Chocolate Mixer

by Jason Armstrong

While making her favorite snack with her Daddy, little Sofia makes an amazing discovery about herself! Her realization changes the way she sees this colorful world. Filled with wonder and questions, Sofia journeys into a world that isn’t just black or white, but a beautiful rainbow of colors. This book is the story of a little girl learning that she is Multiracial. “Chocolate Mixer” addresses the common questions our children may ask about a world filled with different cultures, skin-colors and ways of life, and how even our own parents can look so different from one another.

Cornish Guernseys & Knitfrocks

by Mary Wright

In late 19th century Cornwall hand-knitting was a vital cottage industry and coastal villages developed their own distinctive patterns and names for the traditional navy blue guernsey or knit-frock. Contract-knitting - the occupation of many Cornish women - had died out by the 1920s and was almost forgotten until author Mary Wright started asking old people what they remembered of it. Her research has resulted in a remarkable picture of social history. Cornish Guernseys & Knit-frocks includes many delightful contemporary photographs, and detailed instructions and charts show how to knit a Cornish guernsey incorporating one of thirty local patterns.

Flushed With Pride

The Story of Thomas Crapper

by Wallace Reyburn

Flushed With Pride celebrates the life and times of Thomas Crapper, the Victorian sanitary ware manufacturer who revolutionised the nation's water closets. This new edition has been updated by Simon Kirby, the Managing Director of the Thomas Crapper Company.

Across Great Divides

by Monique Roy

Across Great Divides is a timeless story of the upheavals of war, the power of family, and the resiliency of human spirit. When Hitler came to power in 1933, one Jewish family refused to be destroyed and defied the Nazis only to come up against another struggle—confronting apartheid in South Africa. The novel chronicles the story of Eva and Inge, two identical twin sisters growing up in Nazi Germany. As Jews, life becomes increasingly difficult for them and their family under the Nazi regime. After witnessing the horrors of Kristallnacht, they realize they must leave their beloved homeland if they hope to survive. They travel to Antwerp, Belgium, and then on to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, chasing the diamond trade in hopes of finding work for their father, a diamond merchant. Finally, they find a home in beautiful South Africa and begin to settle down. But just as things begin to feel safe, their new home becomes caught up in it’s own battles of bigotry and hate under the National Party’s demand for an apartheid South Africa. Eva and Inge wonder if they will ever be allowed to live in peace, though they cling to the hope for a better day when there will be “an understanding of the past, compassion for all humanity, and …hope and courage to move forward across great divides.” Worldwide rights are available for this novel. I would like to sell Across Great Divides in Europe, Africa and Asia. The readership for Across Great Divides are history buffs, both female and male, and all ages, from late teens through adult.

Studies on Karachi

Papers Presented at the Karachi Conference 2013

by Editor(s): Sabiah Askari

The conference on Karachi in 2013 was the first event arranged by a newly-created body, The Karachi Conference Foundation, designed to deliberate on all aspects of the city’s life. This book, bringing together the papers presented at the Conference, represents a landmark in scholarship on the mega-city and its issues. It is always a matter of great interest to see how certain societies have developed, starting out as Stone Age sites and flourishing as throbbing urban centres. While not every stage of this process is always documented, the records of remnants collected often help in painting a portrait that provides insights into this transformation. This is what Studies on Karachi does.Lay readers and scholars in a range of different disciplines with an interest in how a sleepy settlement in the late medieval period developed into a mega-city will find this book particularly useful. What emerges from the various chapters is the depiction of a city that, despite its vibrancy, is afflicted with numerous problems, ranging from poor planning to colossal mismanagement.Women, marginalized communities, neglected areas, issues of planning and development, and the history, and the anthropology of Karachi are all particular foci of attention throughout the book.

Living in Liverpool

A Collection of Sources for Family, Local and Social Historians

by Author(s): Alastair Wilcox

Liverpool was a city whose seemingly boundless opportunities bred wealth for the ambitious few and an often precarious lifestyle for its toiling masses. But how far can we penetrate that lost world of working class life in Liverpool? Is it possible to recreate that bustling, noisy, active city? Fortunately, Liverpool’s working classes were being watched. Recording (often, it must be said, with horror) their lifestyles, were a mixture of social commentators. Chief amongst these was local journalist, Hugh Shimmin, and a fresh selection of his best writings is reprinted here. But the observations of others, such as the nationally famous George Sims and the locally renowned Dr Duncan, are to be found within this selection as well. The work of less well-known, but equally remarkable, writers and statisticians who recorded the habits, health, housing, wages and religious affiliations of Liverpool is also included in this collection of over forty key sources. The sources have been given an introduction to put them into a context which will enable their use for general interest and educational purposes by social, local and family historians.

