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A Man of Three Worlds
In the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain made their way to Morocco and established a dynamic community in Fez. A number of Jewish families became prominent in commerce and public life there. Among the Jews of Fez of Hispanic origin was Samuel Pallache, who served the Moroccan sultan as a commercial and diplomatic agent in Holland until Pallache's death in 1616. Before that, he had tried to return with his family to Spain, and to this end he tried to convert to Catholicism and worked as an informer, intermediary, and spy in Moroccan affairs for the Spanish court. Later he became a privateer against Spanish ships and was tried in London for that reason. His religious identity proved to be as mutable as his political allegiances: when in Amsterdam, he was devoutly Jewish; when in Spain, a loyal converso (a baptized Jew). In A Man of Three Worlds, Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers view Samuel Pallache's world as a microcosm of early modern society, one far more interconnected, cosmopolitan, and fluid than is often portrayed. Pallache's missions and misadventures took him from Islamic Fez and Catholic Spain to Protestant England and Holland. Through these travels, the authors explore the workings of the Moroccan sultanate and the Spanish court, the Jewish communities of Fez and Amsterdam, and details of the Atlantic-Mediterranean trade. At once a sweeping view of two continents, three faiths, and five nation-states and an intimate story of one man's remarkable life, A Man of Three Worlds is history at its most compelling.
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1000 years of famous people
Organized according to theme--explorers, inventors, artists, politicians, and others--this comprehensive biographical reference is further arranged chronologically by birthdate and includes profiles that illuminate the life and achievements of important figures who shaped the course of history over the last millennium.
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Chiang Yee
A young man arrives in England in the 1930s, knowing few words of the English language. Yet, two years later he writes a successful English book on Chinese art, and within the following decade publishes more than a dozen others. This is the true story of Chiang Yee, a renowned writer, artist, and worldwide traveler, best known for theSilent Travellerseries--stories of England, the United States, Ireland, France, Japan, and Australia--all written in his humorous, delightfully refreshing, and enlightening literary style.
This biography is more than a recounting of extraordinary accomplishments. It also embraces the transatlantic life experience of Yee who traveled from China to England and then on to the United States, where he taught at Columbia University, to his return to China in 1975, after a forty-two year absence. Interwoven is the history of the communist revolution in China; the battle to save England during World War II; the United States during the McCarthy red scare era; and, eventually, thawing Sino-American relations in the 1970s. Da Zheng uncovers Yee's encounters with racial exclusion and immigration laws, displacement, exile, and the pain and losses he endured hidden behind a popular public image.
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Intrepid women : adventures in anthropology
Meet the pioneering female anthropologists who coped with illness, shipwreck, loneliness and misogyny to document the remarkable lives of people in distant parts of the world where 'ladies' were not meant to travel.
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Fresca -- A Life in the Making
This is a detective story, cultural history and love story. It tells a tale of unconventionality, multifarious creativity, and a quest for new ways of living and loving amidst the complexities of Interwar Britain. For Francesca Allinson life and making art were synonymous, though both were cut short. Her story captures the topsy-turvy quality of a life singularly led; it shows how biography too gets turned upside down in the making -- how the story of a single individual can throw the literary and social perspective of the period into relief. Helen Southworth's initial goal was to discover how Francesca's fictional autobiography, A Childhood, made it onto Leonard and Virginia Woolf's The Hogarth Press list in 1937. The result was to be immediately drawn in to the company of prominent artistic figures of the period. Writer, musicologist, puppeteer and pacifist, British-German Jewish Allinson (19021945) published with the Woolfs, duelled with Ralph Vaughan Williams over the origins of folk song and was psychoanalysed by Adrian Stephen, younger brother of Virginia. Her connections register the cultural ferment of the Interwar years: a rich collaboration and unconsummated romance with homosexual composer Michael Tippett; an affair with Arts League of Service founder Judy Wogan; a friendship with designer Enid Marx; and an infatuation with poet Den Newton, 18 years her junior. Her life of promise, tragically cut short by suicide by drowning in 1945, is an eerie echo of Virginia Woolf's suicide. Allinson's story spans the Twentieth Century, closing with Tippett weeping on stage at the Wigmore Hall during a 1992 performance of The Heart's Assurance, the song cycle he dedicated to Francesca's memory forty years earlier. In parallel, Allinson's own A Childhood makes a second journey: a gift for a young woman living in recently liberated Belgium in 1942, the book comes alive again when she transforms it into an artist's book.
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Groundbreaking guys : 40 men who became great by doing good
\"This illustrated survey book is a collection of forty diverse men who helped their communities\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Contemporary British Autoethnography
This engaging, informative book makes an exciting contribution to current discussions about the challenges and uses of contemporary autoethnography. Authors from a range of disciplines 'show and tell' us how they have created autoethnographies, demonstrating a rich blend of theories, ethical research practices, and performances of identities and voice, linking all of those with the socio-cultural forces that impact and shape the person. The book will be a useful resource for new and experienced researchers; academics who teach and supervise post-graduate students; and practitioners in social science who are seeking meaningful ways to conduct research. This should be required reading for all qualitative research training.
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Kentucky Women
Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Timesintroduces a history as dynamic and diverse as Kentucky itself. Covering the Appalachian region in the east to the Pennyroyal in the west, the essays highlight women whose aspirations, innovations, activism, and creativity illustrate Kentucky's role in political and social reform, education, health care, the arts, and cultural development. The collection features women with well-known names as well as those whose lives and work deserve greater attention.
Shawnee chief Nonhelema Hokolesqua, western Kentucky slave Matilda Lewis Threlkeld, the sisters Emilie Todd Helm and Mary Todd Lincoln, reformers Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and Laura Clay, activists Anne McCarty Braden and Elizabeth Fouse, politicians Georgia Davis Powers and Martha Layne Collins, sculptor Enid Yandell, writer Harriette Simpson Arnow, and entrepreneur Nancy Newsom Mahaffey are covered inKentucky Women, representing a broad cross section of those who forged Kentucky's relationship with the American South and the nation at large.
With essays on frontier life, gender inequality in marriage and divorce, medical advances, family strife, racial challenges and triumphs, widowhood, agrarian culture, urban experiences, educational theory and fieldwork, visual art, literature, and fame, the contributors have shaped a history of Kentucky that is both grounded and groundbreaking.
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