In 1941, 36 people from a small New England mill town went on a picnic to an island on the boat, Raven. The Raven and all the men, except the captain, were never found. The women and the captain were found, drowned. This novel tells of years of speculation and grief brought about by this mysterious tragedy.
Sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose, humans have transported plants and animals to new habitats around the world. Arriving in ever-increasing numbers to American soil, recent invaders have competed with, preyed on, hybridized with, and carried diseases to native species, transforming our ecosystems and creating anxiety among environmentalists and the general public. But is American anxiety over this crisis of ecological identity a recent phenomenon? Charting shifting attitudes to alien species since the 1850s, Peter Coates brings to light the rich cultural and historical aspects of this story by situating the history of immigrant flora and fauna within the wider context of human immigration. Through an illuminating series of particular invasions, including the English sparrow and the eucalyptus tree, what he finds is that we have always perceived plants and animals in relation to ourselves and the polities to which we belong. Setting the saga of human relations with the environment in the broad context of scientific, social, and cultural history, this thought-provoking book demonstrates how profoundly notions of nationality and debates over race and immigration have shaped American understandings of the natural world.
A vivid account of the rivalry between future president William Henry Harrison and the Shawnee chief Tecumseh—and of the Native American alliance that fought westward expansion—from the New York Times bestselling author of Astoria “Taut, multi-layered . . . a much-needed reevaluation of this crucial period of our nation’s history.”—Laurence Bergreen, author of Over the Edge of the World The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. In Gallop Toward the Sun, acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders. William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent Virginia family, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He journeyed west, became governor of the vast Indiana Territory, and sought statehood by attracting settlers and imposing one-sided treaties. Tecumseh, by all accounts one of the nineteenth century’s greatest leaders, belonged to an honored line of Shawnee warriors and chiefs. His father, killed while fighting the Virginians flooding into Kentucky, extracted a promise from his sons to “never give in” to the land-hungry Americans. An eloquent speaker, Tecumseh traveled from Minnesota to Florida and west to the Great Plains convincing far-flung tribes to join a great confederacy and face down their common enemy. Eager to stop U.S. expansion, the British backed Tecumseh’s confederacy in a series of battles during the forgotten western front of the War of 1812 that would determine control over the North American continent. Tecumseh’s brave stand was likely the last chance to protect Indigenous people from U.S. expansion—and prevent the upstart United States from becoming a world power. In this fast-paced narrative—with its sharply drawn characters, high-stakes diplomacy, and bloody battles—Peter Stark brings this pivotal moment to life.
This is an important and interesting book on aspects of our religious heritage which until now have escaped the investigation of scholars. History is all too often employed as a weapon for smiting the "infidel." So it was among religiously-minded people in 19th century England. By the beginning of the Victorian era, after the somnolence of the 18th century, religious enthusiasm among both clergy and laity in the established Church revived. This brought about such acrimonious differences it was a wonder they could be accommodated in the same Church. Provoked by a group of Oxford scholars who sought to show that the Church of England was neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant but a middle way between the two, Protestant militants were aroused to demonstrate against and even disrupt church services of which they disapproved. To remind English men and women of the glories of the Reformation they erected memorials in many towns to celebrate the heroic reputation of the martyrs who suffered in the reign of 'Bloody Mary.' Memorials required names and to find out who the victims were and where they met their end the memorial committees turned to the pages of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs, better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. A most effective work of propaganda in the days of religious warfare, it was reprinted in new editions. Now the target was no longer the Church of Rome, but the Anglo-Catholics or the alleged 'Romanisers.' A perplexing problem for the historian is what the Protestant martyrs actually believed. It is clearly naive to suppose that they died for 19th century parliamentary democracy and liberties. Foxe's criterion of Protestant martyrdom was hatred of Rome and in his anxiety to drum up the numbers he was reticent about or ignorant of the widely varying beliefs of his martyrs. The assumption of the 19th century Protestants was that the English people rose as one to reject popery, but it is impossible to accurately assess the support for state-imposed religious change. Surviving evidence, as the preamble to wills, seems to suggest that people for the most part simply acquiesced in what the government of the day decided was the 'true' religion.
Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure. Detection and Its Designs reads early detective fiction as a self-conscious form that is suspicious of the detective it ostensibly celebrates, and critical of the authorial power he wields in attempting to reconstruct the past and script a narrative of the crime. In readings of Godwin's Caleb Williams, Poe's Dupin stories, Dickens's Bleak House, Collins's The Moonstone, and Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Thoms argues that the detective's figurative writing emerges out of a desire to exert control over others and sometimes over himself. Detection and Its Designs demonstrates that, far from being a naïve form, early detective fiction grapples with the medium of storytelling itself. To pursue these inward-turning fictions is to uncover the detective's motives of controlling the representation of both himself and others, a discovery that in turn significantly undermines the authority of his solutions.
Presenting case studies of professional foresters from 1920 onwards, this text reveals a rich tradition of alternative and dissenting practices combined with professional and political orthodoxies. The aim is to illustrate the public and environmental challenges that engulf contemporary forestry.
During the late summer of 1915 Captain Aidan Liddell's gallant exploits filled many newspaper columns and he was feted as a national hero. Already decorated for bravery while serving with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, and it was as a pilot that he attracted national acclaim.Badly wounded over enemy occupied Belgium, Liddell lost consciousness as his two-seater RE5 aircraft was raked by machine gun fire, and plunged out of control towards the ground. Despite terrible injuries and the extensive damage to his machine, he somehow recovered from an inverted dive and flew on for a further half an hour to the safety of the Allied lines, so saving his observer and a valuable aircraft.For this action he was awarded the Victoria Cross, but did not live to receive Britain's highest gallantry award and succumbed to his wounds a month later. With a Smile and a Wave provides a vivid picture of the squalor and danger of war, the backbreaking hardship of trench life and of the challenges of pioneer air fighting. It draws extensively on Captain Liddell's own letters and diaries and exposes the character and courage of the man in his own often compelling and moving words. But it is a story not just of war, but of growing up in a devout and prosperous family, of a Jesuit education at Stonyhurst College, and of Edwardian Oxford before the Great War. It portrays the privileged lifestyle of the English country gentleman, and describes how a very close knit and patriotic family dealt with the adversity of war.
Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences — and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences — from anatomy to crystallography — are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity — or truth-to-nature or trained judgment — is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity — and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.
Between 1887 and 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, and his great Canon has become the most praised, most studied, and best-known chapter in the history of detective fiction. Over twenty thousand publications pertaining to the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon are known to have been published, most of them historical and critical studies. In addition, however, almost since the first stories appeared, such was their uniqueness and extraordinary attraction that other authors began writing stories based on or derived from them. A new genre had appeared: pastiches; parodies; burlesques; and stories that attempted to copy or rival the great detective himself. As the field widened, there was hardly a year in the twentieth century in which new short stories or novels did not appear. Many hundreds are now known to have been published, some of them written by authors well-known for their work in other literary fields. The non-canonical Sherlock Holmes literature not only constitutes a literary field of considerable historical interest, but includes many stories that are both enjoyable and fascinating in their own right. Although a large bibliography on these stories exists, and a few limited anthologies have been published, no attempt has previously been made to collect them all and discuss them comprehensively. The Alternative Sherlock Holmes does so: it provides a new and valuable approach to the Sherlock Holmes literature, as well as making available many works that have for years remained forgotten. Presented as an entertaining narrative, of interest to both the aficionado and the scholar, it provides full bibliographic data on virtually all the known stories in the field.
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