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The grand palaces and princely villas of the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty—Nymphenburg, Schleissheim, the vast Residenzschloss in Munich, and others—impress visitors with their great halls and intimate cabinets, dramatic stairhalls and seemingly endless rows of sumptuously decorated rooms. But these dazzling residences did not exist solely to delight the eye. In The Utility of Splendor, Samuel John Klingensmith discusses how, over the years, successive rulers reshaped the internal spaces of their residences to reflect changes in the elaborate ceremony that regulated daily life at court.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including building documents, correspondence, diaries, and court regulations, Klingensmith investigates the intricacies of Bavarian court practice and shows that Versailles was only one among several influences on German palace planning. Klingensmith offers a cogent, detailed understanding of the relations between architectural spaces and the ceremonial, social, and private life that both required and used them. Handsomely illustrated with photographs and plans, The Utility of Splendor will appeal to anyone interested in how life was lived among the nobility during the last centuries of the old regime.

Samuel John Klingensmith (1949-1986) was assistant professor of art history at Tulane University.

Debora Greger is a stoic comedian in an age when even wit has its dark
          undertones. In this her fourth collection she finds Ovid in Provincetown,
          a right whale in Iowa, and Cleopatra in the afterworld. Nothing resides
          in its proper place, except the place of exile. "Characteristic wit,
          irony, and precision." —Publishers Weekly
 

In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory. He takes the quantitative social sciences and the broad social theories they rely on to task for their inability to question Western cultural presuppositions, demonstrating that anthropology's comparative approach provides a better means to understand societies. This capacity stems from anthropology's engagement with diversity, its fragmentary approach to studying social life, and its ability to translate difference between cultures. Through essays on topics as varied as iconoclasm, urban poverty, Muslim immigration, and social exclusion van der Veer highlights the ways that studying the particular and the unique allows for gaining a deeper knowledge of the whole without resorting to simple generalizations that elide and marginalize difference.

At the heart of today’s fierce political anger over income inequality is a feature of capitalism that Karl Marx famously obsessed over: the commodification of labor. Most of us think wage-labor economics is at odds with socialist thinking, but as Martha Lampland explains in this fascinating look at twentieth-century Hungary, there have been moments when such economics actually flourished under socialist regimes. Exploring the region’s transition from a capitalist to a socialist system—and the economic science and practices that endured it—she sheds new light on the two most polarized ideologies of modern history.
            Lampland trains her eye on the scientific claims of modern economic modeling, using Hungary’s unique vantage point to show how theories, policies, and techniques for commodifying agrarian labor that were born in the capitalist era were adopted by the socialist regime as a scientifically designed wage system on cooperative farms. Paying attention to the specific historical circumstances of Hungary, she explores the ways economists and the abstract notions they traffic in can both shape and be shaped by local conditions, and she compellingly shows how labor can be commodified in the absence of a labor market. The result is a unique account of economic thought that unveils hidden but necessary continuities running through the turbulent twentieth century. 
 

In the nineteenth century, Latin America was home to the majority of the world's democratic republics. Many historians have dismissed these political experiments as corrupt pantomimes of governments of Western Europe and the United States. Challenging that perspective, James E. Sanders contends that Latin America in this period was a site of genuine political innovation and popular debate reflecting Latin Americans' visions of modernity. Drawing on archival sources in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay, Sanders traces the circulation of political discourse and democratic practice among urban elites, rural peasants, European immigrants, slaves, and freed blacks to show how and why ideas of liberty, democracy, and universalism gained widespread purchase across the region, mobilizing political consciousness and solidarity among diverse constituencies. In doing so, Sanders reframes the locus and meaning of political and cultural modernity.

In 1895, an extraordinarily enigmatic faith healer emerged in the American West. An Alsatian immigrant and former cobbler, Francis Schlatter looked like popular depictions of Jesus, and it was said that his very touch could heal everything from migraines and arthritis to blindness and cancer. First in Albuquerque, and then in Denver, thousands flocked to him, hoping to receive his healing touch. Schlatter accepted no money for his work, behaved modestly, fasted heavily, and treated everyone, from wealthy socialites to impoverished immigrants, equally. He quickly captured national attention, and both the sick hoping to be cured and reporters hoping to expose a fraud hurried to Denver to see the celebrated healer. By November of 1895, it is estimated that Schlatter was treating thousands of people every day, and the neighborhood in which he was staying was overrun with the sick and lame, their families, reporters from across the country, and hucksters hoping to make a quick buck off the local attention. Then, one night, Schlatter simply vanished. Eighteen months later, his skeleton was reportedly found on a mountainside in Mexico’s Sierra Madre range, finally bringing Schlatter’s great healing ministry to an end.

