Service Alert
Delay in delivery of Direct to Player materials
You may experience a delay in delivery of Direct to Player materials. All requests for materials will be delivered as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
You may experience a delay in delivery of Direct to Player materials. All requests for materials will be delivered as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
Showing 1 - 20 of 1156 items
By Karen Krossing. 2022
By 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 consequencesBy 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 womenBy 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.By Jean-Sébastien Marsan. 2019
Le Québec des années 1860 à 1960 a connu une série d'évolutions, de crises et de tensions. La province s'industrialisation,…
s'urbanise et se bureaucratise. Elle connaît une forte émigration vers les États-Unis, les premières féministes remportent leurs premières batailles malgré la criminalisation de l'avortement, une guerre mondiale éclate, suivie de l'effervescence des Années folles, de la Grande Dépression et d'une autre guerre mondiale... Apparaissent alors les fameux enterrements de vie de garçon, les showers, la commercialisation du mariage et la popularisation de l'automobile, du cinéma, de la radio et la télévision. La société québécoise évolue et bénéficie de constant progrès en matière d'hygiène, de médecine et de moyens de contraception. À l'approche de la Révolution tranquille, le Québec subit un décalage de plus criant avec le discours de l'Église : la population aspire maintenant à autre choseBy Lauren Markham. 2024
&“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we&’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order…
to naturalize the forms of injustice we&’ve come to understand as order.&” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so important to the West&’s idea of itself? How does nostalgia fuel the exclusion and demonization of migrants today? In 2021, Lauren Markham went to Greece, in search of her own Greek heritage and to cover the aftermath of a fire that burned down the largest refugee camp in Europe. Almost no one had wanted the camp—not activists, not the country&’s growing neo-fascist movement, not even the government. But almost immediately, on scant evidence, six young Afghan refugees were arrested for the crime. Markham soon saw that she was tracing a broader narrative, rooted not only in centuries of global history but also in myth. A mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay, A Map of Future Ruins helps us see that the stories we tell about migration don&’t just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the futureBy Gilles Bibeau. 2023
Après Les Autochtones, la part effacée du Québec, l'anthropologue Gilles Bibeau raconte la genèse de l'Empire britannique qui s'est imposé…
aux Autochtones et aux descendants de la Nouvelle-France. Pour les Britanniques, le rêve de dominer le monde passait par la conquête de l'ArctiqueBy David Gibbins. 2024
The Viking warship of King Cnut the Great. Henry VIII's the Mary Rose. Captain John Franklin's doomed HMS Terror. The…
SS Gairsoppa, destroyed by a Nazi U-boat in the Atlantic during World War II. Since we first set sail on the open sea, ships and their wrecks have been an inevitable part of human history. Archaeologists have made spectacular discoveries excavating these sunken ships, their protective underwater cocoon keeping evidence of past civilizations preserved. World renowned maritime archeologist David Gibbins ties together the stories of some of the most significant shipwrecks in time to form a single overarching narrative of world history. A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks is not just the story of those ships, the people who sailed on them, and the cargo and treasure they carried, but also the story of the spread of people, religion, and ideas around the world; it is a story of colonialism, migration, and the indominable human spirit that continues today. Drawing on decades of experience, Gibbins reveals the riches beneath the waves and shows us how the treasures found there can be a porthole to the past that tell a new story about the world and its underwater secretsBy Null Paul Nugent. 2024
With the introduction of wine to the Cape Colony, it became associated locally with social extremes: with the material trappings…
of privilege and taste, on the one side, and the stark realities of human bondage, on the other. By examining the history of Cape wine, Paul Nugent offers a detailed history of how, in South Africa, race has shaped patterns of consumption. The book takes us through the Liquor Act of 1928, which restricted access along racial lines, intervention to address overproduction from the 1960s, and then latterly, in the wake of the fall of the Apartheid regime, deregulation in the 1990s and South Africa's re-entry into global markets. We see how the industry struggled to embrace Black Economic Empowerment, environmental diversity and the consumer market. This book is an essential read for those interested in the history of wine, and how it intersects with both South African and global history.By Gregory M. Luebbert, David Collier, Seymour Martin Lipset. 1991
This work provides a sweeping historical analysis of the political development of Western Europe in the late nineteenth and early…
twentieth century. Arguing that the evolution of most Western European nations into liberal democracies, social democracies, or fascist regimes was attributable to a discrete set of social class alliances, the author explores the origins and outcomes of the political development in the individual nations. In Britain, France, and Switzerland, countries with a unified middle class, liberal forces established political hegemony before World War I. By coopting considerable sections of the working class with reforms that weakened union movements, liberals essentially excluded the fragmented working class from the political process, remaining in power throughout the inter-war period. In countries with a strong, cohesive working class and a fractured middle class, Luebbert points out, a liberal solution was impossible. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia, political coalitions of social democrats and the "family peasantry" emerged as a result of the First World War, leading to social democratic governments. In Italy, Spain, and Germany, on the other hand, the urban middle class united with a peasantry hostile to socialism to facilitate the rise of fascism.By Dennis Welland. 1987
