Eras Books

I found this 300 page volume of portraits and information on many Civil War persons englightening because there are pictures of the Famous and not so famous people who I have read and written about. I will treasure this volume for many years

This book is unique in its subject matter. It helps today's reader understand the importance of the entire cotton production, trade, and manufacture.

Ms. Willoughby writes that the cotton trade's impact rippled over many other segments of the national economy and she quotes from another writer that this fiber has been called the most significant ingredient in the economic life of the whole nation [United States] before 1860.

The book describes the connection of cotton to currency and to banking and shows in detail how the banking system was vastly different from our present financial institutions.

The author stresses that much of the cotton business depended on the reputaions of individual men from the planter to the final purchaser and she gives short biographical descriptions of many key individuals.

Transportation facilities were vital to the moving of the cotton from the farm or plantation to the mill. The book describes the importance of vessels and shipping in every phase of the process and also the part that the early railroads played in making important changes in the entire ecomomy.

I would give this book a 10.

Poststructural readings such as these have a lot to offer academia. The play of words, irony, and humor is a welcome addition to the literature of international relations scholarship, a much better influence than the sterility offered by empirical, positivist social science.

I purchased this book looking for photographs by John Collier, Jr., and found Russell Lee and Jack Delano, too. I absolutely must have more of their work and will continue to look. Looking back, it seems that in the 1960s, journalism photography was defined by action-packed scenes from the Vietnam War, but these photos of the 1930s and '40s are more a document of how people lived in these adobe villages of New Mexico, particularly around Taos, (but also the trainyards of Albuquerque, and Anglo villages like Pie Town). I had sought out Collier's photos because of their still-life art quality--and found more. All these photos are quiet; they are haunted, somber, and play in the imagination long after the book is placed back on the shelf. These photos are like objects of contemplation, meditations on a vanished way of life preserved forever on film, the faces of women and men, boys and girls captured for posterity.

Truly, I believe that the people in these photos were not poor--as we think of the Depression; they were rich in culture and family connection, rootedness to their villages. My favorite Collier photo is "Congregation leaving the church after mass, Trampas, New Mexico, 1943." The women are in their Sunday best clothing ("American" style), vulnerable to the wind and snow, but faithful to their customs and way of life, while the buildings all around are "quaint" adobe. The haunted quality of these b & w photos is similar to that of Ansel Adams's, "Moonrise, Hernandez, 1941"--depicting a Hispano village about to change forever because of World War II and the out-migration of villagers. Thank you forever to everyone involved with preserving these photos; soulful gratitude to the long-gone photographers.

Excellent photographs and wonderful stories about the history of steamboats on Lake Winnipesaukee. If you find a copy, buy it and treasure it!

In this fascinating new study, Valerie Steele shows how eroticism formed the basis of the Victorian ideal of feminine beauty and fashion, indeed, how the very concepts of beauty and fashion are in essence erotic. Far from being passive sex objects, Victorian women, like their modern counterparts, chose to emulate an erotic ideal as an aspect of their own self fulfillment and were not merely presenting themselves as men wanted to see them.

Fashion And Eroticism is not only a radical revision of our conventional understanding of Victorian fashion; it is also a major contribution to the history of women and sexuality. Steele offers a powerful and convincing new interpretation of the Victorian woman, who has traditionally been presented as strait-laced and prudish, her clothing an outward sign of her sexual repression and exploitation. Steele shows that the Victorians were, in fact, well aware that women had legs. Even the notorious corset was neither fetishistic nor an unhealthy instrument of torture, although its complex and ambivalent sexual symbolism aroused controversy.

Steele explodes the myth that progress triumphed over fashion. She explains how the twentieth century look of sexy, healthy beauty evolved from within the prewar world of fashion, and not as part of an anti fashion or dress reform movement. Her conclusions are based on prodigious documentary, visual, and material research (including the study of costume collections in the United States, great Britain, Europe, and even Japan), set within a sophisticated interpretive framework. Her use of psychoanalytic theory to explain the connection between fashion and eroticism is both lucid and persuasive, and her discussion of eroticism is sensible and precise, a far cry from the usual prurient and anecdotal histories of sexuality. Fashion And Eroticism approaches its subject from the perspective of the most recent work in women�s history and concluded that fashion and feminism are by no means irreconcilable.

Valerie Steele received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1983, and was the 1984 First Ladies Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution.

For those who like social history written by the comtempories of the actual events, this book is a delight. Mrs. Dana's own writing style is quick and to the point. The editors had the good sense not to get in her way. Thus, the reader gets the true flavor of what had to be an extraordinary event at that time. We just do not have that many contemporary observations from the softer sex. Mrs. Dana's comments are direct and insightful, not unlike those of another female diarists, Mary Chesnut.

This book provides an intimate description of Muslim women's lives in Basrah during the early part of the Twentieth Century. Van Ess first went to Basrah in 1909 to teach in a girl's school there, and stayed for over 50 years. During that time, she made many friends amongst the women in the city. She describes aspects of the lives of some of those women in this book. Topics covered include: marriage, birth and death customs, married life, polygamy and divorce, family relationships, religion and folk beliefs, housekeeping, and societal changes through the mid-1950s. The book is illustrated with a short section of black-and-white photographic plates.