Or did it?

Within hours of the announcement of Schlatter’s found remains, a long-haired man emerged in Cleveland to say that he was Francis Schlatter, and the next twenty-five years, several others claimed to be Denver’s great healer. In The Vanishing Messiah, a modern researcher painstakingly pieces together evidence from letters, newspaper reports, hospital records, mug shots, and published reminiscences of the healer to find out what really happened to Francis Schlatter after he left Denver in the middle of the night in November 1895. In doing so, David N. Wetzel uncovers a historical puzzle of lies, deception, and betrayal, and offers a tantalizing look into a nineteenth-century messiah and his twentieth-century reincarnations—one of whom may have been the healer himself. 

The Venice Ghetto was founded in 1516 by the Venetian government as a segregated area of the city in which Jews were compelled to live. The world's first ghetto and the origin of the English word, the term simultaneously works to mark specific places and their histories, and as a global symbol that evokes themes of identity, exile, marginalization, and segregation. To capture these multiple meanings, the editors of this volume conceptualize the ghetto as a "memory space that travels" through both time and space.

This interdisciplinary collection engages with questions about the history, conditions, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, including its legacy as a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed space. Contributors also consider the ghetto's influence on the figure of the Renaissance moneylender, the material culture of the ghetto archive, the urban form of North Africa's mellah and hara, and the ghetto's impact on the writings of Primo Levi and Marjorie Agosí­n.

In addition to the volume editors, The Venice Ghetto features a foreword from James E. Young and contributions from Shaul Bassi, Murray Baumgarten, Margaux Fitoussi, Dario Miccoli, Andrea Yaakov Lattes, Federica Ruspio, Michael Shapiro, Clive Sinclair, and Emanuela Trevisan Semi.

The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous course on Islamic civilization that Hodgson created and taught for many years at the University of Chicago.

"This is a nonpareil work, not only because of its command of its subject but also because it demonstrates how, ideally, history should be written."—The New Yorker

Volume 1, The Classical Age of Islam, analyzes the world before Islam, Muhammad's challenge, and the early Muslim state between 625 and 692. Hodgson then discusses the classical civilization of the High Caliphate. The volume also contains a general introduction to the complete work and a foreword by Reuben Smith, who, as Hodgson's colleague and friend, finished the Venture of Islam after the author's death and saw it through to publication.

A sweeping work of history that the New Yorker says "demonstrates how history should be written"

The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous course on Islamic civilization that Hodgson created and taught for many years at the University of Chicago.

In the second work of this three-volume set, Hodgson investigates the establishment of an international Islamic civilization through about 1500. This includes a theoretical discussion of cultural patterning in the Islamic world and the Occident.
 

The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous course on Islamic civilization that Hodgson created and taught for many years at the University of Chicago.

In this concluding volume of The Venture of Islam, Hodgson describes the second flowering of Islam: the Safavi, Timuri, and Ottoman empires. The final part of the volume analyzes the widespread Islamic heritage in today's world.

"This is a nonpareil work, not only because of its command of its subject but also because it demonstrates how, ideally, history should be written."—The New Yorker

Amply illustrated, The Vernor's Story -- From Gnomes to Now captures the spirit and genius of the people who transformed Vernors into an iconic American soft drink that has spanned two centuries of shifting public taste. With over seventy photographs depicting the history of the company, The Vernor's Story is an insider's look at early operations, as well as the firm's famous marketing blitz, featuring Vernor's distinctive green and gold packaging and its engaging gnome.

 

Add to that the legion of devoted Vernor's fans, and the beverage itself, a unique, spicy, mysteriously flavored carbonated ginger drink that's appealed to generations of Michiganders and others alike, and you have the makings of a great American success story.

 

A treasure on its own and sure to be a future collectible, this is a fascinating slice of Americana for Vernor's fans everywhere.

Lawrence Rouch is President of Studio3/Innovations, a marketing and consulting firm representing fine artists in the automotive and fine-arts fields.

