History

This book provides a history of Lincoln's place in the American imagination from the hour of his death to the present. In tracing the changing image of Lincoln through time, the book offers insight into the evolution and struggles of American politics and society—and into the character of Lincoln himself. Westerners, Easterners, even Southerners were caught up in the idealization of the late President, reshaping his memory and laying claim to his mantle, as his widow, son, memorial builders, and memorabilia collectors fought over his visible legacy. The author also looks at the complex responses of blacks to the memory of Lincoln, as they moved from exultation at the end of slavery to the harsh reality of free life amid deep poverty and segregation; at more than one memorial event for the great emancipator, the author notes, blacks were excluded. The book makes an engaging examination of the flood of reminiscences and biographies, from Lincoln's old law partner William H. Herndon to Carl Sandburg and beyond. Lincoln was made a voice of prohibition, a saloon-keeper, an infidel, a devout Christian, the first Bull Moose Progressive, a military blunderer and (after the First World War) a military genius, a white supremacist (according to D.W. Griffith and other Southern admirers), and a touchstone for the civil rights movement. Through it all, the author traces five principal images of Lincoln: the savior of the Union, the great emancipator, man of the people, first American, and self-made man.

The relationship between men and the domestic in eighteenth-century Britain has, until now, been obscure. The Little Republic rescues the engagement of men with the house from this obscurity, better equipping historians to understand masculinity, the domestic environment and domestic patriarchy. This book reconstructs men’s experiences of the house, examining the authority that accrued to mundane and everyday household practices and employing men’s own concepts to understand what men thought and felt about their domestic lives. This book explores the distinctive relationship between the domestic environment and masculinity, and finds that ‘home’ is too narrow a concept for an understanding of eighteenth-century domestic experience. Focussing instead on the ‘house’, Harvey foregrounds a different domestic culture in which men and masculinity were central. Men acted within the domestic environment as general managers, accountants, consumers and as keepers of the family history in paper and ink. The book explores a model of domestic patriarchy based on a widely-shared discourse of ‘oeconomy’ – the practice of managing the economic and moral resources of the household for the maintenance of good order. ‘Oeconomy’ was a meaningful way of defining masculinity and established the house a key component of a manly identity and in practising ‘oeconomy’, men established their household authority through small acts of power. The book shows how the public identity of men depended upon the roles they performed within doors, straddling the divide of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the house.

This book explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the 18th century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the 18th century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the 18th century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new desires. This unparalleled ‘product revolution’ provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a ‘new luxury’, one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. This book is built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. The book traces how this new consumer society of the 18th century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialisation itself.

This book is a study of the material world of English ambassadors at the end of the seventeenth century and illustrates the way in which architecture and the arts played an important role in diplomatic life. It positions luxury consumption firmly in the political domain and demonstrates the significance of diplomats as cultural intermediaries, highlighting the importance of the material world to politicians and the role that diplomats played in the evolution of artistic appreciation in England.It looks at diplomats abroad: where they lived, what they took with them, and the style in which they lived when away from home. It investigates the ambassadorial household and the role of wives in embassy life, and positions women firmly in the centre of the diplomatic world. It also looks at the extent to which diplomats reacted to their surroundings and the cultures in which they were immersed, and examines their interaction with foreign aesthetic influences. Within the wider context of artistic patronage, not just fine art, it assesses their impact as conduits for the arts, examining their own collecting and the acquisitions they made for their friends and patrons back home. Case studies examine the way in which cultural politics drove the luxury consumption in which so many diplomats indulged and reveal that these patrons displayed a knowledge and understanding of many areas of artistic endeavour that made them indubitable connoisseurs – of architecture, painting, furniture, textiles, silver, and coaches. The book re-evaluates the reputation for artistic patronage of the later Stuart years and finds that the contribution by English diplomats has been sorely neglected.

This is a double biography of Jean-Marie Roland (1734–1793) and Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, later Madame Roland (1754–1793), leading figures in the French Revolution. J.‐M. Roland was minister of the Interior for a total of eight months during 1792. The couple were close to Brissot and the Girondins, and both died during the Terror. Mme Roland became famous for her posthumous prison memoirs, and is the subject of many biographies, but her husband, despite being a key figure in administration of France, seldom out of the limelight during his time in office, is often marginalized in histories of the Revolution, This book examines the Roland marriage from its beginnings in an ancien regime mésalliance, opposed by both families, through its close cooperation in the 1780s, to its final phase as a political partnership during the Revolution. Both Roland’s actions as minister and Mme Roland’s role as a woman close to power were praised and blamed at the time, and the controversies have persisted. Based on manuscript sources including unpublished letters, this study sets out to examine an unusual companionate marriage over the long term: its intimacy, parenthood, everyday life in the provinces, friendships, academic cooperation, political enthusiasms and quarrels, and finally its dramatic ending during the Revolution.

