Social & Cultural History

Bethlem Hospital is the oldest mental institution in the world, to many famously known as Bedlam: a chaotic madhouse that brutalised its patients. ...

From the ashes of World War II, Rome was reborn as the epicenter of film, fashion, creative energy, tabloid media, and bold-faced libertinism that ...

When Governor John White sailed for England from Roanoke Island in August 1587, he left behind more than 100 men, women and children. They were ...

Chariot races. Gladiatorial combat. Fishing. Hunting. Swimming. The ancient Romans enjoyed these sports--sometimes with fanatical enthusiasm. Th...

This is the true story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who in 1943 escaped the Nazi gas chambers at the Sobibór death camp. He joined wi...

After the Second World War, Germany was an international pariah. Today, it has become a beacon of the Western world. But what makes this extraordin...

In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with n...

The fascinating story of Bronson Alcott''s utopian experiment This is the first definitive account of Fruitlands, one of history''s most unsuccessf...

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a cosmopolitan carnival of nations: French Huguenots, North African merchants, Spanish Moriscosand Iberian New Ch...

If You Were Only White explores the legacy of one of the most exceptional athletes everan entertainer extraordinaire, a daring showman and crowd-pl...

In 1846, James Boyd Hawkins, his wife Ariella, and their young children left North Carolina to establish a sugar plantation in Matagorda County, in...

When a four-year-old California girl died on March 9, 1984, the state charged her mother with involuntary man-slaughter because she failed to provi...

From 1877 to 1896, the popularity of bicycles increased exponentially, and Boston was in on it from the start. The Boston Bicycle Club was the firs...

In 1916 a clearly agitated Henry Ford famously proclaimed that history is more or less bunk. Thirteen years later, however, he opened the outdoor h...

Gender and Nation in Meiji Japan is a historical analysis of_ the discourses of nostalgia in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan. Th...

Visual Art and the Urban Evolution of the New South recounts the enormous influence of artists in the evolution of six southern cities - Atlanta, C...

The delightful and touching stories in Christmas in Nevada tell how Nevadans have celebrated the holiday, from 1858 to the present day. Some are to...

Sometimes, to move forward, we must look back. U.S. involvement in WWI (1917-1919) is vital to understanding and informing our current work in agri...

With the Wests of Texas, noted author Bruce M. Shackelford tells the story of the West family of Lavaca County, forgotten Texas legends.Originally ...

Goal! covers the history of the beautiful game from its origins in English public schools in the early 19th century to its current role as a crucia...

Place and Replace is a collection of recent interdisciplinary research into Western Canada that calls attention to the multiple political, social, ...

Before the Gold Rush of 18481858, Alta (Upper) California was an isolated cattle frontierand home to a colorful group of Spanish speaking, non-indi...

Pay Dirt: The Westland Goldfields, from the diary of William Smart is the fascinating story of how payable gold was discovered in West Canterbury, ...

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867?1957) finished her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, in 1930 when she was sixty-three years old. Throughout the 1930s and int...

In its updated second edition, this book tells the story of how the automobile transformed American life and how automotive design and technology h...

Like No Other: Exceptionalism and Nativism in Early Modern Japan probes the association of the early modern Japanese intellectual institution calle...

As the first Lakota to serve in the United States Congress, Benjamin ('Ben') Reifel (19061990) made a career of straddling two distinct cultures.A ...

In the first decades of the 1800s, white Americans entered the rugged lands of Arkansas, which they had little explored before. They established...

Modern spas are wellness resorts that offer beauty treatments, massages and complementary therapies. Victorian spas were sanitariums, providing ...

Romantic letters are central to understanding same-sex romantic relationships from the past, with debates about so-called romantic friendship turni...

Before radio and sound movies, early 20th century performers and lecturers traveled the nation providing entertainment and education to American...

Covering everything from the Old Well to the Speaker Ban and more, UNC A to Z is a concise, easy-to-read introduction to the nation's first public ...

A History of Zinnias brings forward the fascinating adventure of zinnias and the spirit of civilization. With colorful illustrations, this book is ...

Bloomsbury is the vibrant, intellectual and cultural heart of London that proudly sits within the southern part of the London Borough of Camden. On...

In 1752 an enslaved Pennsylvania ironworker named Ned purchased his freedom and moved to Virginia on the upper James River. Taking the name Edward ...

A philosopher, architect, astronomer, and polymath, Thomas Jefferson lived at a time when geography was considered the mother of all sciences. Alth...

Collegiate Republic offers a compellingly different view of the first generation of college communities founded after the American Revolution. Such...

In its revised and updated fourth edition, this exhaustive encyclopedia provides a record of casualties of war from the last five centuries thro...

A New Statesman Book of the Year, 2021 Follow Iain Sinclair into the cloud jungles of Peru and emerge questioning all that seemed so solid and imm...

The story begins at high seas on a 12-day voyage across the Indian Ocean in the bowels of the SS Karanja bound for Bombay. It is February 1972 and ...

The essays in Transforming the Dead: Culturally Modified Bone in the Prehistoric Midwest explore the numerous ways that Eastern Woodland Native Ame...

Florida is a civilized place with eighteen million residents and all of the modern amenities one might expect: fine universities, art museums, worl...

In 1898, St. Philips Normal and Industrial School opened its doors in San Antonio, offering sewing classes for black girls. It was the inaugural ef...