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1) A people's history of the American Revolution: how common people shaped the fight for independence
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[This book] view[s] the revolution through the eyes of common folk. Their stories have long been overlooked in the mythic telling of America's founding, but are crucial to a comprehensive understanding of the fight for independence. Now, the experiences of farmers, laborers, rank and file soldiers, women, Native Americans, and African Americans - found in diaries, letters, memoirs and other long-ignored primary sources - create a gritty account of...
2) Empire of things: how we became a world of consumers, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first
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Looks at the history of the growth of consumerism, exposing the international nature of its expansion through the last six hundred years, and the challenges it poses to the planet.
"What we consume has become a central-- perhaps the central-- feature of modern life. Our economies live or die by spending, we increasingly define ourselves by our possessions, and this ever-richer lifestyle has had an extraordinary impact on our planet. How have we come...
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Historian David Williams has written the first account of the American Civil War as viewed though the eyes of ordinary people-foot soldiers, slaves, women, prisoners of war, draft resisters, Native Americans, and others. Richly illustrated with little-known anecdotes and firsthand testimony, this path-breaking narrative moves beyond presidents and generals to tell a new and powerful story about America's most destructive conflict.
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In this hip, hilarious and truly eye-opening cultural history, menstruation is talked about as never before. Flow spans its fascinating, occasionally wacky and sometimes downright scary story: from mikvahs (ritual cleansing baths) to menopause, hysteria to hysterectomies-not to mention the Pill, cramps, the history of underwear, and the movie about puberty they showed you in 5th grade.
Flow answers such questions as: What's the point of getting...
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"A globe-spanning history of sewing, embroidery, and the people who have used a needle and thread to make their voices heard. From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry, World War I soldiers coping with PTSD, and the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, to the AIDS quilt, Hmong story clothes, and pink pussyhats, women and men have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances. Threads...
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"A cultural history of fitness explores the ways in which human exercise has changed over time and what can be learned from our athletic ancestors, evaluating whether today's high-tech exercise machines are actually productive while making recommendations based on early health practices,"--NoveList.
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With cities across the country adding miles of bike lanes and building bike-share stations, bicycling is enjoying a new surge of popularity in America. It seems that every generation or two, Americans rediscover the freedom of movement, convenience, and relative affordability of the bicycle. The earliest two-wheeler, the draisine, arrived in Philadelphia in 1819 and astonished onlookers with the possibility of propelling themselves "like lightning."...
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The Potato tells the story of how a humble vegetable, once regarded as trash food, had as revolutionary an impact on Western history as the railroad or the automobile. Using Ireland, England, France, and the United States as examples, Larry Zuckerman shows how daily life from the 1770s until World War I would have been unrecognizable-perhaps impossible-without the potato, which functioned as fast food, famine insurance, fuel and labor saver, budget...
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Stereotypes of redheaded women range from the funloving scatterbrain to the fiery-tempered vixen or the penitent prostitute. Red-haired men are often associated with either the savage barbarian or the redheaded clown. But why is this so? Harvey begins her quest in prehistory and traces the redhead gene as it made its way out of Africa with the early human diaspora, only to emerge under Northern skies. She goes on to the modern age of art, and literature,...
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"Is it possible to identify a starting point in history from which everything else unfolds--a single moment that can explain the present and reveal the essence of our identities? According to Massimo Montanari, this is just a myth: by themselves, origins explain very little and historical phenomena can only be understood dynamically--by looking at how events and identities develop and change as a result of encounters and combinations that are often...
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"Sheds new light on the enticing, often surprising, story of our society's enduring obsession with the hardest gemstone, offering a fascinating history of its origins and revealing its greatest champions and most colorful enthusiasts. 25,000 first printing,"--NoveList.
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A striking and inventive social history of the role of clothing in the making of modern Americans.
While fashions of the rich and famous have been lushly, chronicled, little attention has been paid to the meaning of clothes for everyone else. Yet between 1890 and the outbreak of World War II, as ready-to-wear came into its own, the clothes of ordinary Americans claimed the nation's attention. Allied with civic virtue, fashion now played an increasingly...
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The little-known history of anti-secession Southerners: “Absolutely essential Civil War reading.” —Booklist, starred review
Bitterly Divided reveals that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—the external one that we know so much about, and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. In this fascinating look at a hidden side of...
Bitterly Divided reveals that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—the external one that we know so much about, and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. In this fascinating look at a hidden side of...
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"Between the Great Depression and the mid-1970s, hitchhikers were a common sight for motorists, as American service members, students, and adventurers sought out the romance of the road in droves. Beats, hippies, feminists, and civil rights and antiwar activists saw "thumb tripping" as a vehicle for liberation, living out the counterculture's rejection of traditional values. Yet, by the time Ronald Reagan, a former hitchhiker himself, was in the White...
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Are we doomed? Is an Almighty Power or an earth-shattering meteor waiting for us just around the corner? Probably not. So why are we so obsessed with imagining our own demise? And what does that say about us as a species? In this thought-provoking book, acclaimed critic Adam Roberts explores our many different visions of the apocalypse -- both likely and unlikely, mundane and bizarre -- and what they say about how we see the world, how we respond...
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Downtown department stores were once the heart and soul of America's pulsing Broadways and Main Streets. With names such as City of Paris, Penn Traffic, The Maze, Maison Blanche, or The Popular, they suggested spheres far beyond mundane shopping. Nicknames reflected the affection customers felt for their favorites, whether Woodie's, Wanny's, Stek's, O.T.'s, Herp's, or Bam's.
The history of downtown department stores is as fascinating as their...
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A fascinating, insightful, and wonderfully written exploration of the document. Like Henry Petroski's The Pencil, David Levy's Scrolling Forward takes a common, everyday object, the document, and illuminates what it reveals about us, both in the past and in the digital age. We are surrounded daily by documents of all kinds-letters and credit card receipts, business memos and books, television images and web pages-yet we rarely stop to reflect on their...
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