Историческая литература
Различные книги в жанре Историческая литератураLetters of Note: Space
In Letters of Note: Space, Shaun Usher brings together fascinating correspondence about the universe beyond our planet, containing hopeful thoughts about the future of space travel, awestruck messages penned about the worlds beyond our own and celebrations of the human ingenuity that has facilitated our understanding of the cosmos.
Includes letters by: Buzz Aldrin, Isaac Asimov, Marion Carpenter, Yuri Gagarin, Ann Druyan, Stanley Kubrick, Alexander Graham Bell, Neil DeGrasse Tyson & many more
Testimony
In rural Virginia in 1960, history professor Gen Rider has secured tenure at Baines College, a private school for white women. A woman in a man’s field, she teaches “Negro” history, which has made her suspect with a powerful male colleague. Even while she’s celebrating her triumph, she’s also mourning the break-up of a long-distance relationship with another woman—a romance she has tightly guarded, even from her straight female mentor. As the fall semester dawns, a male instructor at the college is arrested for having sex with a man in a park. Homosexual panic envelops the college town, launching a “Know Your Neighbor” reporting campaign. The police investigation directly threatens Gen’s friend Fenton, the gay theater director at Baines. But Gen finds herself vulnerable, too, when someone leaves mysterious “gifts” for her, including a suggestive pulp novel and a romantic card. As Gen tentatively embarks on a new relationship, a neighbor reports she’s seen Gen kissing a woman, and hearings into her morality catch her in a McCarthy-like web. With her private life under the microscope, Gen faces an agonizing choice: Which does she value more, the career she’s scraped to build against the odds or her right to a private life?
As If Death Summoned
In 1936, a man was caught in a blizzard on Australia’s Bogong High Plains. Found unconscious by a search party, he was taken to the nearest township where an old aborigine woman made the cryptic comment, “They brought back only his body.” He died soon after. In the decades since, there have been reports of a lone figure seen wandering in the region. When approached, the man vanishes and no trace of him can be found. Almost 60 years later, a young American returns from Australia, exhausted after ten years on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic and haunted by dreams of the Bogong High Plains. He, too, is lost in a kind of blizzard, struggling to remember a time when life was about more than death. Plunging back into the heart of the epidemic by working at an AIDS organization in Portland, Oregon, he will eventually come to understand the old woman’s words and his mystic connection to the Bogong High Plains: When he returned to the States, he brought back only his body. The historical event known as the Mt. Bogong Tragedy is the seed for this fictional story about profound loss and profound healing. With expected pathos and unexpected humor, As If Death Summoned testifies to the power of grief to erode a life, and—for those who can find a way through their grief—the power to rebuild and renew it.
Gullah Days
Fresh off the heels of W. Kamau Bell’s profile, The Gullah of South Carolina on CNN’s United Shades of America comes this fascinating look at the history of Gullah people on Hilton Head Island. Many readers will recognize Hilton Head as a golf and beach resort and so may be intrigued at its history as stronghold of the unique Gullah culture. This book will be popular all along the mid-Atlantic coast, where Gullah people reside on the many sea islands. The CNN programming also indicates a national interest in this culture and people. Written in a riveting narrative style, this book should appeal to a broad range of folks. Though grounded in solid research, it is full of first-person accounts, anecdotes, photos, illustrations, and lively quotes in the Gullah language that will appeal to general readers as well as history buffs. The authors, all descendants of generations of Gullah people, write with authority and an intimate knowledge of the subject. Several of their ancestors turn up in the narratives, along with family photos and documents. The book will be handsomely designed with maps, photos, and illustrations, and will include sidebars to the historical narrative with topics about Gullah life, culture, and arts. Authors will appear at multiple festivals and events along the East Coast and at other South Carolina cultural events. Despite the growing interest in this subject, there are few books on the subject, the most prominent being Gullah Culture in America, a Blair backlist title that sells briskly more than a decade after publication.
Exploring the Bounds of Liberty
Exploring the Bounds of Liberty presents a rich and extensive selection of the political literature produced in and about colonial British America during the century before the American Revolution. Most colonial political pamphlets and broadsides were printed in London, but even in the mid-seventeenth century some writings were published in New England, which then had the only printing presses in British America. With the expansion of printing to most of the colonies during the last decade of the seventeenth and the first three decades of the eighteenth century, however, the number of political polemical publications increased exponentially throughout colonial British America, from Barbados to Nova Scotia. The number of publications dealing with political questions increased in every decade after 1710, to become a veritable flood by the 1750s.Exploring the Bounds of Liberty is an ideal introduction to the rich, hitherto only lightly examined literature produced in and about the British colonies between 1680 and 1770. It provides easy access to key but little-discussed political writings, illuminating important political debates in the early-modern British empire and giving crucial context for much better-known tracts of the American Revolution.The selections are presented in chronological sequence, from the earliest, William Penn’s “The Excellent PrivileEAe of Liberty and Property” (1687), to the latest, an anonymous 1774 protest against taxes arbitrarily imposed by royal officials without local consent or parliamentary authority, but simply in the king’s name. Each of the selections is preceded by a short, substantive introductory essay that clarifies the context and content of the sources.As the editors write in their introduction, these writings speak directly to such themes in the history of liberty as the nature and source of corporate and individual rights, the importance of due process and the rule of law for the preservation of those rights, the centrality of private property and local autonomy in a free polity, and the ability of people to pursue their domestic happiness.Jack P. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, where he was a member of the Department of History for thirty-nine years. He has published widely on colonial British America and the American Revolution, most recently Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900 (2010); Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (2011); Celebrating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2013); Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity (2011); and Settler Jamaica: A Social Portrait of the 1750s (2016).Craig B. Yirush is an Associate Professor of History at UCLA. Educated at the University of British Columbia, CambriEAe University, and the Johns Hopkins University, he teaches and writes about the intellectual history of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British world. He is the author of Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of American Political Theory, 1675–1775.