The heart is the most symbolic organ of the human body. Across cultures it is seen as the site of emotions, as well as the origin of life. We feel emotions in the heart, from the heart-stopping sensation of romantic love to the crushing sensation of despair. And yet since the nineteenth century the heart has been redefined in medical terms as a pump, an organ responsible for the circulation of the blood. Emotions have been removed from the heart as an active site of influence and towards the brain. It is the brain that is the organ most commonly associated with emotion in the modern West. So why, then, do the emotional meanings of the heart linger? Why do many transplantation patients believe that the heart, for instance, can transmit memories and emotions and why do we still refer to emotions as ‘heartfelt’? We cannot answer these questions without reference to the history of the heart as both physical organ and emotional symbol. Matters of the Heart traces the ways emotions have been understood between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as both physical entities and spiritual experiences. With reference to historical interpretations of such key concepts as gender, emotion, subjectivity, and the self, it also addresses the shifting relationship from heart to brain as competing centres of emotion in the West.

Miraculous Plagues reimagines New England’s literary history by tracing seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century epidemics alongside the era of early colonial expansion, the Antinomian controversy, the evolution of the halfway covenant and jeremiad, and Boston’s 1721 inoculation controversy. Moving beyond familiar histories of New World epidemics (often referred to as the “virgin soil” model), Miraculous Plagues identifies epidemiology as a generic category with specialized forms and conventions, and considers how regional and generational patterns of illness reposition our understanding of the relation between immunology and ideology in the formation of communal identity. Epidemiology functions as subject and method of analysis in Miraculous Plagues: it describes those narratives that represent modes of infection, population distribution, and immunity, but, more germane to the field of literary criticism, it also describes a set of analytical practices for theorizing the translation of epidemic events into narrative and generic terms. Without denying epidemiology’s usefulness in combating contemporary epidemics, Miraculous Plagues affirms its power to transform colonial spaces, and thus to reshape inquiries into the nature of community and identity; it offers critics new trajectories for analyzing late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century epidemiology, and for rethinking illness and infection in terms of the geopolitics of medicine.

Early in the 1920s, the New York Giants sent a scout to watch a young Cuban play for Foster's American Giants, a baseball club in the Negro Leagues. The scout liked what he saw, but was disappointed in the player's appearance. “He was a light brown,” recalled one of Torrienti's teammates, “and would have gone up to the major leagues, but he had real rough hair.” Such was life behind the color line, the unofficial boundary that prevented hundreds of star-quality athletes from playing big-league baseball. This book tells the forgotten story of excluded baseball players, and gives them the recognition they were so long denied. Reconstructing the old Negro Leagues from contemporary sports publications, accounts of games in the black press, and through interviews with the men who actually played the game, the book brings to life the period that stretched from shortly after the Civil War to the signing of Jackie Robinson in 1947. We watch as the New York Black Yankees and the Philadelphia Crawfords take the field, look on as the East-West All-Star line-ups are announced, and listen as the players themselves tell of the struggle and glory that was black baseball. In addition to these accounts, the book includes yearly Negro League standings and an all-time register of players and officials, making the book a treasure trove of baseball information and lore. The book reminds us that what was often considered the “Golden Age” of baseball was also the era of Jim Crow.

This book explores the varied vernacular forms and rich oral traditions which were such a part of popular culture in early modern England. It focuses, in particular, upon dialect speech and proverbial wisdom, ‘old wives' tales’ and children's lore, historical legends and local customs, scurrilous versifying, and scandalous rumour-mongering. The book argues that while the spoken word provides the most vivid insight into the mental world of the majority in this society, it was by no means untouched by written influences. Even at the beginning of the period, centuries of reciprocal infusion between these complementary media had created a cultural repertoire which had long since ceased to be purely oral. Thereafter, the growth of reading ability together with the proliferation of texts both in manuscript and print saw the rapid acceleration and elaboration of this process. By 1700 popular traditions and modes of expression were the products of a fundamentally literate environment to a much greater extent than has yet been appreciated.

This is the first history of Mills & Boon, the British publishing phenomenon that has become a household name, synonymous with romantic fiction. This book, published on the firm's 90th anniversary, gives a history of Mills & Boon, drawing upon a long-lost archive of over 50,000 letters that reveal the intricate relationship between editorial policy, social attitudes, and sales. The author examines the dictates of the Mills & Boon formula and demonstrates how novels were ‘managed’ by the firm to ensure maximum sales and to nurture a cadre of loyal readers in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. The result is a cultural phenomenon whose ‘product’ reflected the attitudes and morals of the age while offering women an addictive escape from everyday life.