Recommendations based on "A Little History of Literature (Little Histories)"

A Beguiling Cultural History Of Colour By The Bafta Nominated Broadcaster And Art Historian James Fox 'this Book Is A Triumph. James Fox's Passionate And Illuminating Exploration Of The Extraordinary Relationship We Have With Colour Is Itself Extraordinary. It Is An Intellectual Feast As Well As A Visual One - A True Biography Of Colour Which Will Delight Readers.' Edmund De Waal, Author Of The Hare With Amber Eyes The Subject Of This Book Is Humankind's Extraordinary Relationship With Colour. It Is Composed Of A Series Of Voyages, Ranging Across The World And Throughout History, Which Reveal The Meanings That Have Been Attached To The Colours We See Around Us And The Ways These Have Shaped Our Culture And Imagination. It Takes Seven Primary Colours - Black, Red, Yellow, Blue, White, Purple And Green - And Uncovers Behind Each A Root Idea, Based On Visual Resemblances Or Properties So Rudimentary As To Be Common To All Societies. The Book Traces These Meanings To Show How They Changed And Multiplied, The Role That They Have Played In Our Culture And History, And How Understanding Them Allows Us To See Many Of The Milestones In The History Of Art - From Bronze Age Gold-work To Turner, Titian To Yves Klein - In A New Way. It Proceeds By Stories, Which Cumulatively Tell Another, Larger One: A History Of The World From The Black Nothing Which Preceded Existence To The Birth Of Our Red-blooded Species; The Gilded Gods Who Animated The World In Antiquity To The Blue Horizons Which Framed The Age Of Discovery; The Pristine Aspirations Of Enlightenment, The Technicolour Innovation Which Fuelled The Industrial Revolution And The Colour Which Most Embodies The Environmental Crisis Which Now Faces Us.

Mumford explains the forces that have shaped technology since prehistoric times and shaped the modern world. He shows how tools developed because of significant parallel inventions in ritual, language, and social organization. “It is a stimulating volume, informed both with an enormous range of knowledge and empathetic spirit” (Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times). Index; photographs.

"A stunning five-century study of civilization's cultural retreat." — William Safire, New York TimesHighly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500.Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaissance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have been forgotten or obscured. His compelling chapters—such as "Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarchs' Revolution," and "The Artist Prophet and Jester"—show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the era.The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the normal close of great periods and a necessary condition of the creative novelty that will burst forth—tomorrow or the next day.Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.

A brilliant new history that dramatically reassesses how far the Viking world extended.Dr Cat Jarman exposes the unexpected routes that Viking travel and trade took - and how these kings of the river were frequent travellers of the Middle East and the Silk Road.One June day late in the eighth century, Norse seafarers arrived at the English island of Lindisfarne. They waged a savage attack on its unsuspecting abbey, and with this, the Age of the Vikings was born. These roving pillagers spent the next few hundred years raiding and trading a path across Northern and Western Europe. Except, that's not quite true. It's just a convenient place to start the story - a story that has seen radical new discoveries over the past few years.Dr Cat Jarman works on the cutting edge of bioarchaeology, using forensic techniques to research the paths of Vikings who came to rest in British soil. By examining teeth that are now over one thousand years old, she can determine childhood diet, and thereby where a specimen was likely born. With radiocarbon dating, she can ascertain a death date down to the range of a few years.In 2012, a carnelian bead came into her temporary possession. River Kings sees her trace its path back to eighth-century Baghdad, discovering along the way that the Vikings' route was far more varied than we might think, that with them came people from the Middle East, not just Scandinavia, and that the reason for all this unexpected integration between the Eastern and Western worlds may well have been a slave trade running through the Silk Road, and all the way to Britain.River Kings is a major reassessment of the Vikings, and of the medieval world as we know it.

Following his profoundly influential study, Orientalism, Edward Said now examines western culture. From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, Culture and Imperialism is a broad, fierce and wonderfully readable account of the roots of imperialism in European culture.

What makes us human?How did we develop language, thought and culture?Why did we survive, and other human species fail?The past 12,000 years represent the only time in the sweep of human history when there has been only one human species. How did this extraordinary proliferation of species come about - and then go extinct? And why did we emerge such intellectual giants? The tale of our origins has inevitably been told through the 'stones and bones' of the archaeological record, yet Robin Dunbar shows it was our social and cognitive changes rather than our physical development which truly made us distinct from other species.