A Most Extraordinary, Everyday Family Story of Coming to the New World, 1660 – 2016

by Author(s): Clyde R. Forsberg Jr.

What is the American Dream, truly? This American social, cultural, and working-class family history, spanning some four centuries, represents a deeply personal quest for an answer from an unlikely source, namely the author’s own European progenitors. Because of their Mormon faith, their stories have been preserved, but not told. What they have to say about the American Dream is noteworthy. For the huge bulk of the author’s immediate family, their American Dream was not the American Dream; their reports and narratives, in principle, stand well outside the fantastic story of “liberty and justice for all” in the “land of the brave.” Indeed, their economic fortunes, or lack thereof, did not conform to the pattern; and most failed to go from being the vanquished of Europe to the victorious of America. For their trouble, and largely because of their Mormonism, they were cast in the role of America’s Caliban. Their American Dream may have been only to wake up from what quickly became a nightmare, especially for the scores of women and children who paid the ultimate price. Importantly, A Most Extraordinary, Everyday Family Story of Coming to the New World, 1660–2016 is a cautionary tale in an auto-ethnographical vein, and suggests that coming to the United States of America was often not worth such sacrifice.

Transcribing the Graves of All Saints Church, Fenagh, County Carlow, Ireland

Sleeping Histories

by Author(s): Susan Ni Chuileann

In a sleepy village nestled deep in County Carlow, Ireland, rests a small churchyard filled with ancient headstones. Who knew that one woman’s daily walk through this leafy graveyard would unravel stories of landlords, Cromwellian soldiers, bankers, Quakers, and twins whose parents have never been found?This book follows the author’s journey of transcribing gravestones as a hobby, detailing the village church and the secrets buried within its graves. It illustrates how information on headstones allows a glimpse at long-forgotten social conditions, politics, religion and grave robbing. It highlights the social lives of headstones and touches on ways the famine, typhoid and child mortality affected parts of Carlow, and a selection of sketches show the reader the beauty of Fenagh and its people.

Family History in Lancashire

Issues and Approaches

by Editor(s): Andrew Gritt

This book explores the history of the family in Lancashire during and after industrialisation. The family is society’s most basic building block and, as each contributor shows, its ability to adapt to circumstances is one of its most enduring qualities. Economic change created social stresses which, whilst resulting in administrative and institutional change, were primarily absorbed within family groups. Indeed, it could be argued that the family was society’s most effective safety valve and shock absorber, as individuals responded to the pressures created by industrialisation with its associated problems. This book brings together the work of leading historians who have each made unique contributions to our understanding of the family in the North West.

We Are What We Remember

The American Past Through Commemoration

by Editor(s): Jeffrey Lee Meriwether and Laura Mattoon D’Amore

Commemorative practices are revised and rebuilt based on the spirit of the time in which they are re/created. Historians sometimes imagine that commemoration captures history, but actually commemoration creates new narratives about history that allow people to interact with the past in a way that they find meaningful. As our social values change (race, gender, religion, sexuality, class), our commemorations do, too. We Are What We Remember: The American Past Through Commemoration, analyzes current trends in the study of historical memory that are particularly relevant to our own present – our biases, our politics, our contextual moment – and strive to name forgotten, overlooked, and denied pasts in traditional histories. Race, gender, and sexuality, for example, raise questions about our most treasured myths: where were the slaves at Jamestowne? How do women or lesbians protect and preserve their own histories, when no one else wants to write them? Our current social climate allows us to question authority, and especially the authoritative definitions of nation, patriotism, and heroism, and belonging. How do we “un-commemorate” things that were “mis-commemorated” in the past? How do we repair the damage done by past commemorations? The chapters in this book, contributed by eighteen emerging and established scholars, examine these modern questions that entirely reimagine the landscape of commemoration as it has been practiced, and studied, before.

St. John’s Fever and Lock Hospital Limerick, 1780-1890

by Author(s): Patricia M. Bennis

Before 1780 there was no public provision for the hospital treatment of fever patients, “St. John’s being the first building of the kind erected in the empire”. They suffered and died in their homes under the combined pressure of poverty and disease. The spread of fever was controlled by admitting patients to hospital and isolating them from the rest of the community. Epidemics were frequent. This Irish study deals to a large extent with the 1820s, the cholera epidemic of 1832 and with the Great Famine of the 1840s—a period when St. John’s Hospital admitted more than 5,000 fever-ridden patients.