Select Works of Edmund Burke: Letters on a Regicide Peace
This famed Payne edition of Select Works of Edmund Burke is universally revered by students of English history and political thought.Volume 3 presents Burke’s Four Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France—generally styled Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–1796). The Letters, Payne believed, deserve to “rank even before [Burke’s] Reflections, and to be called the writer’s masterpiece.” Faithfully reproduced in each volume are E. J. Payne’s notes and introductory essays. Francis Canavan, one of the great Burke scholars of the twentieth century, has added forewords and a biographical note on Payne.Francis Canavan (1917–2009) was Professor of Political Science at Fordham University from 1966 until his retirement in 1988. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
Collected Political Writings of James Otis
The writings of James Otis arguably had more influence in America and England before 1774 than those of any other American except John Dickinson. John Adams pointed to Otis as the first man to have plumbed the depths of the argument between Britain and the Anglo-American colonies. Anyone who wishes to understand the American Revolution, the American founding, and American political thought would benefit greatly from reading Otis's political writings. Otis's writings tackle enduring themes of American politics: the rule of law, individual rights, and federalism. Otis saw that the problem facing the Anglo-American colonists was the difficulty of reconciling their rights as British subjects, and as men, with continued participation in the British Empire. His proposed solution, a federally structred empire, with a proportionate number of Anglo-American representative in the Parliament in London and the continued presence of Anglo-American governments, was unacceptable to almost everyone else at the time.
Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks
In 1759, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, when Great Britain was suffering a series of military reversals, Montagu considered his country’s plight in an historical context formed by the study of five ancient republics: Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Carthage, and Rome. Montagu’s focus on the ancient republics gives his contribution a distinctive twist to the chorus of voices lamenting Britain’s decline, and his analysis exerted influence in three momentous eighteenth-century crises: the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. This is the first modern edition of Montagu’s work.Edward Wortley Montagu (1713 –1776) was the son of a wealthy British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He was a student of oriental languages at the University of Leiden, which apparently proved useful during the peace negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle which concluded the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748.David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He is the editor of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (2012) for CambriEAe University Press.Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.
George Washington
George Washington speaks for himself on behalf of liberty and the emerging American republic in this handsome book, the only one-volume compilation in print of his vast writings.While Washington is recognized as a military leader and the great symbolic figure of the early republic, many fail to appreciate the full measure of his contributions to the country. In these selections, his political ideas and juEAments stand out with remarkable clarity. His writings are replete with sustained, thoughtful commentary and keen political insight.This volume includes correspondence, all of his presidential addresses, various public proclamations, his last will and testament, and the most comprehensive recompilation of the “discarded first inaugural” ever printed.W. B. Allen is Professor of Political Philosophy and Director of the Program in Public Policy and Administration at Michigan State University. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century collects nine essays by Trevor-Roper on the themes of religion, the Reformation, and social change.In his longest essay, “The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Trevor-Roper points out that “in England the most active phase of witch-hunting coincided with times of Puritan pressure—the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the period of the civil wars—and some very fanciful theories have been built on this coincidence. But . . . the persecution of witches in England was trivial compared with the experience of the Continent and of Scotland. Therefore . . . [one must examine] the craze as a whole, throughout Europe, and [seek] to relate its rise, frequency, and decline to the general intellectual and social movements of the time.”Because Trevor-Roper believes that “the English Revolution of the seventeenth century cannot be isolated from a general crisis in Europe,” he devotes the longest of his essays to the European Witch-craze. Events in England—and the intellectual currents from which they emerged and to which they gave impetus—cannot be understood apart from events and intellectual currents on the Continent.Trevor-Roper acknowleEAes that the belief in witches, and the persecution of people believed to be witches, may be, to some at least, “a disgusting subject, below the dignity of history.” However, he goes on, “[I]t is also a historical fact, of European significance, and its rise precisely in the years of the Renaissance and Reformation is a problem which must be faced by anyone who is tempted to overemphasize the ‘modernity’ of that period.”Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre (1914–2003) was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.