The Very Worst Road contains sixteen contemporary accounts by travelers who reached Alabama along what was known as the “Old Federal Road,” more a network of paths than a single road, that ran from Columbus and points south in Georgia for more or less due west into central Alabama and to where the confluence of the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers forms the Alabama River.

 

These accounts deal candidly with the rather remarkable array of impediments that faced travelers in Alabama in its first decades as a state, and they describe with wonder, interest, and, frequently with some disgust, the road, the inns, the travelling companions, and the few and raw communities they encountered as they made their way, often with difficulty, through what seemed to many of them uncharted wilderness. The Very Worst Road was originally published by the Historic Chattahoochee Commission in 1998.

After a series of victories through Mississippi early in the spring of 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee had reached the critical point in its campaign to capture Vicksburg. Taking the city on the hill would allow the Union to control the Mississippi River and would divide the Confederacy in half. Confederate morale was low, and a Union victory in the war appeared close before the start of Grant’s assault against General John C. Pemberton’s Army of Mississippi.
 
But due to difficult terrain, strong defenses, and uncoordinated movements, the quick triumph Grant desired was unattainable. On the afternoon of May 19, with little rest, preparation, or reconnaissance, Union forces charged the Confederate lines only to be repulsed. A respite between the assaults allowed both sides to reinforce their positions. Early on May 22 the Union artillery sought to soften the stronghold’s defenses before the general attack, but despite the Union forces’ preparation, the fighting proved even more disorganized and vicious. Again Grant failed to move Pemberton. Not wanting to risk more soldiers in a third attack, Grant conceded to the necessity of laying siege. Confederate morale climbed as the Southerners realized they had held their ground against an overwhelming force.
 
Editors Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear have assembled five captivating essays that examine Grant’s unsuccessful assaults against Confederate defensive lines around Vicksburg. Ranging from military to social history, the essays further historical debates on prominent topics, such as the reactions of Midwesterners to the first failures of Grant’s Vicksburg campaign. Two essays from opposing sides analyze the controversial decisions surrounding the Railroad Redoubt, the site of the bloodiest fighting on May 22. Another investigates how the tenacity of Texan reinforcements forced Union soldiers to abandon their gains.
 
Peppered with first-hand observations and bolstered by an impressive depth of research, this anthology is an invitingly written account and comprehensive assessment. By zeroing in on the two assaults, the contributors offer essential clarity and understanding of these important events within the larger scope of the Civil War’s Vicksburg Campaign.

Ulysses S. Grant’s ingenious campaign to capture the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River was one of the most decisive events of the Civil War and one of the most storied military expeditions in American history. The ultimate victory at Vicksburg effectively cut the Confederacy in two, gave control of the river to Union forces, and delivered a devastating blow from which the South never fully recovered. Editors Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear have assembled essays by prominent and emerging scholars, who contribute astute analysis of this famous campaign’s most crucial elements and colorful personalities.

Encompassed in this first of five planned volumes on the Vicksburg campaign are examinations of the pivotal events that comprised the campaign’s maneuver stage, from March to May of 1863. The collection sheds new light on Grant’s formidable intelligence network of former slaves, Mississippi loyalists, and Union spies; his now legendary operations to deceive and confuse his Confederate counterparts; and his maneuvers from the perspective of classic warfare. Also presented are insightful accounts of Grant’s contentious relationship with John A. McClernand during the campaign; interactions between hostile Confederate civilians and Union army troops; and the planning behind such battles as Grierson’s Raid, Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion Hill, and Big Black River Bridge.

Bosbury is the second parish history to be produced by the Trust for the Victoria County History of Herefordshire, following the history of Eastnor published in 2013. Like Eastnor, Bosbury is an agricultural parish, near the market town of Ledbury. It covers a relatively large area below the western slopes of the Malvern Hills. In the Middle Ages Bosbury was the site of one of the favourite residences of the bishops of Hereford; in the western part of the parish, called Upleadon, was an estate belonging first to the Knights Templar and then to the Hospitallers. From the 16th century onwards both estates passed into the hands of tenants, leaving the parish without a major resident landowner until John Stedman and Edward Higgins successively developed the Bosbury House estate in the late 18th and the 19th century. Much of that estate was given after the First World War to create the Bosbury Farm Settlement for former soldiers. The economy of the parish has always been agricultural, mixed farming being practised. Orchards have been important, particularly on the higher ground in the northern part of the parish, and hops have been grown since the 17th century. By the late 19th century the lack of industry, and indeed of any major roads, made the parish appear an oasis of rural peace. The many timber-framed buildings, particularly those along the village street, and the parish church with its detached bell tower, attracted visitors and some new residents, but the parish avoided any large-scale 20th-century development.