First published in 1987, the second edition of The United States illuminates America’s past and present by a straightforward examination…
of a wide range of subjects – geography, urbanization, immigration, and race, American wars, government, politics and foreign policy, literature, the visual arts and the media, as well as American thought and ideals. All the contributors have been engaged in the development of American studies in British universities, many of them as pioneers in that field.By Andrzej Swidlicki. 1988
First published in 1988, Political Trials in Poland 1981-1986 describes the major political trials which took place in Poland between…
1981 and 1986. Based on extensive original research using both official and unofficial information from Poland and interviews with Solidarity activists, it shows how the trials constituted an attempt by the Jaruzelski regime to break the back of the independent Solidarity movement by judicial and penal measures. It discusses how the authorities abused the law and how the law itself leaves much to be desired and it charts the different human rights that were violated in each case. It considers the implications of the abuse of law in this way for the rule of law and the image of the state in communist countries. This book will be of interest to students of history and political science.By Jerald A. Combs, Jessica Elkind. 2024
Now in its fifth edition, this volume offers a clear, concise, and nuanced history of U.S. foreign relations since the…
Spanish–American War and places that narrative within the context of the most influential historiographical trends and debates.The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895 includes both revised and new sections that incorporate insights from recent scholarship on the United States in the world. These sections devote more attention to the international framework as well as the domestic constraints under which American foreign policymakers operated. This edition also emphasizes the role of non-state actors such as missionaries, aid workers, activists, and business leaders in shaping policies and contributing to international relations. As a result, the text considers a broader and more diverse range of people and voices than many other histories of U.S. foreign policy. Expanded final chapters bring the story of U.S. foreign relations to the present and explore some of the contemporary challenges facing American and global leaders, including terrorism, the effects of climate change, China’s increasing influence, and globalization. Updated controversial issues sections and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter reflect important contributions from new studies.This engaging text is an invaluable resource for students interested in the history of American foreign policy and international relations.By Peter C.W. Gutkind, Robin Cohen, Jean Copans. 1978
Originally published in 1978, this book was distinctive in translating the work of French labour specialists and includes chapters on…
Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Kenya, Tanganyika, Madagascar and Botswana. Although all the papers are set in historically specific events, some of the larger issues receive further treatment. These concern the reality of the existence of an African working class and its class identity and consciousness. Each contributor adds to the debate by means of demonstrating how African workers have responded to their work situation, to deprivation and exploitation, and to the political authority of the colonial or neocolonial stateBy Mitchell Nathanson. 2024
Under Jackie&’s Shadow is a portal to the hidden world of Minor League baseball in the era just after Jackie…
Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. What was it like to be Black and playing in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1965, or Memphis, Tennessee, in 1973? What was it like to play for white coaches and scouting directors from the Jim Crow South who cut their professional teeth in the segregated game before Jackie Robinson ushered in the sport&’s integration? Or to be called into the clubhouse with your Black teammates one spring training morning in 1969 and told that to make the ballclub you&’d have to beat out the Black men in that room, because none of you were ever going to beat out a white player, regardless? Or to spend a staggering eight seasons playing A-ball in the Midwest League, even winning a triple crown, while watching less-talented white teammates get promoted each year while you stayed behind? The thirteen players in Under Jackie&’s Shadow are going to tell you. The players&’ experiences in baseball&’s Minor Leagues in the 1960s and 1970s do not comport with the largely celebratory tales the leagues like to tell about themselves. The Black Minor League players remained largely invisible men—most of whom couldn&’t be named by even the most devoted baseball followers. Based on Mitchell Nathanson&’s interviews, Under Jackie&’s Shadow uses the players&’ own words to tell the unvarnished story of what it was like to be a Black baseball player navigating the wilds of professional baseball&’s Minor Leagues following the integration of the Major Leagues. Harrowing, beautiful, and maddening, these stories are vital to our understanding of race not only in baseball but in the United States as a whole.By Waite Hoyt, Tim Manners. 2024
Waite &“Schoolboy&” Hoyt&’s improbable baseball journey began when the 1915 New York Giants signed him as a high school junior,…
