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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 womenVoices from the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook
Par Lisa Kaborycha. 2024
The Italian Renaissance was a period of intense cultural transformations when the ancient world was being rediscovered and a New…
World had been literally discovered. Between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries, traditional beliefs were being challenged as people across the Italian Peninsula explored new ways of thinking about religion, politics, and society and introduced startling innovations in the arts.This book contains more than hundred selections of primary sources—the historian’s raw material in the form of memoirs, letters, treatises, sermons, stories, poems, drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Here are eyewitness accounts of cold-blooded murders, lavish court pageants, the Sack of Rome, and the Black Death; first views of Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes and glimpses of the surface of the moon through Galileo’s telescope. These sources bring the reader into direct contact with the creators of the great Renaissance works of art, literature, philosophy, and science, as well as lesser-known people, who in their own words express emotions of love, loss, and spiritual yearning.Selected to accompany and supplement A Short History of Renaissance Italy, the primary sources in this book make it an ideal course reader for students of history or art history. Yet this volume can be equally read well on its own; each selection is clearly introduced, annotated, and provided with references for further reading. These sources reach out to an audience beyond the classroom—the general reader, or the traveler to Italy—anyone curious to learn more about the Italian Renaissance will find themselves swept into conversation with these vibrant voices from the past.Nineteenth-Century British Perspectives on Spanish America: Volume I: Romanticism and Revolutions
Par Marisa Palacios Knox. 2024
The sources in this volume focus on Great Britain’s moral, financial, and diplomatic interventions and ambitions in Latin America. It…
begins during the wars of independence spanning 1810-1825, when Foreign Secretary George Canning prematurely declared, "Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English." The independence movements of the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, as well as their ancient past, inspired Romantic writers such as Anna Letitia Barbauld and spurred British military support and political debate, as attested by mercenary Richard Vowell’s Campaigns and Cruises in Venezuela and James Mill's "Emancipation of Spanish America."Churchill's Great Escapes: Seven Incredible Escapes Made by WWII Heroes
Par Damien Lewis. 2021
From Damien Lewis, bestselling author and award-winning historian and war reporter, comes the thrillingly told stories of seven dramatic and…
epic WWII escapes executed by members of one of the world&’s legendary military fighting forces: the British Special Air Service. No food. No water. Out of ammo. Hunted and on the run. The dreaded certainty of discovery looming between recapture and safe haven. What would you do? Give up? For the seven heroes of Churchill&’s Great Escapes the answer was simple: keep moving against all odds. These are the extraordinary stories of the bravery and endurance of the men of SAS, legendary pioneers of escape and evasion who, through the darkest of days and nights of World War II, endeavored and succeeded in slipping through the clutches of the enemy. Based on in-the-moment personal diaries and notebooks, mission reports, debriefings and letters, Damien Lewis recounts the most terrifying and adrenaline-fueled days and nights in the lives of men for whom survival was the only option. We follow every desperate step, facing unknowable threats and death around every corner, and share in the breathtaking endurance that brought them freedom against the most formidable of threats: the seemingly invincible Nazi war machine.Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power
Par Timothy W. Ryback. 2024
From the internationally acclaimed author of Hitler&’s Private Library, a dramatic recounting of the six critical months before Adolf Hitler…
seized power, when the Nazi leader teetered between triumph and ruinIn the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler&’s National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist, was a reluctant president bound by oath to uphold the constitution. The November elections offered Hitler the prospect of a Reichstag majority and the path to political power. But instead, the Nazis lost two million votes. As membership hemorrhaged and financial backers withdrew, the Nazi Party threatened to fracture. Hitler talked of suicide. The New York Times declared he was finished. Yet somehow, in a few brief weeks, he was chancellor of Germany. In facinating detail and with previously un-accessed archival materials, Timothy W. Ryback tells the remarkable story of Hitler&’s dismantling of democracy through democratic process. He provides fresh perspective and insights into Hitler&’s personal and professional lives in these months, in all their complexity and uncertainty—backroom deals, unlikely alliances, stunning betrayals, an ill-timed tax audit, and a fateful weekend that changed our world forever. Above all, Ryback details why a wearied Hindenburg, who disdained the &“Bohemian corporal,&” ultimately decided to appoint Hitler chancellor in January 1933. Within weeks, Germany was no longer a democracy.Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise To Power
