Tag Archives: History

A Year in Books/Day 54: The Prospect Before Her

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  • Title: The Prospect Before Her A History of Women in Western Europe Volume One 1500-1800
  • Author: Olwen Hufton
  • Year Published: 1995 (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.)
  • Year Purchased: 2002-2004
  • Source: Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller Company
  • About: A lengthy, serious study of what girls could expect from their lives, from the cradle to the grave, between the years 1500-1800 in Western Europe. This isn’t the most well-made volume, and is falling apart at the binding, but the scholarship and writing are first-class.
  • Motivation: I’m a feminist. I dig history and women’s studies.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 91: “The women involved were drawn not from the city of Lyons, unless they were the master’s daughters, but from the mountainous villages of the Forez, Besse and Bugey and parts of the Dauphine. They were known as silk-maker’s servants because they lived in (often sleeping under the looms) and like domestic servants they were paid on an annual basis or when they left the employment of the master. Like servants they started in their early teens and expected to work for about fifteen years before having saved enough to embark on matrimony.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9

A Year in Books/Day 53: The Illustrated History of the 19th Century

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  • Title: The Illustrated History of the 19th Century Month by Month Year by Year
  • Year Published: 2000 (Hackberry Press)
  • Year Purchased: 2002/2003
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: This is a thick encyclopedia devoted to the century that gave us Victoria and Dickens, Edison and Bernhardt, Lincoln and Eliot. It maintains a nice balance between text and illustrations.
  • Motivation: I love history, reference books and arcane data.
  • Times Read: Cover-to-cover:2/As reference tool: countless
  • Random Excerpt/Page 118: “A food scare is caused by an English chemistry professor, Frederick Accum, who publishes ‘Adulteration of Foods and Culinary Poisons’, showing that food on sale in Britain is usually adulterated, some with poisons, and has to flee to Berlin to avoid prosecution.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8 1/2
    Sarah Bernhardt, 1877

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A Year in Books/Day 48: Seeing Europe with Famous Authors

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  • Title: Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Vol. II Great Britain and Ireland Part Two
  • Editor: Francis W. Halsey
  • Year Published: 1914 (Funk & Wagnalls Company)
  • Year Purchased: September, 2010
  • Source: Springfield (OH) Antique Show & Flea Market
  • About: This tiny book was one of a ten-volume compilation series culled from previously published travel essays by famous authors. On hand are pieces by Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Boswell, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and others. Even in 1914, some of the essays were decades old. Now, they all read like history as well as travel-they remain fascinating word-gems of a time long ago surpassed by the frantic rhythms of our modern world.
  • Motivation: I bought this perfectly preserved first-edition copy while shopping for vintage lovelies for my December 2010 nuptials. It was too adorable and cheap ($3.00) to pass up. History and literature is a heady mix for this girl.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 54: “It is doubtful whether the name of any lighthouse is so familiar throughout the English-speaking world as the “Eddystone.” Certainly no other “pillar of fire by night, of cloud by day,” can offer so romantic a story of dogged engineering perseverance, of heartrending disappointments, disaster, blasted hopes, and brilliant success.”
  • Happiness Scale: 7 1/2
    English: photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson

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A Year in Books/Day 46: Scotch Whisky

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  • Title: Scotch Whisky A Liquid History
  • Author: Charles MacLean
  • Year Published: 2005 (Cassell Illustrated)
  • Year Purchased: 2009
  • Source: A dear friend.
  • About: The history of Scotch, covering the years 1494-1994.
  • Motivation: This book was a thank you gift from a close friend. My (now) husband and I love Scotch. In fact, my appreciation of and knowledge about the beverage helped him fall in love with me. Although this is the stuff of another story or ten, our mutual love of the drink has been a pretty constant thread in our relationship. Aw, romance!
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 37: “In 1707 Scotland was one of the poorest and most backward countries in Europe. Agriculture was at the stage it had reached centuries before; manufacturing, as we understand the term, did not exist. Even the gentry lived in relatively straitened circumstances-an average gentlewoman would possess no more than three or four fine dresses throughout her lifetime.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9 1/2

 

A Year in Books/Day 45: Haunted London

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English: Exterior of The Langham, London

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  • Title: Haunted London
  • Author: Richard Jones
  • Year Published: 2004 (Barnes & Noble Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2005
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: A photograph-rich travel book that blends traditional history with paranormal research.
  • Motivation: I’m a history-mad Anglophile with a penchant for off-the-beaten-path adventure.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 23: “A forerunner of London’s grand hotels, the Langham Hotel was built in 1864. Its Victorian splendor was host to such famous names as Mark Twain, Arnold Bennett, Napoleon III of France, and the composer Dvorak -who managed to offend the sensibilities of the management when, in an attempt to save money, he requested a double room for himself and his adult daughter.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9