The Future of Post-Human Formal Science

A Preface to a New Theory of Abstraction and Application

by Author(s): Peter Baofu

What exactly is so appealing in formal science, such that its influence can be seen in numerous disciplines nowadays, for practical purposes like better functionality, performance, and so on—as Pythagoras already famously said in antiquity: “Number is the ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and demons”?This contemporary addiction to practical convenience in formal science has turned a blind eye to its other side, which has impoverished both our knowledge of reality and the well-being of our lifeworld.Contrary to conventional wisdom, the other side of this appealing addiction has yet to be comprehensively understood, nor has the fact that its practical convenience is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that the proponents of formal science would like us to believe. Needless to say, this by no means suggests that formal science should not be used for practical purposes, or that the literature in formal science (and other related fields like computer science, information theory, microeconomics, decision theory, statistics, and linguistics, just to cite a few of them) should be dismissed. Of course, neither of these two extreme views is reasonable either.Instead, this book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of formal science, especially in relation to systems theory for practical convenience—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). In the end, this book offers a new theory to transcend the existing approaches in the literature in a new direction not thought of before. This seminal project is to fundamentally alter the way that we think about formal science, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.

We Are What We Remember

The American Past Through Commemoration

by Editor(s): Jeffrey Lee Meriwether and Laura Mattoon D’Amore

Commemorative practices are revised and rebuilt based on the spirit of the time in which they are re/created. Historians sometimes imagine that commemoration captures history, but actually commemoration creates new narratives about history that allow people to interact with the past in a way that they find meaningful. As our social values change (race, gender, religion, sexuality, class), our commemorations do, too. We Are What We Remember: The American Past Through Commemoration, analyzes current trends in the study of historical memory that are particularly relevant to our own present – our biases, our politics, our contextual moment – and strive to name forgotten, overlooked, and denied pasts in traditional histories. Race, gender, and sexuality, for example, raise questions about our most treasured myths: where were the slaves at Jamestowne? How do women or lesbians protect and preserve their own histories, when no one else wants to write them? Our current social climate allows us to question authority, and especially the authoritative definitions of nation, patriotism, and heroism, and belonging. How do we “un-commemorate” things that were “mis-commemorated” in the past? How do we repair the damage done by past commemorations? The chapters in this book, contributed by eighteen emerging and established scholars, examine these modern questions that entirely reimagine the landscape of commemoration as it has been practiced, and studied, before.

Living in Liverpool

A Collection of Sources for Family, Local and Social Historians

by Author(s): Alastair Wilcox

Liverpool was a city whose seemingly boundless opportunities bred wealth for the ambitious few and an often precarious lifestyle for its toiling masses. But how far can we penetrate that lost world of working class life in Liverpool? Is it possible to recreate that bustling, noisy, active city? Fortunately, Liverpool’s working classes were being watched. Recording (often, it must be said, with horror) their lifestyles, were a mixture of social commentators. Chief amongst these was local journalist, Hugh Shimmin, and a fresh selection of his best writings is reprinted here. But the observations of others, such as the nationally famous George Sims and the locally renowned Dr Duncan, are to be found within this selection as well. The work of less well-known, but equally remarkable, writers and statisticians who recorded the habits, health, housing, wages and religious affiliations of Liverpool is also included in this collection of over forty key sources. The sources have been given an introduction to put them into a context which will enable their use for general interest and educational purposes by social, local and family historians.

Translation, History and Arts

New Horizons in Asian Interdisciplinary Humanities Research

by Editor(s): Meng JI, UKAI Atsuko

Translation, History and Arts: New Horizons in Asian Interdisciplinary Humanities Research is a collection of selected research papers originally presented at the Todai Forum in October 2011 in Lyon, France, under the auspices of the University of Tokyo, Japan. Papers selected for inclusion in this book stand at the frontier of interdisciplinary humanities research, and are concerned with translation and cross-cultural studies, social and art history, and comparative area studies. A central theme of the papers is the development of a new discursive narrative of local histories against the backdrop of world history. Through case studies of historical and modern socio-cultural events occurring in different regions and countries, this book strives to advance our understanding of the dynamic and complex interactions among distinct social and cultural systems in world history.

Solway Country

Land, Life and Livelihood in the Western Border Region of England and Scotland

by Author(s): Allen J. Scott

The Solway Country – the lands surrounding the inner Solway Firth – constitutes one of the many small regional worlds of the British Isles that are remarkable for the ways in which their landscapes evoke a powerful sense of territorial identity rooted not only in their physical appeal, but also in the richness and distinctiveness of their human history and geography. The Solway Country is an archetypical but hitherto little known exemplar of places like these.This book captures the spirit and substance of the Solway Country’s allure by means of a series of layered narratives dealing with its natural milieu, its past social and political turmoil, its changing forms of rural and agrarian life, and its responses to the industrial and urban forces that were unleashed in Britain after the eighteenth century. The Solway Country has the added charm of being partly in England and partly in Scotland, so that its personality partakes of elements of both. At the same time, the region exhibits a composite geographic unity derived from the central physical feature of the Solway Firth itself and from the many common aspects of local life and livelihood that have left deep imprints on the landscape. This unity is expressed symbolically in the peculiar hybrid culture of ballads and songs that emerged alongside the theft, murder, and mayhem that raged in the Anglo-Scottish marchlands in the days of the border reivers.