Exploring the changing character of Harwich, Dovercourt and Parkeston through the course of the 19th century, included in this book is the economic, social and political history of the borough. The book provides an overview of the development of areas such as education, religion, public health with a strong focus on Harwich’s maritime history. The borough of Harwich, including the parish of Dovercourt, lies in the far north east corner of Essex. Its coastal location as a natural harbour at the mouth of the Orwell river dictated that Harwich had a prominent role as a port and naval base from the 14th century onwards. In the 19th century Harwich retained its military function, particularly during the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. The port declined economically as a result of losing the continental packet service in the 1830s, but it was rejuvenated by the opening of the railway in 1854. Dovercourt grew as a residential area and seaside resort in the second half of the 19th century, although the rest of the parish retained much of its traditional agricultural character. The opening of the port at nearby Parkeston in 1883 led to a rapid growth in both passenger traffic and trade to and from the continent.

The parish of Newport lies in the valley of the river Cam in north-west Essex about three and a half miles south-west of the market town of Saffron Walden, and a short distance from the Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire borders. It probably originated in the early 10th century as a royal foundation, and it soon developed some urban features such as a market. Its position on an important through route between London and East Anglia gave it a more varied character than some of its neighbouring villages, and the coming of the railway in the 19th century led to the establishment of a gas works and maltings. Even so, it remained a largely agricultural community until the mid 20th century, but thereafter its position as a thoroughfare village helped to establish Newport as a community with most of its adult population finding work elsewhere, some in London.

This book explores the varying character of Newport over eleven centuries. It examines the changing patterns of landownership, social structure and economy of the village and its institutions, not least its 16th-century grammar school. It also discusses the part played, especially in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, by the owners of Shortgrove Hall, within the parish, and Quendon Hall, a few miles to the south.

The story of Southend’s growth as a town and resort in the Victorian and Edwardian periods is told here in this new history of Southend.

As the nearest seaside resort to London, the town’s development has been determined in large part by the impact of its seasonal visitors. Yet it was the year-round movement of people from other parts of Essex, England and from the European continent in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries that was to have a lasting effect on the character of the town.

Richly illustrated and drawing from original sources, this volume offers new perspectives on the developments that laid the foundations of Southend as we know it today. Its thematic chapters chart the physical expansion of housing in the period and the development of the resort’s infrastructure and economy, among other topics. Although concentrating on Southend and its resort, chapters on agricultural depression and land speculation, education, clubs and societies and unemployment expand the book’s regional focus to neighbouring areas, making this valuable reading for anyone interested in the history of Essex and the UK’s seaside towns.

The familiar image of Cheltenham, a large and prosperous former spa town, world-famous on account of its Georgian and Regency architecture, its festivals and educational establishments, masks an earlier history. While numerous descriptions of the town have been published over the years, most say little about the many centuries of its existence before the 1740s, when it began to develop as a fashionable resort. This is the fullest account ever attempted to chronicle those centuries, from the late Saxon period until the 18th century. In this period, Cheltenham developed into a successful small town, ranged along a single main street, with the market and trades serving not only its own needs but also those of the surrounding countryside. It draws on a range of documentary sources preserved in local and national archives, many of them never examined in detail before. It therefore helps to explain the foundations upon which present-day Cheltenham was constructed.

Yate is a town in South Gloucestershire, north-east of Bristol. Its ancient parish extended across a largely flat vale, which until the 13th century lay within Horwood forest, and was then cleared, inclosed and farmed as rich pasture by the tenants of the influential owners of its three manors. A limestone ridge fringing the vale provided good building stone, and across the parish seams of coal and a rare mineral - celestine - have been exploited until recent times. Yate lay on an important early route between Bristol and Oxford, and its mineral wealth attracted early railway links, so that it was well placed for industrial development. Bristol-based industries moved there during the decades after 1900, including wartime aviation production, so that Yate's population and housing began to increase.