A Year in Books/Day 41: Mary Queen of Scots

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  • Title: Mary Queen of Scots
  • Author: Marjorie Bowen
  • Year Published: First Edition-1934/This Edition: 1971 (Sphere Books Limited)
  • Year Purchased: 2001
  • Source: Book Harbor, Westerville, Ohio
  • About: A fine biography that gives the Scots queen her full due. A true classic.
  • Motivation: I have a largish collection of Tudor-themed books. Although I have never been strongly attached to Elizabeth’s cousin, I thought it was time to give a few feet of shelf space to the House of Stuart. I’m glad I did.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 200: “It was Sir Henry Killigrew who brought the official warning and the secret complaint to Edinburgh. He had his notes to make on the affairs, domestic and politic, of the young Queen of Scots who should, by the birth of her son, have been at the height of her triumph.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10
    Mary, Queen of Scots, who conspired with Engli...

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A Year in Books/Day 40: The World’s Most Notorious Women

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  • Title: The World’s Most Notorious Women Secrets, lies, murders, and scandals….The Notorious Acts of Women
  • Author: None listed. I cannot say that I blame them (see below).
  • Year Published: 2001/This Edition 2002 (ALVA PRESS)
  • Year Purchased: 2003/2004
  • Source: Via mail/unknown source
  • About: When I bought this book for a dollar or two, my hopes were admittedly pretty low. I thought it would be an easy, quick, silly beach-type read. Little did I know then how wrong I was. This is, without any doubt, the shoddiest book I have ever seen or read. If writing 2,000 words enumerating exactly how awful it is, in every damn way, was not wildly out of proportion to its inherent insignificance, I would probably do so. Continue reading →

A Year in Books/Day 34: A History of Ireland

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  • Title: A History of Ireland
  • Author: Mike Cronin
  • Year Published: 2001 (Palgrave)
  • Year Purchased: 2001/2002
  • Source: History Book Club
  • About: A compact, well-written account of the last 900 years of Irish history.
  • Motivation: I could read history tomes all day, every day. This volume is one of many I own on the Emerald Isle.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 15: “Following the favourable reaction from the Irish kings, Henry called an Irish synod together at Cashel. The synod brought the Irish Church
    Drawing by Albrecht Dürer of Irish soldiers.

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    back into line with the greater Church and enacted reforms which addressed Papal concerns. Through his actions, Henry brought a level of peace to Ireland which had been absent for years, reformed the Church and won the approval of the majority of the different native kings.”

  • Happiness Scale: 9

A Year in Books/Day 30: The Medieval World Europe 1100-1350

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  • Title: The Medieval World Europe 1100-1350
  • Author: Friedrich Heer
  • Year Published: 1961/This Edition: 1998 (WELCOME RAIN)
  • Year Purchased: 2000/2001
  • Source: Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller Company
    English: A medieval page presumably from a Boo...

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  • About: A modern, scholarly classic that remains enjoyably readable whilst sparing no attention to detail.
  • Motivation: I felt a need to brush up on my Medieval European history. No, really.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page: “Our contemporary European societies, both Western and Eastern, in many ways continue to live on their medieval inheritance. History is the present, and the present is history. When we look more closely into the crises and catastrophes, the hopes and fears of our own day, whether we know it or not we are concerned with developments whose origins can be traced back directly or indirectly to their source in the high Middle Ages.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9

A Year in Books/Day 24: Beneath the Diamond Sky

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  • Title: Beneath the Diamond in the Sky Haight Ashbury 1965-1970
  • Author: Barney Hoskyns
  • Year Published: 1997 (Simon & Schuster Editions)
  • Year Purchased: 2001/2002
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: A history of the ascent of the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco into the world’s greatest, if short-lived, hippie mecca. It is equal parts text and photos.
  • Motivation: Although my Mom was a hippie, and I have a natural kinship for this subject, I bought the book for a friend then living in the Bay Area. I decided to read it before popping it into the mail. I did, and ended up keeping it for my collection!
  • Times Read: 2 (with another reading on the horizon)
  • Random Excerpt/Page 31: “Kesey, thirty-one, married with three children, had already begun to assert himself as the charismatic ringleader of an anarchic post-beatnik scene around Palo Alto. A rugged, curly-haired farm boy from Oregon, he had arrived at Stanford University on a creative-writing fellowship in 1958, later moving into the artsy-boho enclave that was Perry Lane and helping himself to samples of LSD and mescaline during the Veterans’ Hospital tests. It was while working as a night attendant on the hospital’s psych ward that he conceived the idea for ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.
  • Happiness Scale: 9
    Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, California, USA

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