Par Timothy W. Ryback. 2024
From the internationally acclaimed author of Hitler's Private Library, a dramatic recounting of the six critical months before Adolf Hitler…
assumed power, when the Nazi leader teetered between triumph and ruin.In the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler's National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist, was a reluctant president bound by oath to uphold the constitution. The November elections offered Hitler the prospect of a Reichstag majority and a path to political power. But instead, the Nazis lost two million votes. As membership hemorrhaged and financial backers withdrew, the Nazi Party threatened to fracture. Hitler talked of suicide. The New York Times declared he was finished. Yet somehow, in a few brief weeks, he was chancellor of Germany.In fascinating detail and with previously un-accessed archival materials, Timothy W. Ryback tells the remarkable story of Hitler's dismantling of democracy through the democratic process. He provides a fresh perspective and insights into Hitler's personal and professional lives in these months, in all their complexity and uncertainty-backroom deals, unlikely alliances, stunning betrayals, an ill-timed tax audit, and a fateful weekend that changed our world forever. Above all, Ryback makes clear why a wearied Hindenburg, who disdained the "Bohemian corporal," ultimately decided to appoint Hitler chancellor in January 1933.Within weeks, Germany was no longer a democracy.Takeover
Par Timothy W. Ryback. 2024
From the internationally acclaimed author of Hitler's Private Library, a dramatic recounting of the six critical months before Adolf Hitler…
assumed power, when the Nazi leader teetered between triumph and ruin.In the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler's National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist, was a reluctant president bound by oath to uphold the constitution. The November elections offered Hitler the prospect of a Reichstag majority and a path to political power. But instead, the Nazis lost two million votes. As membership hemorrhaged and financial backers withdrew, the Nazi Party threatened to fracture. Hitler talked of suicide. The New York Times declared he was finished. Yet somehow, in a few brief weeks, he was chancellor of Germany.In fascinating detail and with previously un-accessed archival materials, Timothy W. Ryback tells the remarkable story of Hitler's dismantling of democracy through the democratic process. He provides a fresh perspective and insights into Hitler's personal and professional lives in these months, in all their complexity and uncertainty-backroom deals, unlikely alliances, stunning betrayals, an ill-timed tax audit, and a fateful weekend that changed our world forever. Above all, Ryback makes clear why a wearied Hindenburg, who disdained the "Bohemian corporal," ultimately decided to appoint Hitler chancellor in January 1933.Within weeks, Germany was no longer a democracy.Strangers Within: The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite
Par Francisco Bethencourt. 2024
A comprehensive study of the New Christian elite of Jewish origin—prominent traders, merchants, bankers and men of letters—between the fifteenth…
and eighteenth centuriesIn Strangers Within, Francisco Bethencourt provides the first comprehensive history of New Christians, the descendants of Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in late medieval Spain and Portugal. Bethencourt estimates that there were around 260,000 New Christians by 1500—more than half of Iberia&’s urban population. The majority stayed in Iberia but a significant number moved throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, coastal Asia and the New World. They established Sephardic communities in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. Bethencourt focuses on the elite of bankers, financiers and merchants from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and the crucial role of this group in global trade and financial services. He analyses their impact on religion (for example, Teresa de Ávila), legal and political thought (Las Casas), science (Amatus Lusitanus), philosophy (Spinoza) and literature (Enríquez Gomez).Drawing on groundbreaking research in eighteen archives and library manuscript departments in six different countries, Bethencourt argues that the liminal position in which the New Christians found themselves explains their rise, economic prowess and cultural innovation. The New Christians created the first coherent legal case against the discrimination of a minority singled out for systematic judicial inquiry. Cumulative inquisitorial prosecution, coupled with structural changes in international trade, led to their decline and disappearance as a recognizable ethnicity by the mid-eighteenth century. Strangers Within tells an epic story of persecution, resistance and the making of Iberia through the oppression of one of the most powerful minorities in world history. Packed with genealogical information about families, their intercontinental networks, their power and their suffering, it is a landmark study.The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace
Par Laura McAtackney, Máirtín Ó Catháin. 2024
The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many…
facets of the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict, colloquially known as the Troubles, and its subsequent peace process. This volume is rooted in opening space to address controversial subjects, answer key questions, and move beyond reductive analysis that reproduces a simplistic two community theses. The temporal span of individual chapters can reach back to the formation of the state of Northern Ireland, with many starting in the late 1960s, to include a range of individuals, collectives, organisations, understandings, and events, at least up to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998.This volume has forefronted creative approaches in understanding conflict and allows for analysis and reflection on conflict and peace to continue through to the present day. With an extensive introduction, preface, and 45 individual chapters, this volume represents an ambitious, expansive, interdisciplinary engagement with the North of Ireland through society, conflict, and peace from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches.While allowing for rich historical explorations of high-level politics rooted in state documents and archives, this volume also allows for the intermingling of different sources that highlight the role of personal papers, memory, space, materials, and experience in understanding the complexities of both Northern Ireland as a people, place, and political entity.Although it was characterized by simmering international tensions, the early Cold War also witnessed dramatic instances of reconciliation between states,…
as former antagonists rebuilt political, economic, and cultural ties in the wake of the Second World War. And such efforts were not confined to official diplomacy, as this study of postwar rapprochement between Poland and West Germany demonstrates. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Peace at All Costs follows Polish and German non-state activists who attempted to establish dialogue in the 1950s and 1960s, showing how they achieved modest successes and media attention at the cost of more nuanced approaches to their national histories and identities.In The Case of Literature, Arne Höcker offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. His reinterpretations of…
Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Döblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and he argues that modern literature not only contributed to the development of the human sciences but also established itself as the privileged medium for a modern style of case-based reasoning.The Case of Literature deftly traces the role of narrative fiction in relation to the scientific knowledge of the individual from eighteenth-century psychology and pedagogy to nineteenth-century sexology and criminology to twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Höcker demonstrates how modern authors consciously engaged casuistic forms of writing to arrive at new understandings of literary discourse that correspond to major historical transformations in the function of fiction. He argues for the centrality of literature to changes in the conceptions of psychological knowledge production around 1800; legal responsibility and institutionalized forms of decision-making throughout the nineteenth century; and literature's own realist demands in the early twentieth century.The Wolf King: Ibn Mardanish and the Construction of Power in al-Andalus (Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures)
Par Abigail Krasner Balbale. 2022
The Wolf King explores how political power was conceptualized, constructed, and wielded in twelfth-century al-Andalus, focusing on the eventful reign…
of Muhammad ibn Sad ibn Ahmad ibn Mardanīsh (r. 1147–1172). Celebrated in Castilian and Latin sources as el rey lobo/rex lupus and denigrated by Almohad and later Arabic sources as irreligious and disloyal to fellow Muslims because he fought the Almohads and served as vassal to the Castilians, Ibn Mardanīsh ruled a kingdom that at its peak constituted nearly half of al-Andalus and served as an important buffer between the Almohads and the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.Through a close examination of contemporary sources across the region, Abigail Krasner Balbale shows that Ibn Mardanīsh's short-lived dynasty was actually an attempt to integrate al-Andalus more closely with the Islamic East—particularly the Abbasid caliphate. At stake in his battles against the Almohads was the very idea of the caliphate in this period, as well as who could define righteous religious authority. The Wolf King makes effective use of chronicles, chancery documents, poetry, architecture, coinage, and artifacts to uncover how Ibn Mardanīsh adapted language and cultural forms from around the Islamic world to assert and consolidate power—and then tracks how these strategies, and the memory of Ibn Mardanīsh more generally, influenced expressions of kingship in subsequent periods.Stalin’s Failed Alliance: The Struggle for Collective Security, 1936–1939
