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Swedish immigrants tell their own stories in this collection of letters, diaries, and memoirs—a perfect book for those interested in history, immigration, or just the daily lives of early Swedish-American settlers.

A naturalist's captivating portrait of Alabama's wildlife, landscapes, and people.

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), a British naturalist, left home at age 17 and made his way to Alabama in 1838, where he had heard educated people were in demand. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold at Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen children of local landowners, but his principal interest was natural history. During the eight months he lived in th Black Belt he watched, listened, thought, took notes, and made sketches--activities that eventually led to Letters from Alabama. He lived among Alabamians, talked and listened to them, saw them at their best and their worst, and came to understand their hopes and fears. They were a part of the natural world, and he paid attention to them as any good scientist would. With the skills of a scientist and the temperament of an artist, Gosse set down an account of natural life in frontier Alabama that has no equal. Written to no one in particular, a common literary device of the period, the letters were first published in a magazine, and in 1859 appeared as a book. By that time Gosse was an established scholar and one of England’s most noted scientific illustrators.

New and improved edition of a naturalist's captivating portrait of Alabama's wildlife, landscapes, and people. 

Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), a British naturalist, left home at age seventeen and made his way to Alabama in 1838. He was employed by Judge Reuben Saffold and other planters near Pleasant Hill in Dallas County as a teacher for about a dozen of their children, but his principal interest was natural history. Letters from Alabama is a personalized record of Gosse’s perceptive observations during his eight-month residence in this small antebellum community. The work addresses a Victorian readership, including entomologists, who Gosse believed were relatively uninformed about the novelty and beauty of this “hilly region of the State of Alabama.” Written in an engaging literary style and organized as a series of epistolary discussions, the book is unparalleled in its detailed evocations of the natural history and cultural conditions of frontier Alabama. By the time Letters from Alabama appeared in 1859, Gosse’s scientific publications and fine illustrations had led to his being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Edited by Gary R. Mullen and Taylor D. Littleton, this authoritative edition features thirty grayscale lithographs shot directly from the 1859 edition, reset type for easier reading, a new introduction and index by the two foremost scholars of Gosse in Alabama, a new appendix that provides modern scientific and common names for the plant and animal species described by Gosse, and a four-color cover featuring one of the plates from Gosse’s Entomologia Alabamensis.

On December 7, 1941, Navy sailor Elmer Luckett witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the beginning of a wartime journey that would carry him across oceans, through distant ports, and around the globe during one of the most consequential periods in modern history.

Drawn from more than six hundred letters written home to his parents and to his future wife, Rose Schmid, Letters from the War offers an intimate firsthand account of life in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Elmer's correspondence follows him from his early days of service through V-J Day, chronicling everything from long stretches at sea and visits to unfamiliar corners of the world to kamikaze attacks, unexpected adventures, and the everyday realities of military life.

Observant, thoughtful, and exceptionally well written, these letters reveal not only the experiences of a sailor at war but also the growth of a young man coming of age under extraordinary circumstances. Letters from the War brings history to life through the authentic voice of one American sailor, preserving a personal story that reflects the experiences of a generation shaped by war, travel, sacrifice, and hope.

Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another.

Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque is a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors—one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas—provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. The Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque joins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research—it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.

Coinciding with Diana Scarisbrick’s ninety-fourth birthday, this work honors her extraordinary career as the “world’s leading jewelry historian.”

Through twenty contributions by noted scholars, Liber Amicorum explores the pioneering research accomplished by jewelry historian Diana Scarisbrick. These collected pieces celebrate both the length of Scarisbrick’s career and its wide-ranging nature, touching upon her work with everything from gems, rings, chalices, bindings, and crown jewels to contemporary jewelry production, jewel theft, and individual collections.

Throughout the book, the insightful historical research of the contributors is beautifully supported by high-quality illustrations. These bring their essays to life, highlighting the splendor and fragility of some of the objects that are discussed as each delves into the work of this eminent scholar.

Liberalism and Transformation is the first scholarly work that explores the historical, philosophical, and intellectual development of global liberalism since the nineteenth century in the context of the deployment of violence, force, and intervention. Using an approach that includes interpretive and contextual analysis of texts from writers, philosophers, and policy-makers across nearly two centuries, as well as historiographical and historical analysis of archival documents (some of which have been recently declassified) and other media, Liberalism and Transformation narrates the messy history of emancipatory liberalism and its engagement with issues of war and peace. The book contributes to both a rethinking of liberal democracy and its relationship to world politics, as well as the effects of liberal internationalism on global processes. Furthermore, Liberalism and Transformation invites readers to reflect on global ethics and transformation in world politics. In the first place, it shows how ethical imaginings of the world have direct effects on actions of transformative importance. In the second place, it suggests that discourses are fluid, changing, and complex.

Rethinking the language of liberty, protection, and citizenship in nineteenth-century America.

Figures of protection and security are everywhere in American public discourse, from the protection of privacy or civil liberties to the protection of marriage or the unborn, and from social security to homeland security. Liberalism and the Culture of Security traces a crucial paradox in historical and contemporary notions of citizenship: in a liberal democratic culture that imagines its citizens as self-reliant, autonomous, and inviolable, the truth is that claims for citizenship—particularly for marginalized groups such as women and slaves—have just as often been made in the name of vulnerability and helplessness.

Katherine Henry traces this turn back to the eighteenth-century opposition of liberty and tyranny, which imagined our liberties as being in danger of violation by the forces of tyranny and thus in need of protection. She examines four particular instances of this rhetorical pattern. The first chapters show how women’s rights and antislavery activists in the antebellum era exploited the contradictions that arose from the liberal promise of a protected citizenry: first by focusing primarily on arguments over slavery in the 1850s that invoke the Declaration of Independence, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fiction and Frederick Douglass’s “Fourth of July” speech; and next by examining Angelina Grimké’s brief but intense antislavery speaking career in the 1830s.

New conditions after the Civil War and Emancipation changed the way arguments about civic inclusion and exclusion could be advanced. Henry considers the issue of African American citizenship in the 1880s and 1890s, focusing on the mainstream white Southern debate over segregation and the specter of a tyrannical federal government, and then turning to Frances E. W. Harper’s fictional account of African American citizenship in Iola Leroy. Finally, Henry examines Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians, in which arguments over the appropriate role of women and the proper place of the South in post–Civil War America are played out as a contest between Olive Chancellor and Basil ransom for control over the voice of the eloquent girl Verena Tarrant.