for no pay and a five-dollar bonus. After nearly having both his hands amputated and cavorting with men twice his age in the hardscrabble Minor Leagues, he somehow ended up the best pitcher for the New York Yankees in the 1920s. Based on a trove of Hoyt&’s writings and interview transcripts, Tim Manners has reanimated the baseball legend&’s untold story, entirely in Hoyt&’s own words. Schoolboy dives straight into early twentieth-century America and the birth of modern-day baseball, as well as Hoyt&’s defining conflict: Should he have pursued something more respectable than being the best pitcher on the 1927 New York Yankees, arguably the greatest baseball team of all time? Over his twenty-three-year professional baseball career, Hoyt won 237 big league games across 3,845 ⅔ innings—and one locker room brawl with Babe Ruth. He also became a vaudeville star who swapped dirty jokes with Mae West and drank champagne with Al Capone, a philosophizer who bonded with Lou Gehrig over the meaning of life, and a funeral director who left a body chilling in his trunk while pitching an afternoon game at Yankee Stadium. Hoyt shares his thoughts on famous moments in the golden age of baseball history; assesses baseball legends, including Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, and Pete Rose; and describes the strategies of baseball managers John McGraw, Miller Huggins, and Connie Mack. He writes at length about the art of pitching and how the game and its players changed—and didn&’t—over his lifetime. After retiring from baseball at thirty-eight and coming to terms with his alcoholism, Hoyt found some happiness as a family man and a beloved, pioneering Cincinnati Reds radio sportscaster with a Websterian vocabulary spiked with a Brooklyn accent. When Hoyt died in 1984 his foremost legacy may have been as a raconteur who punctuated his life story with awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping anecdotes. In Schoolboy he never flinches from an unsparing account of his remarkable and paradoxical eighty-four-year odyssey.By Jerry Grillo. 2024
Johnny Mize was one of the greatest hitters in baseball&’s golden age of great hitters. Born and raised in tiny…
Demorest, Georgia, in the northeast Georgia mountains, Mize emerged from the heart of Dixie as a Bunyonesque slugger, a quiet but sharp-witted man from a broken home who became a professional player at seventeen, embarking on an extended tour of the expansive St. Louis Cardinals Minor League system. Mize then spent fifteen seasons terrorizing Major League pitchers as a member of those Cardinals, the New York Giants of Mel Ott and Leo Durocher, and finally with the New York Yankees, who won a record five straight World Series with Mize as their ace in the hole—the best pinch hitter in the American League. Few hitters have combined such meticulous bat control with brute power the way Mize did. Mize was a line-drive hitter who rarely struck out and also hit for distance, to all fields, and usually for a high average. Nicknamed the Big Cat, &“nobody had a better, smoother, easier swing than John,&” said Cardinals teammate Don Gutteridge. &“It was picture perfect.&” Tabbed as a can&’t-miss Hall of Famer, then all but forgotten, Mize spent twenty-eight years waiting for the call from Cooperstown before he was finally inducted in 1981, delighting fans with his straightforward commentary and sly sense of humor during a memorable induction speech. From the backroads of the Minor Leagues to the sunny Caribbean, where he played alongside the best Black and Latin players as a twenty-one-year-old, and to the Major Leagues, where he became a ten-time All-Star, home run champion, and World Series hero, Mize forged a memorable trail along baseball&’s landscape. This is the first complete biography of the Big Cat.By David Krell. 2024
To be a part of Red Sox Nation is to be a hopeful romantic who neither betrays loyalty nor surrenders…
hope in the direst of circumstances. From Bangor to Back Bay, New Englanders endure in baseball matters. And life. The team&’s history has intersected with the history of Boston and well beyond it, through the Curse of the Bambino, the military service of Ted Williams during World War II, and the Boston Marathon bombing. The Fenway Effect chronicles these stories and others that have built the incredible saga of the Boston Red Sox. How did Cheers depict the passion of Boston&’s sports fans? Why is Narragansett beer so important to New England? What&’s the architectural impact of The Teammates—the statue of Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky, Ted Williams, and Dom DiMaggio outside Fenway Park? What did the Boston press really think about Red Sox owner Harry Frazee selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees? What was the origin of Fenway Park&’s predecessor—Huntington Avenue Grounds? Even Yankees fans will tip their caps to the rich impact of the Red Sox on music, movies, branding, broadcasting, and more. Plus, there&’s a chapter focusing on the oral history of Red Sox fans, some of whom share here anecdotes that are funny, insightful, and heartwarming.Intimate Histories focuses on intimate relations as sites of shared pasts connecting African American and German history in the years…
between 1933 and 1990. By tracing topics that include anti-miscegenation laws, forced sterilization, casual sexual encounters, marriage, and friendships, Intimate Histories broadens our understanding of African American–German relations during the so-called “century of extremes.”By Rainer F. Buschmann, David Manzano Cosano. 2024
Through a number of significant case studies, this volume examines changing Iberian dynamics in the Pacific, bridging the gaps between…
English and Spanish speaking scholarship to highlight understudied actors and debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book shifts the predominant emphasis on Anglo-American studies and the historical neglect of Iberian endeavors in this ocean by focusing on several episodes that illuminate Spanish engagement in the Pacific. It describes Spain’s treatment of this sea from its discovery to the end of the overseas empire in 1899, becoming the first book to place its analytical focus in the heart of the islands rather than the Pacific Rim. In tracing shifting Spanish positions and policies, the book cautions against making generalities about the distinct histories of Pacific islands and their Indigenous populations, uncovering a much more heterogeneous world than previous research may convey. Exploring Iberian Counterpoints in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Pacific is the perfect resource for students and researchers of the Iberian world, Hispanic studies, and the Pacific Ocean in early modern and modern eras.