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129 books match the query 'City and town life' and 9 start with a

cover of A Day in a Medieval City

A Day in a Medieval City

Chiara Frugoni

University of Chicago Press, 2005

An opportunity to experience the daily hustle and bustle of life in the late Middle Ages, A Day in a Medieval City provides a captivating dawn-to-dark account of medieval life. A visual trek through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—with seasoned historian and expert on medieval iconography Chiara Frugoni as guide—this book offers a vast array of images and vignettes that depicts the everyday hardships and commonplace pleasures for people living in the Middle Ages.

A Day in a Medieval City breathes life into the activities of the city streets, homes, fields, schools, and places of worship. With entertaining anecdotes and gritty details, it engages the modern reader with its discoveries of the religious, economic, and institutional practices of the day. From urban planning and education to child care, hygiene, and the more leisurely pursuits of games, food, books, and superstitions, Frugoni unearths the daily routines of the private and public lives of citizens. A Day in a Medieval City is a charming portal to the Middle Ages that you'll surely want with you on your travels to Europe—or in your armchair.

“With its color illustrations of rare paintings and artifacts, this thoughtful and informative, elegantly fashioned excursion into the life of a medieval city is a veritable feast of information and visual delights. Frugoni is a marvelously experienced historical travel guide.”—Choice 

 “Stunningly beautiful . . . and a good read as well. . . . It’s amazing how much wealth of detail and image Ms. Frugoni has packed into this delightful, relatively small book.”—Steve Goode, Washington Times

 “Charming and insightful. . . .Written with exceptional grace and infused with a warm sense of humanity.”—Library Journal

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cover of A Little Rock Boyhood: Growing Up in the Great Depression

A Little Rock Boyhood

Growing Up in the Great Depression

A. Cleveland Harrison

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2010

History books provide the statistics and the “big picture” of the Great Depression, but what did any of that mean for a family just trying to make it through those years? A. Cleveland Harrison’s A Little Rock Boyhood provides that viewpoint in this evocative memoir as he captures what Little Rock was like for him as a child in the 1930s. The Harrison family’s experiences and those of their extended family and neighbors bring the tough economic times down to the individual level. The youngest Harrison is an able reporter, relating the memories of an observant though naive child. All was not grim, though, if you were a kid, and Harrison describes those happy times. He remembers his life in the residential neighborhoods of downtown Little Rock when a child could grow up in difficult times without becoming difficult. This book is an insightful look back at a time, a place, and a childhood.
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cover of After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape and Lightscape of Ancient Cities

After Dark

The Nocturnal Urban Landscape and Lightscape of Ancient Cities

Nancy Gonlin

University Press of Colorado, 2022

After Dark explores the experience of nighttime within ancient urban settings. Contributors present material evidence related to how ancient people manipulated and confronted darkness and night in urban landscapes, advancing our knowledge of the archaeology of cities, the archaeology of darkness and night, and lychnology (the study of ancient lighting devices).
 
Sensory archaeology focuses on the sensual experience of the nocturnal environment—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feel of an ancient city—and the multi-faceted stimuli that diverse urban populations experienced in the dark. Contributors investigate night work—for example, standing guard or pursuing nocturnal trades—and nightlife, such as gambling at Chaco Canyon. They also examine how urban architecture, infrastructure, and the corresponding lighting were inextricably involved in enabling nighttime pursuits and signaling social status.
 
The subjects of the night, darkness, and illumination taken together form a comprehensive framework for analyzing city life. After Dark embraces night as a conceptual lens through which to view the material and visual cultures of the ancient world and, in doing so, demonstrates a wealth of activities, behaviors, and beliefs that took place between dusk and dawn. This perspective greatly enriches the understanding of urban life and its evolution and has much to offer archaeologists in deepening an examination of complexity and inequality. This volume will be of interest to any scholar or student of the past who is interested in urban activities and the significance of the night in urban settings.
 
Contributors: Susan M. Alt, J. Antonio Ochatoma Cabrera, Martha Cabrera Romero, Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, Kirby Farrah, Nancy Gonlin, Anna Guengerich, Christopher Hernandez, John Janusek, Kristin V. Landau, Maggie L. Popkin, Monica L. Smith, Meghan E. Strong, Susan Toby Evans, Robert S. Weiner
 
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cover of After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900-1917

After the West Was Won

Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900-1917

Paula M. Nelson

University of Iowa Press, 1989

"In this well-written monograph Paula M. Nelson tells the story of the settlement of 'west river country,' that part of South Dakota west of the Missouri River....Nelson's major contribution is her reconstruction of the social life of this generation of settlers....Nelson is particularly sensitive to the experience of pioneer women, both those who labored within the family and those single women who homesteaded on their own."--American Historical Review "After the West Was Won is an impressively researched and beautifully written study....Nelson also conveys the sense of pain and suffering that pioneers in western South Dakota endured; the technology of steam, electricity, and internal combustion failed to create utopia in a primitive area after the West was won."--Technology and Culture "Paula M. Nelson's account of the trials and tribulations of the pioneers of that flat, windswept plain is a welcome addition to the literature on the agricultural frontier."--Journal of American History
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cover of Alliance, Illinois