Par Michael Jabara Carley. 2024
In the spring of 1936, the Soviet effort to build an anti-Nazi alliance was failing. Stalin continued nevertheless to support…
diplomatic efforts to stop Nazi aggression in Europe. In Stalin’s Failed Alliance, the sequel to Stalin’s Gamble, Michael Jabara Carley continues his re-evaluation of European diplomacy during the critical events between May 1936 and August 1939. This narrative history examines the great crises of the pre-war period – the Spanish Civil War, Anschluss, and Munich accords – as well as both the last Soviet efforts to organize an anti-Nazi alliance in the spring–summer of 1939 and Moscow’s shocking volte-face, the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. Carley’s history traces the lead-up to the outbreak of war in Europe on 1 September 1939 and sheds light on the Soviet Union’s efforts to organize a defensive alliance against Nazi Germany, in effect rebuilding the anti-German Entente of the First World War. The author argues for the sincerity of Soviet overtures to the western European powers and that the non-aggression pact was a last-ditch response to the refusal of other states, especially Britain and France, to conclude an alliance with the USSR against Nazi Germany. Drawing on extensive archival research in Soviet and Western archival papers, Stalin’s Failed Alliance aims to see the European crisis of the 1930s through Soviet eyes.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.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.A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West
Par Ronald D. Asmus. 2010
The brief war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 seemed to many like an unexpected shot out of the…
blue that was gone as quickly as it came. Former Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Ronald Asmus contends that it was a conflict that was prepared and planned for some time by Moscow, part of a broader strategy to send a message to the United States: that Russia is going to flex its muscle in the twenty-first century. A Little War that Changed the World is a fascinating look at the breakdown of relations between Russia and the West, the decay and decline of the Western Alliance itself, and the fate of Eastern Europe in a time of economic crisis.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.Edward VI: The Lost King of England
Par Chris Skidmore. 2009
The birth of Edward on October 12, 1537, ended his father's twenty-seven-year wait for an heir. Nine years later, Edward…
was on the throne, a boy-king in a court where manipulation, treachery, and plotting were rife.Henry VIII's death in January 1547 marked the end of a political giant whose reign had dominated his kingdom with an iron grip for thirty-eight years. Few could remember an England without him---certainly little had remained untouched: the monasteries and friaries had been ripped down, the Pope's authority discarded, and new authoritarian laws had been introduced that placed his subjects under constant fear of death.Edward came to the throne promising a new start; the harsh legislation of his father's was repealed and the country's social and economic problems approached with greater sensitivity. Yet the early hope and promise he offered soon turned sour. Despite the terms of Henry's will, real power had gone to just one man---the Protector, Edward's uncle, the Duke of Somerset, and there were violent struggles for power, headed by the duke's own brother, Thomas Seymour.Chris Skidmore reveals how the countrywide rebellions of 1549 were orchestrated by the plotters at court and were all connected to the burning issue of religion: Henry VIII had left England in a religious limbo. Court intrigue, deceit, and treason very nearly plunged the country into civil war. The stability that the Tudors had sought to achieve came close to being torn apart in the six years of Edward's reign.Even today, the two dominant figures of the Tudor period are held to be Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Yet Edward's reign is equally important. His reign was one of dramatic change and tumult, yet many of the changes that were instigated during this period---certainly in terms of religious reformation---not only exceeded Henry's ambitions but have endured for over four centuries since Edward's death in 1553.Money Makers: Inside the New World of Finance and Business
Par David Snider, Chris Howard. 2010
An indispensable on-the-ground guide that puts today's financial landscape into perspective.Money Makers illuminates the often secretive industries of the private…
sector that drive the modern economy. David Snider and Chris Howard draw on their interviews with top executives--such as Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase; David Rubenstein, Cofounder of the Carlyle Group; and Shona Brown, Senior Vice President of Business Operations at Google--to reveal the histories, mechanics, operations and challenges of investment banking, venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, management consulting, and the management of Fortune 500 companies.With a Foreword by Robert K. Steel, Former CEO of Wachovia and Under Secretary of Domestic Finance for the US Treasury