Free-spirited Clare Consuelo Sheridan (1885-1970) led a remarkable life. Sculptor, writer, and cousin and friend to Winston Churchill, she traveled extensively and wrote of her journeys. In 1921 she visited America and Mexico with her son...and what an adventure she had! She was a lover to Charlie Chaplin on this visit, and possibly had affairs with Russian revolutionaries she sculpted while in that country in 1920. She spoke favorably of Trotsky and Lenin and earned herself a file in the archives of her native England’s MI-5 as an anti-British propagandist. AND Winston Churchill was a favorite cousin. It was on her year-long trip to America that she kept this journal and had an affair with Charlie Chaplin, of whom she writes much in these pages. She found Americans to her liking and visited many interesting places in the U.S. and Mexico. Everywhere she went, she was “hunting heads” to sculpt. She was the guest of many prominent Americans, including Sinclair Lewis, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sam Goldwyn, and many others. All of this she relates in her unique voice and revealing style within this small volume. She leaves us a fascinating picture of travel in America in the first quarter of the 20th century. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

‘I am one of the cracked people of the world,’ Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon wrote of herself, ‘and I like to herd with the cracked ... queer Americans, democrats, socialists, artists, poor devils or angels; and am never happy in an English genteel family life. I try to do it like other people, but I long always to be off on some wild adventure.’ Reformer, feminist, free-thinker, later to endow the founding of Girton College, Barbara Bodichon went to the United States on a marriage journey. First published in 1972, her journal of that trip, published in its original form for the first time, contains timely observation and incisive criticism of the American South before the Civil War, and gives a vivid portrait of a lively woman of her times, the friend of George Eliot and other leading figures of her age. This edition includes a fascinating introduction about the English visitor in the United States, from Dickens to Trollope. There is also a biographical study of Barbara Bodichon herself, giving an account of her life and of the causes, notably Women’s Rights, to which she devoted her time and energy.

A ground-breaking work of Asian American fiction in a brand new edition.

The official journal of the American Association for the History of Nursing

While historians have written with ease about the state and the church, the family has so far defied historical analysis. As the primary cell of human social organisation, upon which both state and church depend, it is of crucial importance. In this concise, informative and stimulating book, Rosemary O'Day seeks to explain the difficulties facing the historian of the family and to suggest strategies for their solution. She compares families and households in time, space and economy over the period 1500-1914 and draws together the important existing work.

The Dred Scott case is the most notorious example of slaves suing for freedom. Most examinations of the case focus on its notorious verdict, and the repercussions that the decision set off-especially the worsening of the sectional crisis that would eventually lead to the Civil War-were extreme. In conventional assessment, a slave losing a lawsuit against his master seems unremarkable. But in fact, that case was just one of many freedom suits brought by slaves in the antebellum period; an example of slaves working within the confines of the U.S. legal system (and defying their masters in the process) in an attempt to win the ultimate prize: their freedom. And until Dred Scott, the St. Louis courts adhered to the rule of law to serve justice by recognizing the legal rights of the least well-off. For over a decade, legal scholar Lea VanderVelde has been building and examining a collection of more than 300 newly discovered freedom suits in St. Louis. In Redemption Songs, VanderVelde describes twelve of these never-before analyzed cases in close detail. Through these remarkable accounts, she takes readers beyond the narrative of the Dred Scott case to weave a diverse tapestry of freedom suits and slave lives on the frontier. By grounding this research in St. Louis, a city defined by the Antebellum frontier, VanderVelde reveals the unique circumstances surrounding the institution of slavery in westward expansion. Her investigation shows the enormous degree of variation among the individual litigants in the lives that lead to their decision to file suit for freedom. Although Dred Scott's loss is the most widely remembered, over 100 of the 300 St. Louis cases that went to court resulted in the plaintiff's emancipation. Beyond the successful outcomes, the very existence of these freedom suits helped to reshape the parameters of American slavery in the nation's expansion. Thanks to VanderVelde's thorough and original research, we can hear for the first time the vivid stories of a seemingly powerless group who chose to use a legal system that was so often arrayed against them in their fight for freedom from slavery.

An examination of the cultural aspects of U.S.-Japan relations during the postwar Occupation and the early Cold War

The global icon is an omnipresent but poorly understood element of mass culture. This book asks why audiences around the world have embraced particular iconic figures, how perceptions of these figures have changed, and what this tells us about transnational relations since the Cold War era. Prestholdt addresses these questions by examining one type of icon: the anti-establishment figure. As symbols that represent sentiments, ideals, or something else recognizable to a wide audience, icons of dissent have been integrated into diverse political and consumer cultures, and global audiences have reinterpreted them over time. To illustrate these points the book examines four of the most evocative and controversial figures of the past fifty years: Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and Osama bin Laden. Each has embodied a convergence of dissent, cultural politics, and consumerism, yet popular perceptions of each reveal the dissonance between shared, global references and locally contingent interpretations. By examining four very different figures, Icons of Dissent offers new insights into global symbolic idioms, the mutability of common references, and the commodification of political sentiment in the contemporary world.