Studies on Karachi

Papers Presented at the Karachi Conference 2013

by Editor(s): Sabiah Askari

The conference on Karachi in 2013 was the first event arranged by a newly-created body, The Karachi Conference Foundation, designed to deliberate on all aspects of the city’s life. This book, bringing together the papers presented at the Conference, represents a landmark in scholarship on the mega-city and its issues. It is always a matter of great interest to see how certain societies have developed, starting out as Stone Age sites and flourishing as throbbing urban centres. While not every stage of this process is always documented, the records of remnants collected often help in painting a portrait that provides insights into this transformation. This is what Studies on Karachi does.Lay readers and scholars in a range of different disciplines with an interest in how a sleepy settlement in the late medieval period developed into a mega-city will find this book particularly useful. What emerges from the various chapters is the depiction of a city that, despite its vibrancy, is afflicted with numerous problems, ranging from poor planning to colossal mismanagement.Women, marginalized communities, neglected areas, issues of planning and development, and the history, and the anthropology of Karachi are all particular foci of attention throughout the book.

Remembering Home in a Time of Mobility

Memory, Nostalgia and Melancholy

by Editor(s): Maja Mikula

Memory, nostalgia and melancholy have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades. Numerous critics of globalisation, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism have posited an overwhelming feeling of homelessness not only among people who have been displaced from their original home/lands, but also among those who feel estranged from their places of origin due to rapid social change or environmental decline. Arguably, homesickness is prevalent in today’s developed world, and can be – and sometimes indeed is – felt even for times and places unrelated to someone’s personal roots.Memory has been mobilised to justify recent conflicts, to question mainstream interpretations of past events, or to demand compensation for the suffering of earlier generations. Nostalgia has been employed as a “utopia in reverse”, revealing more about our unattainable “ideal present”, than about the elusive “lost” past it invokes. A corollary of nostalgia in the late modern politics of loss, melancholy has been a way of dis-identifying from both the horrors of recent history, and the growing insecurities of the present.The volume raises complex questions related to the ways people have coped with displacement and time-space compression, arguably the two most manifest symptoms of late modernity. How do we grapple with the traumatic experience of the loss of home? What strategies do we use, and what is their underlying politics? How do they intersect with identity positions, such as gender, class and sexuality? How might they contribute to the preservation of national cultures? How has our understanding of home changed in a time of mobility and flow? Spanning multiple Eurasian and Northern American cultural contexts, the book is of interest to an international academic readership within the fields of cultural studies, memory studies, gender studies, literature, art, performance, film and media studies.

Transcribing the Graves of All Saints Church, Fenagh, County Carlow, Ireland

Sleeping Histories

by Author(s): Susan Ni Chuileann

In a sleepy village nestled deep in County Carlow, Ireland, rests a small churchyard filled with ancient headstones. Who knew that one woman’s daily walk through this leafy graveyard would unravel stories of landlords, Cromwellian soldiers, bankers, Quakers, and twins whose parents have never been found?This book follows the author’s journey of transcribing gravestones as a hobby, detailing the village church and the secrets buried within its graves. It illustrates how information on headstones allows a glimpse at long-forgotten social conditions, politics, religion and grave robbing. It highlights the social lives of headstones and touches on ways the famine, typhoid and child mortality affected parts of Carlow, and a selection of sketches show the reader the beauty of Fenagh and its people.

A Most Extraordinary, Everyday Family Story of Coming to the New World, 1660 – 2016

by Author(s): Clyde R. Forsberg Jr.

What is the American Dream, truly? This American social, cultural, and working-class family history, spanning some four centuries, represents a deeply personal quest for an answer from an unlikely source, namely the author’s own European progenitors. Because of their Mormon faith, their stories have been preserved, but not told. What they have to say about the American Dream is noteworthy. For the huge bulk of the author’s immediate family, their American Dream was not the American Dream; their reports and narratives, in principle, stand well outside the fantastic story of “liberty and justice for all” in the “land of the brave.” Indeed, their economic fortunes, or lack thereof, did not conform to the pattern; and most failed to go from being the vanquished of Europe to the victorious of America. For their trouble, and largely because of their Mormonism, they were cast in the role of America’s Caliban. Their American Dream may have been only to wake up from what quickly became a nightmare, especially for the scores of women and children who paid the ultimate price. Importantly, A Most Extraordinary, Everyday Family Story of Coming to the New World, 1660–2016 is a cautionary tale in an auto-ethnographical vein, and suggests that coming to the United States of America was often not worth such sacrifice.