Recommended by the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy as an exemplary informational text. Designed to accompany Joy Hakim's ten volume A History of US or as a stand alone reference, this collection of great American documents is ideal for all students of American history. Filled with primary sources, the Sourcebook and Index traces the gradual unfolding of ideas of freedom in America through letters, declarations, proclamations, court decisions, speeches, laws, acts, the Constitution, and other writings. About the Series: Master storyteller Joy Hakim has excited millions of young minds with the great drama of American history in her award-winning series A History of US. Recommended by the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy as an exemplary informational text, A History of US weaves together exciting stories that bring American history to life. Hailed by reviewers, historians, educators, and parents for its exciting, thought-provoking narrative, the books have been recognized as a break-through tool in teaching history and critical reading skills to young people. In ten books that span from Prehistory to the 21st century, young people will never think of American history as boring again.

A book that revolutionised our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the English working class emerged through the degradations of the industrial revolution to create a culture and political consciousness of enormous vitality.

The Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses... A succession of dramatic social and political events reshaped England in the period 1360 to 1461. In his lucid and penetrating account of this formative period, Gerald Harriss draws on the research of the last thirty years to illuminate late medieval society at its peak, from the triumphalism of Edward III in 1360 to the collapse of Lancastrian rule. The political narrative centres on the deposition of Richard II in 1399 and the establishment of the House of Lancaster, which was in turn overthrown in the Wars of the Roses. Abroad, Henry V's heroic victory at Agincourt in 1415 led to the English conquest of northern France, lasting until 1450. Both produced long term consequences: the first shaped the English constitution up to the Stuart civil war, while the second generated lasting hostility between England and France, and a residual wariness of military intervention in Europe. Equally significant changes occurred in English society. The Black Death produced a crisis in agrarian structures, marked by the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 and the end of serfdom. In landed society distinctive grades of knights, esquires and gentlemen emerged, linked to the nobility in a web of patronage and service, with an ethos of 'good lordship' and fidelity. While the nobility were the king's immediate counsellors, the gentry reflected the concerns of the community of the realm in parliament. An increasingly well-educated and articulate class, they served as MPs and JPs and staffed the growing legal profession. The greater merchants controlled the wool trade, the source of England's wealth, and distributed commodities through a network of towns and markets. The marked individualism of this society, memorably depicted in The Canterbury Tales, was accompanied by a growing sense of national identity, expressed in the use of standard London English. A spate of church building in perpendicular, a distinctive national style, was matched on the one hand by the intensity of Catholic devotion and on the other hand by the proto-Protestantism of John Wyclif and the Lollards.THE NEW OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLAND The aim of the New Oxford History of England is to give an account of the development of the country over time. It is hard to treat that development as just the history which unfolds within the precise boundaries of England, and a mistake to suggest that this implies a neglect of the histories of the Scots, Irish, and Welsh. Yet the institutional core of the story which runs from Anglo-Saxon times to our own is the story of a state-structure built round the English monarchy and its effective successor, the Crown in Parliament. While the emphasis of individual volumes in the series will vary, the ultimate outcome is intended to be a set of standard and authoritative histories, embodying the scholarship of a generation.

In a period scarred by apprehensions of revolution, war, invasion, poverty, and disease, elite members of society lived in constant fear of what they thought of as the 'mad, bad, and dangerous people'. Boyd Hilton examines the changes in politics and society in the years 1783-1846, and how the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as 'Victorianism'. - ;This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the 'first industrial revolution'. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty years of 'war to the death' against Napoleonic France. But if Britain's external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country's population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and its manufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England. The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefront of European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading 'evangelicalism'. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as 'Victorianism'. - ;A scrupulously complete analysis of political and social change. - Charles Saumarez Smith, The Sunday Telegraph;History writing at its most compelling. - Adam Phillips, The Observer;The range, richness and complexity of Boyd Hilton's text are impossible to convey in summary, and hard fully to appreciate in a single reading. A mastery of the voluminous literature is complimented by an acquaintance with the sources which produce a wealth of illuminating quotation to catch the tones and inflections of the age...The analysis it offers, and the proportions and emphases which it adopts, will galvanize debate for years to come, and make it a contribution to history such as a safer survey, less ambitious in design, enterprising in argument, and integrative in technique, could not be. - Paul Smith, The Times Literary Supplement;The main narrative is interspersed with fascinating essays on science, religion, art, architecture and literature - a generous helping for the many people who will read this book for pleasure rather than profit. - Ben Wilson, The Spectator;Boyd Hilton has produced a tour de force that will stimulate interest in and guide understanding of the period for years to come. - Peter Borsay, BBC History Magazine;A lively and wide-ranging study...[a] comprehensive, intriguing and challenging volume that has proved well worth the wait. - Tristram Hunt, New Statesman;This book, like its companion volumes, takes for its subject English society as a whole, and the Byronic nudge of the title, as well as promising entertainment, is meant to alert us to the idea that the years before the Victorian Reform Acts were ones of violence, apprehension and 18th century debauchery. - David Horspool, The Guardian