The book provides good documentation of the everyday details of women's lives of the period. Van Ess had much greater opportunities to get to know women than either male writers or women travelers, and this is reflected in her detailed descriptions of family customs. Although the blurb on the jacket reads "A fascinating view of the vanished and romantic world of Arab women in the era of the veil," I'm not so sure the customs she describes here have entirely vanished yet. Perhaps many of the traditions were already disappearing from Iraq by the 1950s, but in my recent five-year stay in Dubai, I noted that the "Era of the Veil," and many of its attendant customs are still alive and thriving in the Arab Gulf today.

When hunting for Hubbard collectibles, I found this book to be very valuable. I've dug up books I never knew existed thanks to this volume. Barnes & Noble's used book site is excellent to find these out of print items listed in The Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard's fiction, especially his early 1930s-1940s work was top of the line at the time, with his pals Asimov and Heinlein at the helm.

I found that Ace Publishing and DAW books had anthologies that I had never heard of that had a Hubbard story in it. Quite a valuable reference work if you're hunting down valuable collectibles. Some of these, such as Andre Norton's "Space Police" has a Hubbard story in this anthology that's worth several hundred dollars, so the search can be a fun one. Then use Amazon or Barnes & Noble to find them.

This is basically a giant bibliography, organized by date and publisher and gives a few tidbits of what's what in the fiction world at that time.

I was also amazed how cheap this book is on Amazon! If you're looking for collectibles such as vintage pulps and paperbacks from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, pick up this book!

I have read about this book for a long time. If you read early American history or constitutional history, you will come across many many a reference to this book. This work started out(I believe) as Dr. Adams' dissertation and was written in German. During the Bicentennial year, it won a prize for being the best recently written work on early American history written in a foreign language. The prize was a translation in English that was originally published in 1980. For this edition, Dr. Adams updated the very useful bibliography and added two additional chapters (essays that were written afterwards that somewhat speak to the book's main theme).
The main theme of the book is one that hadn't been explored enough when Dr. Adams first wrote: the influence of the early constitutions written, ratified and lived under in the original 13 colonies (and Vermont) on the United States Constitution of 1787.
The plan of the book is fairly simple. In the first three chapters, Dr. Adams gives us a preparatory historical background. He covers the organization of governmental structures as we go from revolutionary committees organizing the first and second Continental Congresses, the decision for independence and the subsequent call from the Congress to create new state governments. He covers quickly the history of the writing of those constitutions and the Articles of Confederation.
The body of the book is devoted to an examination of some of the main political ideas/themes of the period and how they were written in the various state constitutions. He covers popular sovereignity, liberty, equality, property, the common good, representation, seperation of powers, and federalism.
The new chapters are the weakest part of the book for me. The first new chapter somewhat redundantly and weakly summarizes his argument of the body of the book and the last chapter examines the republican/libery debate in the light of his research. Really the best part of the updating is the bibliography which is organized by state as well as by subject matter and thus easily guides the obsessed reader onto further research. I like it a lot.
There are many things in his discussion that I learned from and that make the book very much worth reading. I will mention only two.
One of the most jarring aspects of this period for any reader is the many of the most vocal advocates of liberty and equality were slave owners. Many many contemporary British and Tory commentators noted this contradiction. "All men are created equal" wrote a man who owned almost 150 slaves. George Mason (owner of 118 slaves) wrote in the Virginia Bill of Rights the following line:"..all men are by nature equally free and independent."
Adams claim is that the use of equality in this period was politically useful to the revolutionary leaders in the context of social contract theory. They wanted to establish their equality as British citizens and to deny their second-class citizen status as colonists. Thus the clauses on equality in some of our early national and state documents. Three other states (Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Vermont) also included declarations of the equality of man in their first state constitutions. Only one (Vermont) prohibited slavery. Adams basic claim is that what was revolutionarily useful later caused a variety of problems that national and state leaders tried to control (see the whole of chapter 9 for Adams' documentation of the above facts).
Which leads me to the last point of the good Dr. Adams that I want to emphasize. What is clear from my reading of this book and Rakove's The Beginning of National Politics is that in this period we were a people scampering for solutions and justifications. There was much experimenting and sometimes just plain fudging through to make things work (see Adams on how the Massachusetts constituion got ratified). We were being led by some very thoughtful and well-read men to be sure. But they were organizing a resistance to the most powerful military on Earth at that time, they fought a revolution on a shoestring and they were creating unprecedented forms of government. There wasn't a whole lot of room for theoretical consistency.
My only complaint against the book is an unfair one. If Dr. Adams' was writing the book now, he would probably have much more material to base his research on. The book leans heavily on the town records of Massachusetts because they were easily available in the Handlins collection. But like I said, this complaint may not be fair simply because comparable records from, say, South Carolina, simply weren't preserved.
Willi Paul Adams' book is a learned and useful guide to that period. If you really want to understand the original intentions of our founders, this is a necessary read.