During the 1950s a 'new town' plan was devised which carefully controlled Yate's expansion, and included pioneering housing estate design, diverse industrial development and a large and progressive shopping mall. Yate's boundaries were redrawn in 1988, and the population of this vibrant, modern town now exceeds 20,000.

Tracing the history of two small, closely-linked parishes which lie to the south of Basingstoke on the edge of the chalk downlands, and a third parish, Hatch (abandoned towards the end of the 14th century and has formed part of both of the others), Cliddesden, Hatch and Farleigh Wallop is the latest publication from the Victoria County History of Hampshire project. Each settlement has a common manorial descent from the 15th century onwards and they were managed as components of a single estate under the lordship of the Wallop family from their seat at Farleigh House. This volume discusses the manorial owners and the development of the estate, and also includes much more about the lives and activities of ordinary people living and working in the settlements.   Religious and social history of the area is covered and the survival of an unusually full set of records has enabled the history of the school to be told in detail. This, coupled with lively tales of social activities, provides a fascinating picture of rural life as it was and as it has become in the 21st century – largely a home for commuters, with Hatch absorbed into an ever-growing Basingstoke and farming undertaken from one centre across nearly all the land.   Published by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, this is the fourth volume from the Victoria County History of Hampshire following Mapledurwell, Steventon and Basingstoke: a Medieval Town c.1000–c.1600. Each title provides a scholarly account of individual villages and towns of interest to their inhabitants, those in the wider area and to those beyond Hampshire itself.

Eastnor is the first parish history to be produced by the Trust for the Victoria County History of Herefordshire, and complements some of the work on Ledbury undertaken for the Heritage Lottery-funded England’s Past for Everyone project between 2005 and 2009. In its expanded treatment of the parish history, emphasising the economy and society of the parish as well as landownership and religious life, Eastnor is modelled on the first individual VCH parish history to be published, that of Mapledurwell, Hampshire, in 2012. Eastnor lies at the southern end of the Malvern Hills and has always been an agricultural parish. In the 19th and 20th centuries it was dominated by the Castle, built between 1812 and 1820, and by its owners, the Somers Cocks family, Barons and later Earls Somers, and their descendants. The Somers Cocks owned most of the land in the parish and employed many of its inhabitants, and this ownership saved the parish and its many timber-framed houses from modern development. In earlier centuries the pattern of land ownership was very different; at the time of Domesday Book the bishop of Hereford’s manor covered the whole parish. From the later Middle Ages the owners of small freeholds extended their holdings, so that in the 16th and 17th centuries several gentry families owned small estates in the parish. In the course of the 18th century these were bought up by the Somers Cocks family. This book explores, using the extensive archival records, how these changes in land ownership affected the inhabitants of the parish and the way in which the land was farmed.

Basingstoke is frequently seen as a very modern town, the product of the last decades of the 20th century. In reality it has a long, rich and prosperous history. From its beginnings c.1000 it became a significant market centre for the area around, and a place on the route to London from the west. By 1500 it was among the top 60 towns in England by wealth and taxpayers, and the centre of a major industrial area, whose manufactured cloths formed part of international patterns of trade. Moreover, it is well documented particularly for the 15th and 16th century, when it was at its peak, and should provide a useful addition to the limited number of studies of small medieval towns. Much of the old town has been swept away by the shopping centre, but something of the medieval footprint survives in its street beyond this, in a few surviving buildings and above all in its magnificent church. This book examines these features as well as the families, whether outsiders or locals, who made the most of the new thriving economic conditions, and whose dynamism helped create the town’s expansion.

Steventon, a chalkland village near Basingstoke, is best known because Jane Austen, the famous novelist and daughter of the local rector, spent the first 25 years of her life here. Unlike Chawton and Bath, no house or museum commemorates the author’s memory in Steventon but this new history explains how family life and observation of north Hampshire society shaped her early literary career. She wrote early versions of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey in Steventon from 1796 to 1798, drawing on local society for inspiration for characters, manners and sentiments.

But the village had a rich history before and after its famous novelist and there are many other reasons to enjoy this book. Steventon is a typical southern chalkland settlement whose history provides examples of downland agriculture, of agricultural improvements, a scandalous landlord who was driven out of the village by his son and excommunicated by the archbishop of Canterbury, a new Victorian manor house, of landlord–tenant relations and much else. It discusses the social, economic and religious lives of the ordinary people of the village together with the lords of the manor.

