Early English History

George Arliss was an actor, author, playwright, and filmmaker who was active from 1887 to his retirement in 1939. This genial gentleman spent much of his life in the Victorian Era, and in many respects, he was a child of his times. However, as the 20th century advanced, Arliss realized that times had changed. By the 1910s a contraption called “motion pictures” was competing with his domain of the legitimate theater in which he was one of its most popular stars. Arliss realized that films could no longer be ignored when he received several persistent offers to star in them. When he began...

It just doesn’t make sense, does it? The America of today shouldn’t exist if what our teachers and overseers taught us about the country’s history were true. The truth is that nearly all of it was untrue or, at the very best, wildly inaccurate. Your eyes are not fooling you. There’s no better or more important time than now to smash the establishment’s historical narrative on American History. A Twisted History of the United States, 1450-1945, is an innovative, rollicking, and eye-opening ride down America’s memory lane that, like all good histories, explains why things really ...

Danger lurks everywhere as he travels alone across the continent. Strange mannerisms, frightening movements, sudden screaming—all involuntary—set him apart. Out of step with everyone, Pieter experiences a crisis of faith and eventually leaves his family, church and community to set off on his own. The French Indian conflict with the British is beginning to gather momentum. At nineteen, Pieter is swept up into the maelstorm of war. By 1757, the British and the French are in a race to claim the Great Sea of the West for their respective countries. The British capture Pieter, now a young ...

Much has been written about Western intervention during the breakup of Yugoslavia, and whether it made matters worse, prevented worse atrocities, or was simply ineffective. In early 1992, however, what was clear was that Europe was hopelessly divided over the best course of action to take towards Yugoslavia, and after several years of fighting, the Bosnian War was one of the most violent conflagrations in Europe since the end of World War II.

Written by a leading authority and artist of the historical transverse flute, The Notation Is Not the Music offers invaluable insight into the issues of historically informed performance and the parameters - and limitations - of notation-dependent performance. As Barthold Kuijken illustrates, performers of historical music should consider what is written on the page as a mere steppingstone for performance.

A must-listen new audio book about filmmakers Ted and Leo Wharton, whose serials become popular in the 1910s.

The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this book explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson.

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the US effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly.

In The Sum of Our Dreams, Louis P. Masur offers a sweeping yet compact history of America from its beginnings to the current moment. Evoking Barack Obama's belief that America remains the "sum of its dreams", Masur locates the origin of those dreams - of freedom, equality, and opportunity - and traces their progress chronologically, illuminating the nation's struggle over time to articulate and fulfill their promise.

"Great Wall to Global Power: A History of China" offers readers an expansive and engrossing journey through the rich tapestry of Chinese history, from the ancient foundations of its first dynastic rule to its contemporary status as a burgeoning global powerhouse. This meticulously researched book serves as a profound exploration of the multifaceted developments that have shaped China over millennia, presenting a narrative that is as detailed as it is captivating. As you turn the pages of this comprehensive volume, you will be transported through time, beginning with the construction of the ...

Ancient cultures have been looking up at the stars for thousands of years, wondering about their place in the universe. What were those glowing spots in the black cover of night? Just how far away was the moon? These and other questions hounded humanity through the millennia until, finally, relative economic stability allowed for a number of people to examine their world more closely. Slowly, knowledge and understanding accumulated generation by generation until the conditions were ideal enough for a revolution to occur in thinking, experimentation, worldview, and natural philosophy.

In this fascinating and highly original work of cultural history, Richard Cullen Rath recreates in rich detail a world remote from our own, one in which sounds were charged with meaning and power. This audiobook's stunning evidence of the importance of sound in early America - even among the highly literate New England Puritans - reminds us of a time before a world dominated by the visual, a young country where hearing was a more crucial part of living.

In Faithful Witness, Phil Baker explains the theology of martyrdom that developed over the first 300 years of Christianity, and why that theology proved so powerful in the early years of the faith. Why did they choose faithfulness over fear? Why did they choose dying over killing? Why did they choose self-sacrifice over revenge? Why did they have such peace and joy in the midst of unimaginable torture? By AD 313, why had roughly 10 percent of the Roman Empire’s population embraced Christianity, when it was both illegal and incredibly dangerous to do so?

It should come as no surprise to anyone that it is much easier to overthrow a government than form a new one, and that in turn it is easier to form a government than to govern. The men who founded America knew these facts in theory, but in the last decade of the 18th century, they learned them by experience when, just a few years after the new Constitution had been ratified, a rebellion arose over taxes.

This book argues that the structure of public education is a key factor in the failure of America's public education system to fulfill the intellectual, civic, and moral aims for which it was created. The book challenges the philosophical basis for the traditional common school model and defends the educational pluralism that most liberal democracies enjoy. Berner provides a unique theoretical pathway that is neither libertarian nor state-focused and a pragmatic pathway that avoids the winner-takes-all approach of many contemporary debates about education.

Aaron Sullivan explores the British occupation of Philadelphia, chronicling the experiences of a group of people who were pursued, pressured, and at times persecuted, not because they chose the wrong side of the Revolution but because they tried not to choose a side at all. For these people, the war was neither a glorious cause to be won nor an unnatural rebellion to be suppressed, but a dangerous and costly calamity to be navigated with care. Both the Patriots and the British referred to this group as "the disaffected".

By the mid-17th century, the existence of a land in the south referred to as Terra Australis was generally known and understood by the Europeans, and incrementally, its shores were observed and mapped. Van Diemen’s Land, an island off the south coast of Australia now called Tasmania, was identified in 1642 by Dutch mariner Abel Tasman, and a few months later, the intrepid Dutchman would add New Zealand to the map of the known world.

In 1990, though no one knew it then, a fearless group of players changed the sport of soccer in the United States forever. Young, bronzed, and mulletted, they were America’s finest athletes in a sport that America loved to hate. Even sportswriters rooted against them. Yet this team defied massive odds and qualified for the World Cup, making possible America’s current obsession with the world’s most popular game. New Kids in the World Cup is the origin story of modern American soccer.

Much of the contemporary discussion of the Jesus tradition has focused on aspects of oral performance, storytelling, and social memory, on the premise that the practice of communal reading of written texts was a phenomenon documented no earlier than the second century CE. Brian J. Wright overturns that premise by examining evidence that demonstrates communal reading events in the first century.

Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South. In exploring their lives she rewrites early American history, challenging the established male-centered narrative.