Alliance, Illinois

Dave Etter

Northwestern University Press, 2005

In the tradition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, each of the 222 poems in this collection is narrated by a different resident of the fictional small town of Alliance, Illinois. Their voices, individual and yet familiar, describe the ordered simplicity of life in the American small town during the second half of the twentieth century. Dave Etter's themes and images come from the very lifeblood of prairie Illinois-rivers, trees, cornfields, wildlife, county fairs, railroads and, always, the people and the ever-changing seasons. Deceptively, invitingly simple on their surface, Etter's poems reveal upon careful examination a remarkable psychological insight and a careful craftsmanship. Alliance, Illinois is truly one of the great monuments of rural American literature.
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cover of American Dictators: Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine

American Dictators

Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine

Hart, Steven

Rutgers University Press, 2013

One man was tongue-tied and awkward around women, in many ways a mama's boy at heart, although his reputation for thuggery was well earned. The other was a playboy, full of easy charm and ready jokes, his appetite for high living a matter of public record. One man tolerated gangsters and bootleggers as long as they paid their dues to his organization. The other was effectively a gangster himself, so crooked that he hosted a national gathering of America's most ruthless killers. One man never drank alcohol. The other, from all evidence, seldom drank anything else.

American Dictators is the dual biography of two of America’s greatest political bosses: Frank Hagueand Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. Packed with compelling information and written in an informal, sometimes humorous style, the book shows Hague and Johnson at the peak of their power and the strength of their political machines during the years of Prohibition and the Great Depression. Steven Hart compares how both men used their influence to benefit and punish the local citizenry, amass huge personal fortunes, and sometimes collaborate to trounce their enemies.

Similar in their ruthlessness, both men were very different in appearance and temperament. Hague, the mayor of Jersey City, intimidated presidents and wielded unchallenged power for three decades. He never drank and was happily married to his wife for decades. He also allowed gangsters to run bootlegging and illegal gambling operations as long as they paid protection money. Johnson, the political boss of Atlantic City, and the inspiration for the hit HBO series Boardwalk Empire, presided over corruption as well, but for a shorter period of time. He was notorious for his decadent lifestyle. Essentially a gangster himself, Johnson hosted the infamous Atlantic City conference that fostered the growth of organized crime.

Both Hague and Johnson shrewdly integrated otherwise disenfranchised groups into their machines and gave them a stake in political power. Yet each failed to adapt to changing demographics and circumstances. In American Dictators, Hart paints a balanced portrait of their accomplishments and their failures.

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cover of Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain

Anonymous Connections

The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain

Tina Young Choi

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Anonymous Connections asks how the Victorians understood the ethical, epistemological, and biological implications of social belonging and participation. Specifically, Tina Choi considers the ways nineteenth-century journalists, novelists, medical writers, and social reformers took advantage of spatial frames-of-reference in a social landscape transforming due to intense urbanization and expansion. New modes of transportation, shifting urban demographics, and the threat of epidemics emerged during this period as anonymous and involuntary forms of contact between unseen multitudes. While previous work on the early Victorian social body have tended to describe the nineteenth-century social sphere in static political and class terms, Choi’s work charts new critical terrain, redirecting attention to the productive—and unpredictable—spaces between individual bodies as well as to the new narrative forms that emerged to represent them. Anonymous Connections makes a significant contribution to scholarship on nineteenth-century literature and British cultural and medical history while offering a timely examination of the historical forebears to modern concerns about the cultural and political impact of globalization.

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cover of Antebellum Jefferson, Texas: Everyday Life in an East Texas Town

Antebellum Jefferson, Texas

Everyday Life in an East Texas Town

Jacques D. Bagur

University of North Texas Press, 2012

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cover of Archaeology of Southern Urban Landscapes

Archaeology of Southern Urban Landscapes

Amy L Young

University of Alabama Press, 2000

Groundbreaking essays in urban archaeology highlight the impact of towns and cities on the southern landscape.

The rapid growth and development of urban areas in the South have resulted in an increase in the number of urban archaeology projects required by federal and state agencies. These projects provide opportunities not only to investigate marginal areas between the town and countryside but also to recover information long buried beneath the earliest urban structures. Such projects have also created a need for a one-volume update on archaeology as it is practiced in the urban areas of the southeastern United States.

Archaeology of Southern Urban Landscapes will assist practitioners and scholars in the burgeoning fields of urban and landscape archaeology by treating the South as a distinctive social, geographic, and material entity and by focusing on the urban South rather than the stereotypical South of rural plantations. The case studies in this volume span the entire southeastern United States, from Annapolis to New Orleans and from colonial times to the 19th century. The authors address questions involving the function of cities, interregional diversity, the evolution of the urban landscape, and the impact of the urban landscape on southern culture. By identifying the relationship between southern culture and the South's urban landscapes, this book will help us understand the built landscape of the past and predict future growth in the region.
 

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