolcraft story brings his ongoing saga up to date, revealing the rampant abuses that continue in the NYPD today, including warrantless surveillance and systemic harassment. Through this lens, he tells the broader tale of how American law enforcement has for the past thirty years been distorted by a ruthless quest for numbers, in the form of CompStat, the vaunted data-driven accountability system first championed by New York police chief William Bratton and since implemented in police departments across the country. Forced to produce certain crime stats each quarter or face discipline, cops in New York and everywhere else fudged the numbers, robbing actual crime victims of justice and sweeping countless innocents into the police net. Rayman paints a terrifying picture of a system gone wild, and the pitiless fate of the whistleblower who tried to stop it.A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews
Par David M. Gitlitz, Linda Kay Davidson. 1999
When Iberian Jews were converted to Catholicism under duress during the Inquisition, many struggled to retain their Jewish identity in…
private while projecting Christian conformity in the public sphere. To root out these heretics, the courts of the Inquisition published checklists of koshering practices and "grilled" the servants, neighbors, and even the children of those suspected of practicing their religion at home. From these testimonies and other primary sources, Gitlitz & Davidson have drawn a fascinating, award-winning picture of this precarious sense of Jewish identity and have re-created these recipes, which combine Christian & Islamic traditions in cooking lamb, beef, fish, eggplant, chickpeas, and greens and use seasonings such as saffron, mace, ginger, and cinnamon. The recipes, and the accompanying stories of the people who created them, promise to delight the adventurous palate and give insights into the foundations of modern Sephardic cuisine.Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn: A Social History of the Tea Room Craze in America
Par Jan Whitaker. 2002
The Gypsy Tea Kettle. Polly's Cheerio Tea Room. The Mad Hatter. The Blue Lantern Inn. These are just a few…
of the many tea rooms - most owned and operated by women -- that popped up across America at the turn of the last century, and exploded into a full-blown craze by the 1920s. Colorful, cozy, festive, and inviting, these new-fangled eateries offered women a way to celebrate their independence and creativity. Sparked by the Suffragist movement, Prohibition, and the rise of the automobile, tea rooms forever changed the way America eats out, and laid the groundwork for the modern small restaurant and coffee bar.In this lively, well-researched book, Jan Whitaker brings us back to the exciting days when countless American women dreamed of opening their own tea room - and many did. From the Bohemian streets of New York's Greenwich Village to the high-society tea rooms of Chicago's poshest hotels, from the Colonial roadside tea houses of New England to the welcoming bungalows of California, the book traces the social, artistic, and culinary changes the tea room helped bring about.Anyone interested in women's history, the early days of the automobile, the Bohemian lives of artists in Greenwich Village, and the history of food and drink will revel in this spirited, stylish, and intimate slice of America's past.Computers The Machines We Think With
Par D. S. Halacy. 1961
Excerpt: "While you are reading this sentence, an electronic computer is performing 3 million mathematical operations! Before you read this…
page, another computer could translate it and several others into a foreign language. Electronic “brains” are taking over chores that include the calculation of everything from automobile parking fees to zero hour for space missile launchings. Despite bitter winter weather, a recent conference on computers drew some 4,000 delegates to Washington, D.C.; indicating the importance and scope of the new industry. The 1962 domestic market for computers and associated equipment is estimated at just under $3 billion, with more than 150,000 people employed in manufacture, operation, and maintenance of the machines. In the short time since the first electronic computer made its appearance, these thinking machines have made such fantastic strides in so many different directions that most of us are unaware how much our lives are already being affected by them. Banking, for example, employs complex machines that process checks and handle accounts so much faster than human bookkeepers 2that they do more than an hour’s work in less than thirty seconds."Thomas Paine and the Promise of America: A History & Biography
Par Harvey J. Kaye. 2005
Thomas Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a…
radical age. Through writings like Common Sense—and words such as "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth," "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," and "These are the times that try men's souls"—he not only turned America's colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war but, as Harvey J. Kaye demonstrates, articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.Peter Zheutlin's thoroughly researched account will make you wish you'd been around to catch a glimpse of the extraordinary woman…