This is the second parish history to be published by the new Victoria History of Hampshire group, providing scholarly studies of individual places. It should be of interest to those living in and beyond the county. The first new parish history by the group, Mapledurwell, was published in 2012.

Scenic and rural, the parish of Cradley stretches down westwards from the Malvern Hills, bordered by Worcestershire to the north and east. It is one of the largest parishes in Herefordshire, and from the medieval period to the nineteenth century was populous and prosperous. Cradley manor was a valuable holding of the medieval bishops of Hereford. The ecclesiastical benefice, Anglo-Saxon in origin, was equally lucrative, frequently passing nepotistically to well-connected young priests; however, such connections did not prevent one thirteenth-century rector being outlawed for murder! The expanding number of manors in the parish, from the thirteenth century onwards, resulted in a fragmented model of land ownership and the development of a powerful body of wealthy yeomanry, shaping the distinctive character of the parish and its governance in the early modern period.

Drawing extensively on local archival sources, this volume analyses, among other topics, the centrality of agriculture to the parish's story, charting Cradley's socio-economic growth from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, before its subsequent decline. As such, this book constitutes an important contribution to English local history, exploring the prosperity that could be enjoyed by parishes in fertile Eastern Herefordshire, and the impact of changes in the national economy upon rural, agrarian communities.

Eastnor is the first parish history to be produced by the Trust for the Victoria County History of Herefordshire, and complements some of the work on Ledbury undertaken for the Heritage Lottery-funded England’s Past for Everyone project between 2005 and 2009. In its expanded treatment of the parish history, emphasising the economy and society of the parish as well as landownership and religious life, Eastnor is modelled on the first individual VCH parish history to be published, that of Mapledurwell, Hampshire, in 2012. Eastnor lies at the southern end of the Malvern Hills and has always been an agricultural parish. In the 19th and 20th centuries it was dominated by the Castle, built between 1812 and 1820, and by its owners, the Somers Cocks family, Barons and later Earls Somers, and their descendants. The Somers Cocks owned most of the land in the parish and employed many of its inhabitants, and this ownership saved the parish and its many timber-framed houses from modern development. In earlier centuries the pattern of land ownership was very different; at the time of Domesday Book the bishop of Hereford’s manor covered the whole parish. From the later Middle Ages the owners of small freeholds extended their holdings, so that in the 16th and 17th centuries several gentry families owned small estates in the parish. In the course of the 18th century these were bought up by the Somers Cocks family. This book explores, using the extensive archival records, how these changes in land ownership affected the inhabitants of the parish and the way in which the land was farmed.

Buckminster and Sewstern, in north-east Leicestershire, are two small villages within a single parish, and although both were established before 1086, they have developed different characters. Buckminster was purely an agricultural village until the 1790s, when Sir William Manners enlarged a small park, built a mansion and began to create an estate village. Many of the houses are of red brick, and were built for estate employees by the 9th earl of Dysart between 1878 and 1935, as part of a programme of village improvements. All the land, residential and commercial properties in Buckminster were held in 2017 by the Tollemache family, descendants of Sir William and Lord Dysart. In contrast, Sewstern’s houses are individual in character, and mostly built from local limestone. Before the 20th century, many had large paddocks to the rear. The village is near the presumed ancient route known as Sewstern Lane, and a wide range of trades were followed between the 14th and 19th centuries, until the age of the railways ended the passing trade. Land in both villages was quarried for ironstone in the 20th century, then reinstated for farmland, resulting in fields that are several feet below the level of the roads and property curtilages. This book explores the similarities and differences between the two villages over more than a thousand years of recorded history.  

The parish of Castle Donington  in north-west Leicestershire lies on the south bank of the river Trent, 20 miles north-west of Leicester and 8 miles south-east of Derby. A nucleated village developed on the present site more than 1,000 years ago. A castle was built in the 1150s, and several features of a town soon developed, including a market, fair and hospital. Secondary settlements grew up alongside the Trent, by the King’s Mills and at Cavendish Bridge, the site of an important medieval ferry. Donington Park, which originated in the early 13th century as a hunting park, became a separate estate of the earls of Huntingdon in the late 16th century. Later history has been shaped by strong religious nonconformity and the growth and then decline of traditional industries in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since then, modern transport links, including East Midlands Airport in the south of the parish, have delivered new employment opportunities. Castle Donington in the early 21st century is thriving. Many people travel in daily to work, and thousands more visit the motor-racing circuit at Donington Park and other leisure attractions each year, yet few know of the parish’s rich history. This book, the first in the Leicestershire VCH series since 1964, examines the changing patterns of landscape, landownership, working lives, social structure and religious worship in Castle Donington across many centuries, and includes the settlements at King’s Mills and Cavendish Bridge. It will be of interest to local residents, visitors, family and local historians.

entirely wrongly) Kensington?

