Social & Cultural History

Mark Girouard has, he claims, scarcely ever thrown away a letter that he has received, and here he selects and reproduces 29 of them, ranging from ...

Do you remember getting up on a Saturday morning to watch Going Live? A time when scrunchies and curtains were the height of cool? Playing Sonic th...

From a renowned foreign-policy expert, a new paradigm for strategy in the twenty-first century In 1961, Thomas Schellings The Strategy of Conflict ...

Salvador Dalí once asked room service at Le Meurice in Paris to send him up a flock of sheep. When they were brought to his room he pulled out a gu...

The Beatles provided the soundtrack for the `Swinging Sixties, wrote and recorded groundbreaking albums, made films and were adored by fans univers...

In modern-day media, depictions of ancient Egyptian society are of a highly sexualised, lustful culture, but how accurate are these depictions of a...

Buck Ewing (1859-1906) was regarded by contemporaries as the greatest catcher and all-around player of his era. A lifetime .300-hitter, he playe...

This reference work is in two parts. The first is a biographical dictionary of the 325 men who played in the National Association between 1871 a...

At the close of the 19th century, more than 2 million American children under age 16--some as young as 4 or 5--were employed on farms, in mills,...

Between 1870 and 2010, 165 Jewish Americans have played Major League baseball. This work presents oral histories featuring 23 of these Jewish majo...

By 1871, the popularity of baseball had spread so thoroughly across America that one writer observed, It is as much our national game as cricket...

Following the 2013 revelations of Edward Snowden, Americans have come to realize that many of us may be under surveillance at any time. It all s...

H.G. Salsinger, the undisputed leading expert on Ty Cobb during the last century, analyzed and reported on Cobb's exploits on the diamond for 50 ye...

What didn't you like about the 1990s--the peace or the prosperity? Setting aside nostalgia for the end of the 20th century, this book takes a ca...

The past quarter-century has seen a number of biographies and anthologies on women travelers but to date there has been little comprehensive ref...

A positive legacy of the troubled Nixon administration--and one virtually unknown to the American public--is the extensive acquisition of valuab...

Action figures are more than toys or collectibles--they are statements on race, gender, class, body positivity and more. This collection of nine...

Approaching 21st-century Dublin by boat, the topography of the sight before you - the hill of Howth, the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains - is much the...

The 1957 PCL season faced uncertainty about the pending invasion of major league baseball in 1958. While the meetings, wheeling and dealing and pol...

In 1983, Interpol named Northern Ireland the most dangerous place in the world to be a police officer. In 1968, the RUC was catapulted into the T...

In 1972, the Philadelphia Phillies experienced one of their worst seasons in franchise history, finishing with an abysmal 59-97 record. Yet through...

Bette Davis as a madam. Orson Welles hosting The Twilight Zone. Mae West voicing a cartoon character. Shirley Temple playing a social worker. While...

Paper dolls might seem the height of simplicity--quaint but simple toys, nothing more. But through the centuries paper figures have reflected re...

In 1924, Professor Ueno Eizaburo of Tokyo Imperial University adopted an Akita puppy he named Hachiko. Each evening Hachiko greeted Ueno on his ret...

Every legitimate member of Revolutionary War soldier Francis Jones's family (including his son-in-law Congressman James Strudwick Smith) lies in a ...

Women played an integral role in the theater of the Antebellum and Civil War South. Yet their contributions have largely been overlooked by hist...

Vit Nam is the home of more than fifty ethnic minorities--such as the Cham and Thai--many of which have distinctive clothing and weaving traditi...

As the Civil War ended, thousands of Union veterans imagined Kansas as a place to make a new beginning. Many veterans settled in the southeaster...

During the Cleveland Indians' checkered 110-year history, only two of its teams have brought home baseball's ultimate prize. While the 1948 team co...

A bold new account of how celebrity worksWhy do we care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? Do celebrities deserve the ou...

A 1970s childhood was, for many, a life of happy-go-lucky freedom set against a soundtrack of pop music played on a transistor radio dangling from ...

Lustrous, warm, lightweight, strong, silk has always been a symbol of wealth and status, beginning in prehistoric China. In Pomp and Poverty: A His...

A Metro book of the year Interweaving the social, political, and personal, in 1947 Elisabeth Åsbrink chronicles the year that now began. In 1947,...

Lying at the very edge of the eighteenth-century city, behind high walls and forbidding gates, the Dublin Foundling Hospital was long viewed with h...

A dance was devised in eighteenth-century Skye. An exhilarating dance. A dance, a visitor reports, the emigration from Skye has occasioned. The vis...

The Reign of Terror continues to fascinate scholars as one of the bloodiest periods in French history, when the Committee of Public Safety strove t...