as she went wheeling by. --Bill Littlefield, National Public Radio's Only A GameUntil 1894 there were no female sport stars, no product endorsement deals, and no young mothers with the chutzpah to circle the globe on a bicycle. Annie Londonderry changed all of that. When Annie left Boston in June of that year, she was a brash young lady with a 42-pound bicycle, a revolver, a change of underwear, and a dream of freedom. She was also a feisty mother of three who had become the center of what one newspaper called "one of the most novel wagers ever made": a high-stakes bet between two wealthy merchants that a woman could not ride around the world on a bicycle. The epic journey that followed took the connection between athletics and commercialism to dizzying new heights, and turned Annie Londonderry into a symbol of women's equality. A vastly entertaining blend of social history, high adventure, and maverick marketing, Around the World on Two Wheels is an unforgettable portrait of courage, imagination, and tenacity. "Annie was a remarkable woman and well worth getting to know." --Booklist"A wonderful telling of one of the most intriguing, offbeat, and until now, lost chapters in the history of cycling." --David Herlihy, author of Bicycle: The History "A pleasant, affectionate portrait of a free spirit who pedaled her way out of Victorian constraints." --Kirkus Reviews"[A] charming and informative book." --Cape Cod Times"[An] incredible story. . .[a] fascinating book." --NextReads "[A] stirring tale. . .not only a must read, but a must have." --Western Writers of America Roundup Magazine"[A] remarkable saga." --The Winston-Salem (NC) Journal"[R]ead[s]. . .like a novel." --The Columbia (SC) State"[M]eticulously researched. . .illuminat[es] the feeling of a bygone era." --The Portsmouth (NH) Wire Peter Zheutlin has been chasing the story of his great-grandaunt Annie Londonderry for more than four years. He is an avid cyclist and a freelance journalist whose work appears regularly in the Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor. He has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, AARP Magazine, Bicycling, the New England Quarterly, and other publications. He lives in Needham, Massachusetts.Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire
Par Laura Fernández-González. 2021
Philip II of Spain was a major patron of the arts, best known for his magnificent palace and royal mausoleum…
at the Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial. However, neither the king’s monastery nor his collections fully convey the rich artistic landscape of early modern Iberia. In this book, Laura Fernández-González examines Philip’s architectural and artistic projects, placing them within the wider context of Europe and the transoceanic Iberian dominions.Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire investigates ideas of empire and globalization in the art and architecture of the Iberian world during the sixteenth century, a time when the Spanish Empire was one of the largest in the world. Fernández-González illuminates Philip’s use of building regulations to construct an imperial city in Madrid and highlights the importance of his transformation of the Simancas fortress into an archive. She analyzes the refashioning of his imperial image upon his ascension to the Portuguese throne and uses the Hall of Battles in El Escorial as a lens through which to understand visual culture, history writing, and Philip’s kingly image as it was reflected in the funeral commemorations mourning his death across the Iberian world. Positioning Philip’s art and architectural programs within the wider cultural context of politics, legislation, religion, and theoretical trends, Fernández-González shows how design and images traveled across the Iberian world and provides a nuanced assessment of Philip’s role in influencing them. Original and important, this panoramic work will have a lasting impact on Philip II’s artistic legacy. Art historians and scholars of Iberia and sixteenth-century history will especially value Fernández-González’s research.The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy
Par Megan Brandow-Faller. 2020
Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna’s “female Secession”…
created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art” and “craft,” “decorative” and “profound,” and “masculine” and “feminine” in art.Tracing the history of the women’s art movement in Secessionist Vienna—from its origins in 1897, at the Women’s Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst—Brandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women’s art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft, and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria’s women’s art movement apart and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group’s ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel. Engagingly written and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as “works from women’s hands.” It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art
Par Mey-Yen Moriuchi. 2018
The years following Mexican independence in 1821 were critical to the development of social, racial, and national identities. The visual…
arts played a decisive role in this process of self-definition. Mexican Costumbrismo reorients current understanding of this key period in the history of Mexican art by focusing on a distinctive genre of painting that emerged between 1821 and 1890: costumbrismo.In contrast to the neoclassical work favored by the Mexican academy, costumbrista artists portrayed the quotidian lives of the lower to middle classes, their clothes, food, dwellings, and occupations. Based on observations of similitude and difference, costumbrista imagery constructed stereotypes of behavioral and biological traits associated with distinct racial and social classes. In doing so, Mey-Yen Moriuchi argues, these works engaged with notions of universality and difference, contributed to the documentation and reification of social and racial types, and transformed the way Mexicans saw themselves, as well as how other nations saw them, during a time of rapid change for all aspects of national identity.Carefully researched and featuring more than thirty full-color exemplary reproductions of period work, Moriuchi’s study is a provocative art-historical examination of costumbrismo’s lasting impact on Mexican identity and history.E-book editions have been made possible through support of the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Baroque Seville: Sacred Art in a Century of Crisis
Par Amanda Wunder. 2017
Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume…
explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens.Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos—divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization.Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville’s hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.