Nestled in the heart of Paris, the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity today stands as one of the great buildings of this ancient city. The history of the church itself presents a rich portrait of lively men and women who made it their mission to serve God and the people of Paris with all their hearts. Meticulously researched, A History of the American Pro-Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, Paris, 1815-1980 delivers an impressive narrative on each period of growth and development within this church. Beginning with the American Episcopal Church's need to serve Americans living in Paris, author Cameron Allen traces the development of the foundational congregation, the building of the first church, and its organization over the years. Allen draws on diary entries, church documents, and other primary sources to reveal the personalities behind church leaders, including W. O. Lamson, who formally established the church, the pivotal role of J. P. Morgan, organist L. K. Whipp, and German Colonel Rudolph Damrath, a Lutheran minister who took over during the German Occupation of France during World War II. In addition, he discusses the church's role during major historical events and its present needs. This inspiring, well-written history provides an excellent resource for current and past church members, rectory libraries, and historians.

Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of international culture that attracted artists from Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas during a period of burgeoning global immigration. Sixteen essays by a group of emerging and established international scholars - including several whose work has not been previously published in English - address the experiences of foreign exiles, immigrants, students and expatriates. They explore the formal and informal structures that permitted foreign artists to forge connections within and across national communities and in some cases fashion new, transnational identities in the City of Light. Considering Paris from an innovative global perspective, the book situates both important modern artists - such as Edvard Munch, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Marc Chagall and Gino Severini - and lesser-known American, Czech, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Catalan, and Hungarian painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, and illustrators within the larger trends of international mobility and cultural exchange. Broadly appealing to historians of modern art and history, the essays in this volume characterize Paris as a thriving transnational arts community in which the interactions between diverse cultures, peoples and traditions contributed to the development of a hybrid and multivalent modern art.

One of the most notorious Victorian murders was committed by Dr George Henry Lamson, who stood trial in 1882 for poisoning his crippled brother-in-law Percy Malcolm John; he was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed.

For almost three hundred years there were those in England who believed that an Italian translation of the Book of Common Prayer could trigger radical change in the political and religious landscape of Italy. The aim was to present the text to the Italian religious and political elite, in keeping with the belief that the English liturgy embodied the essence of the Church of England. The beauty, harmony, and simplicity of the English liturgical text, rendered into Italian, was expected to demonstrate that the English Church came closest to the apostolic model. Beginning in the Venetian Republic and ending with the Italian Risorgimento, the leitmotif running through the various incarnations of this project was the promotion of top-down reform according to the model of the Church of England itself. These ventures mostly had little real impact on Italian history: as Roy Foster once wrote, "the most illuminating history is often written to show how people acted in the expectation of a future that never happened." This book presents one of those histories. Making Italy Anglican tells the story of a fruitless encounter that helps us better to understand both the self-perception of the Church of England's international role and the cross-cultural and religious relations between Britain and Italy. Stefano Villani shows how Italy, as the heart of Roman Catholicism, was--over a long period of time--the very center of the global ambitions of the Church of England.

Larz and Isabel Anderson were wealthy socialites whose extraordinary lives spanned a century of American historyfrom the Civil War to World War II. Their world included dozens of celebrities who helped define modern culture and politics: Henry and Clover Adams, Alice Pike Barney, Cecilia Beaux, Lord and Lady Curzon, Maud Howe Elliott, Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Robert Todd Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, John Singer Sargent, and William Howard Taft. In his dual biography based on six years of archival research, Stephen Moskey offers a fresh look into Americas Gilded Age while focusing not just on the lives of the Andersons, but also on the intersection of wealth, celebrity, politics, gender, and race as one century ended and another began. While leading others back in time, Moskey shines a light on Larzs professional achievements as well as Isabels emergence as an American woman of the early modern era whose words and deeds anticipated womens roles in culture and society today. Larz and Isabel Anderson shares the story of a glittering Gilded Age couple as they lived, worked, prospered, and gave back during a fascinating time in Americas history.

Florence Maybrick was the first American woman to be sentenced to death in England--for murdering her husband, a crime she almost certainly did not commit. Her 1889 trial was presided over by an openly misogynist judge who was later declared incompetent and died in an asylum. Hours before Maybrick was to be hanged, Queen Victoria reluctantly commuted her sentence to life in prison--in her opinion a woman who would commit adultery, as Maybrick had admitted, would also kill her husband. Her children were taken from her; she never saw them again. Her mother worked for years to clear her name, enlisting the president of the United States and successive ambassadors, including Robert Todd Lincoln. Decades later, a gruesome diary was discovered that made Maybrick's husband a prime Jack the Ripper suspect.