A History of the World in 100 Objects

A History of the World in 100 Objects PDF Author: Neil MacGregor
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141966831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 564

Book Description
This book takes a dramatically original approach to the history of humanity, using objects which previous civilisations have left behind them, often accidentally, as prisms through which we can explore past worlds and the lives of the men and women who lived in them. The book's range is enormous. It begins with one of the earliest surviving objects made by human hands, a chopping tool from the Olduvai gorge in Africa, and ends with an object from the 21st century which represents the world we live in today. Neil MacGregor's aim is not simply to describe these remarkable things, but to show us their significance - how a stone pillar tells us about a great Indian emperor preaching tolerance to his people, how Spanish pieces of eight tell us about the beginning of a global currency or how an early Victorian tea-set tells us about the impact of empire. Each chapter immerses the reader in a past civilisation accompanied by an exceptionally well-informed guide. Seen through this lens, history is a kaleidoscope - shifting, interconnected, constantly surprising, and shaping our world today in ways that most of us have never imagined. An intellectual and visual feast, it is one of the most engrossing and unusual history books published in years.

Cheltenham in the Great War

Cheltenham in the Great War PDF Author: Neela Mann
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750968656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Cheltenham in the Great War is the first book to portray the town, its people and the impact of the 'war to end all wars' from the declaration of war in 1914 to Armistice Day in 1918. Almost 1,000 Cheltenham women left by train every day for munitions work, hundreds made airplanes in the Winter Gardens, many were nurses and most former suffragettes joined the WVR. Why did two schools do double shifts and for what did the townspeople raise £186,000 in one week in 1918? How did Cheltenham cope with 7,250 soldiers billeted in the town and 'khaki fever'? This book gives an insight into the lives of different social classes in Cheltenham – including stories of remarkable women – and how their war was fought on the Home Front. The Great War story of Cheltenham is told through considerable new research and is vividly illustrated throughout with evocative, informative images, many of which have not been published previously.

Britain's Industrial Revolution in 100 Objects

Britain's Industrial Revolution in 100 Objects PDF Author: John Broom
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1399003968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
The period of Britain’s Industrial Revolution was perhaps the most transformative era in the nation’s history. Between about 1750 and 1914, life and work, home and school, church and community changed irreversibly for Britain’s rapidly expanding population. Lives were transformed, some for the better, but many endured abysmal domestic and workplace conditions. Eventually improvements were made to Britain’s social fabric which led to the prospect of richer and more fulfilled lives for working men, women and even children. Focusing on 100 objects that either directly influenced, or arose from, these changes, John Broom offers a distinctive insight into this fascinating age. With plentiful illustrations and suggestions for visits to hundreds of places of historical interest, this book makes an ideal companion for a journey into Britain’s industrial past.

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party PDF Author: Edward Dolnick
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 198219961X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods, a historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history. In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled on a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head. No one had ever seen such things. Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had even imagined that creatures like three-toed giants had once lumbered across the land. And if anyone had somehow conjured up such a scene, they would never have imagined that all those animals could have vanished, hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world. Now, in Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland, a kind of Doctor Doolittle on a mission to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom; and then on to Richard Owen, the most respected and the most despised scientist of his generation. Entertaining, erudite, and featuring an unconventional cast of characters, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party tells the story of how the accidental discovery of prehistoric creatures upended humanity’s understanding of the world and their place in it, and how a group of paleontologists worked to bring it back into focus again.

A Woman's Will

A Woman's Will PDF Author: Viki Holton
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445692449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
Unearths the lives of British women over 1,000 years using the rich historical record of their wills and legacies.

Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows

Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows PDF Author: Ruth Scurr
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 163149242X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Book Description
Marking the 200th anniversary of his death, Napoleon is an unprecedented portrait of the emperor told through his engagement with the natural world. “How should one envisage this subject? With a great pomp of words, or with simplicity?” —Charlotte Brontë, “The Death of Napoleon” The most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Since Thomas Carlyle first christened him “our last Great Man,” regiments of biographers have marched across the same territory, weighing campaigns and conflicts, military tactics and power politics. Yet in all this time, no definitive portrait of Napoleon has endured, and a mere handful of women have written his biography—a fact that surely would have pleased him. With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the shibboleth of the “Great Man” theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon’s life through gardens, parks, and forests. As Scurr reveals, gardening was the first and last love of Napoleon, offering him a retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Gardens were, at the same time, a mirror image to the battlefields on which he fought, discrete settings in which terrain and weather were as important as they were in combat, but for creative rather than destructive purposes. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical scholarship, and taking us from his early days at the military school in Brienne-le-Château through his canny seizure of power and eventual exile, Napoleon frames the general’s story through the green spaces he cultivated. Amid Corsican olive groves, ornate menageries in Paris, and lone garden plots on the island of Saint Helena, Scurr introduces a diverse cast of scientists, architects, family members, and gardeners, all of whom stood in the shadows of Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall. Building a cumulative panorama, she offers indelible portraits of Augustin Bon Joseph de Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, who used his position to advance Napoleon’s career; Marianne Peusol, the fourteen-year-old girl manipulated into a Christmas-Eve assassination attempt on Napoleon that resulted in her death; and Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, the atlas maker to whom Napoleon dictated his memoirs. As Scurr contends, Napoleon’s dealings with these people offer unusual and unguarded opportunities to see how he grafted a new empire onto the remnants of the ancien régime and the French Revolution. Epic in scale and novelistic in its detail, Napoleon, with stunning illustrations, is a work of revelatory range and depth, revealing the contours of the general’s personality and power as no conventional biography can.

A History of Women in 100 Objects

A History of Women in 100 Objects PDF Author: Professor Maggie Andrews
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750987197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 538

Book Description
The history of the world has been told in objects. But what about the objects that tell the history of women? What are the items that symbolise the journey of women from second-class citizens with no legal rights, no vote and no official status to the powerful people they are today? And what are the objects that still oppress women, even now? From the corset to the contraceptive pill, the bones of the first woman to Rosa Parks's mugshot and the iconic Mary Quant cape, A History of Women in 100 Objects documents the developing role of women in society through the lens of the inanimate objects that touched women's lives, were created by women or that at some time – perhaps even still – oppressed them. Woven by two leading historians, this complex, fascinating and vital tale of women and womanhood is told with a lightness of touch and depth of experience that will appeal to all those interested in women's history.

Spectacle and Display: A Modern History of Britain’s Roman Mosaic Pavements

Spectacle and Display: A Modern History of Britain’s Roman Mosaic Pavements PDF Author: Michael Dawson
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1789698324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Antiquarian interest in the Roman period mosaics of Britain began in the 16th century. This book is the first to explore responses and attitudes to mosaics, not just at the point of discovery but during their subsequent history. It is a field which has received scant attention and provides a compelling insight into the agency of these remains.
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