Category: History

Revolutionary Domesticity in the Italian Risorgimento: Transnational Victorian Feminism, 1850–1890 by Diana Moore
Requirements: .PDF reader, 3 MB
Overview: "This book examines how a group of transnational British-Italian women affiliated with the exiled patriots of the Italian Left repurposed traditionally feminine activities, such as fundraising, gift-giving, maternity, and memory collection, to make a substantial contribution to Italian Unification and state-building. Through their actions, Mary Chambers, Sara Nathan, Giorgina Saffi, Julia Salis Schwabe, and Jessie White Mario transcended the boundaries of acceptable behavior for middle-class women and participated in the broader female emancipation movement. By drawing attention to their activities, this book reveals how nineteenth-century female activists achieved their most revolutionary goals by using conservative, domestic, or anti-Catholic language. Adding to the growing understanding of the Italian Risorgimento as a transnational phenomenon, it also shows how non-Catholic and non-Italian women participated in the creation and development of the Italian state. Finally, the book argues for the continuing importance of religion in both politics and philanthropy throughout the nineteenth century."
Genre: Non-Fiction > History

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Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) by Natan M. Meir
Requirements: .PDF reader, 5 MB
Overview: Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the Shtetl tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust.

Combining archival research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts, Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society’s outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists. Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in eastern Europe―from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to the slums and insane asylums of Warsaw and Odessa, from the conscription of poor orphans during the reign of Nicholas I to the cholera wedding, a magical ritual in which an epidemic was halted by marrying outcasts to each other in the town cemetery―Stepchildren of the Shtetl reconsiders the place of the lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History

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Bodies complexioned: Human variation and racism in early modern English culture, c. 1600-1750 by Mark Dawson
Requirements: .PDF reader, 14 MB
Overview: This book examines how bodily difference was understood by the people of early modern England. Using an array of sources – from sermons, polemics, and newspapers to medical case-notes, almanacs, diaries, and dramas – it traces people’s attitudes to somatic contrasts, both among themselves and, as they ventured across the Atlantic, among non-Europeans.

The book demonstrates that individuals’ distinctive features were thought to be innate, even as discrete populations were believed to have fleshly characteristics in common – whether similarities in skin-tone, facial profile, hair colour, or demeanour. According to most scholarship, bodies constituted from the same four elemental fluids as Adam and Eve’s – the phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, and melancholic humours – were not the stuff of visceral inequality or racism. But this book contends that people routinely judged others on sight according to the ostensible balance, or complexion, their humours.

Complexions vouched for distinctions in social status, physical cum moral fitness, national allegiance, and religious affiliation. But to establish whether this scrutiny had a racist potential, we need to determine if the people of the day had an entirely naturalistic view of themselves and the world they inhabited.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History

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The Imperial Capitals of China: A Dynastic History of the Celestial Empire by Arthur Cotterell
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 6mb
Overview: From the third century B.C. Shang Emperor’s obsessive—and fatal—attempts to engage the Immortals with cosmologically pleasing urban planning, Chinese emperors have designed their imperial capitals in ways that reveal the heart of their dynasty. In a history peopled with countless races, nationalities, and faiths, capital city ley lines display religious preoccupations and building design shows cultural influences of the period. The Tang capital at Chang’an betrays the striking creativity and cultural receptiveness that earmark the era as a literary and artistic golden age, and the Forbidden City of fifteenth century Beijing still stands as testament to Ming dynasty architectural virtuosity. Arthur Cotterell provides an inside view of the rich array of characters, political and ideological tensions, and technological genius that defined the imperial cities of China, as each in turn is uncovered, explored, and celebrated. The oldest continuous civilization in existence today stands to become the most influential.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History

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Rome: Republic into Empire: The Civil Wars of the First Century BCE by Paul Chrystalm
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 6 MB
Overview: Rome: Republic into Empire looks at the political and social reasons why Rome repeatedly descended into civil war in the early 1st century BCE and why these conflicts continued for most of the century; it describes and examines the protagonists, their military skills, their political aims and the battles they fought and lost; it discusses the consequences of each battle and how the final conflict led to a seismic change in the Roman political system with the establishment of an autocratic empire.

This is not just another arid chronological list of battles, their winners and their losers. Using a wide range of literary and archaeological evidence, Paul Chrystal offers a rare insight into the wars, battles and politics of this most turbulent and consequential of ancient world centuries; in so doing, it gives us an eloquent and exciting political, military and social history of ancient Rome during one of its most cataclysmic and crucial periods, explaining why and how the civil wars led to the establishment of one of the greatest empires the world has known.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History

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