. This period was one of rapid urban transformation in the parish, as the large aristocratic riverside houses of the 17th century gave way to a bustling centre of commerce and culture in the 18th. The slums that developed in the 19th century were then swept away by the grand constructions of the Royal Courts of Justice and the Victoria Embankment, followed by the new thoroughfares of Aldwych and Kingsway, which are still the major landmarks in the area. Characterised by its contrasts, St Clement Danes was home to a mix of rich and poor residents, including lawyers, artisans, servants and prostitutes. The history of this fascinating area introduces a cast of characters ranging from the Twinings tea-trading family, to the rowdy theatre-going butchers of Clare Market and from the famous Samuel Johnson, to the infamous pornographers of Holywell Street. This book also unpicks the complicated structure of local government in the parish, and provides detailed accounts of the parish schools and charities.

The township of Wem lies on the North Shropshire Plain, about nine miles north of Shrewsbury. The centre of a much larger medieval manor and parish, the township consists of the small medieval market town and its immediate rural hinterland. Anglo-Saxon settlements existed in the area but the town developed from a Norman foundation, with a castle, parish church, market and water mill. The urban area of the township, ‘within the bars’, was distinguished from the rural, ‘without the bars’. Burgages were laid out, with a customary borough-hold tenure, but the borough never attained corporate status. Isolated from the main regional transport routes, Wem developed as a local centre of government and trade in agricultural produce, especially cheese. It was thrust onto the national stage in 1642 when Parliamentarians defeated a Royalist attack and held the town for the duration of the Civil War. The ‘great fire’ of 1677 then destroyed most of the medieval buildings in the town centre, leading to its predominantly Georgian and Victorian appearance today. The decline in agricultural employment and the withdrawal of services and industries from small market towns like Wem in recent decades is a challenge, met by the advantage of the railway station to residents who work elsewhere but choose the town as a place to live.

When Margaret Thatcher called in 1979 for a return to Victorian values such as hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and national pride, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock responded that “Victorian values” also included “cruelty, misery, drudgery, squalor, and ignorance.”

The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is an in-depth look at the ways that the twentieth century reacted to and reimagined its predecessor. It considers how the Victorian inheritance has been represented in literature, politics, film, and visual culture; the ways in which modernists and progressives have sought to differentiate themselves from an image of the Victorian; and how conservatives (and some liberals) have sought to revive elements of nineteenth-century life. Nostalgic and critical impulses combine to fix an understanding of the Victorians in the popular imagination.

Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture.

Although more than one hundred years have passed since the death of Queen Victoria, the impact of her time is still fresh. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror speaks to diverse audiences in literary and cultural studies, in addition to those interested in visual culture and contemporary politics, and situates detailed close readings of literary and cinematic texts in the context of a larger argument about the legacies of an era not as distant as we might like to think.

This groundbreaking history of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) examines, for the first time in any language, how General Francisco Franco and his Nationalist forces managed state finance and economic production, and mobilized support from elites and middle-class Spaniards, to achieve their eventual victory over Spanish Republicans and the revolutionary left.
    The Spanish Nationalists are exceptional among counter-revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, Michael Seidman demonstrates, because they avoided the inflation and shortages of food and military supplies that stymied not only their Republican adversaries but also their counter-revolutionary counterparts—the Russian Whites and Chinese Nationalists. He documents how Franco’s highly repressive and tightly controlled regime produced food for troops and civilians; regular pay for soldiers, farmers, and factory workers; and protection of property rights for both large and small landowners. These factors, combined with the Nationalists’ pro-Catholic and anti-Jewish propaganda, reinforced solidarity in the Nationalist zone.
    Seidman concludes that, unlike the victorious Spanish Nationalists, the Russian and Chinese bourgeoisie were weakened by the economic and social upheaval of the two world wars and succumbed in each case to the surging revolutionary left.