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Most places in Britain have had a local history written about them. Up until this century these histories have addressed more parochial issues, such as the life of the manor, rather than explaining the features and changes in the landscape in a factual manner. Much of what is visible today in Britain's landscape is the result of a chain of social and natural processes, and can be interpreted through fieldwork as well as from old maps and documents.Michael Aston uses a wide range of source material to study the complex and dynamic history of the countryside, illustrating his points with aerial photographs, maps, plans and charts. He shows how to understand the surviving remains as well as offering his own explanations for how our landscape has evolved.

Utilizing the techniques developed by renowned local historian W. G. Hoskins in his landmark study published 50 years ago, Local History in England, this book demonstrates how local history has evolved as a discipline over the last half century. Fifteen historians write about a variety of local history subjects that are significant in their own right but which also point to current trends in the field. They show how local historians use their sources systematically, from the nonverbal evidence of buildings to various types of electronic sources. All periods between the middle ages and the early twenty-first century are explored, covering many parts of England from Skye to the Kent coast and discussing topics that include social, economic, religious, legal, intellectual, and cultural history.

In this collection of essays, Antonia Gransden brings out the virtues of medieval writers and highlights their attitudes and habits of thought. She traces the continuing influence of Bede, the greatest of early medieval English historians, from his death to the sixteenth century. Bede’s clarity and authority were welcomed by generations of monastic historians. At the other end is a humble fourteenth-century chronicle produced at Lynn with little to add other than a few local references.

Firsting and Lasting argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, Jean M. O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.

In this revelatory account of the people who founded the New England colonies, historian David D. Hall compares the reforms they enacted with those attempted in England during the period of the English Revolution. Bringing with them a deep fear of arbitrary, unlimited authority, these settlers based their churches on the participation of laypeople and insisted on \"consent\" as a premise of all civil governance. Puritans also transformed civil and criminal law and the workings of courts with the intention of establishing equity. In this political and social history of the five New England colonies, Hall provides a masterful re-evaluation of the earliest moments of New England's history, revealing the colonists to be the most effective and daring reformers of their day.

Immanuel Wallerstein's highly influential, multi-volume opus, The Modern World-System, is one of this century's greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. This new volume encompasses the nineteenth century from the revolutionary era of 1789 to the First World War. In this crucial period, three great ideologies--conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism--emerged in response to the worldwide cultural transformation that came about when the French Revolution legitimized the sovereignty of the people. Wallerstein tells how capitalists, and Great Britain, brought relative order to the world and how liberalism triumphed as the dominant ideology.

Author, collector, and historian Alice Morse Earle (1851–1911) was among the most important and prolific writers of her day. Between 1890 and 1904, she produced seventeen books as well as numerous articles, pamphlets, and speeches about the life, manners, customs, and material culture of colonial New England. Earle’s work coincided with a surge of interest in early American history, genealogy, and antique collecting, and more than a century after the publication of her first book, her contributions still resonate with readers interested in the nation’s colonial past. An intensely private woman, Earle lived in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and four children and conducted much of her research either by mail or at the newly established Long Island Historical Society. She began writing on the eve of her fortieth birthday, and the impressive body of scholarship she generated over the next fifteen years stimulated new interest in early American social customs, domestic routines, foodways, clothing, and childrearing patterns. Written in a style calculated to appeal to a wide readership, Earle’s richly illustrated books recorded the intimate details of what she described as colonial “home life.” These works reflected her belief that women had played a key historical role, helping to nurture communities by constructing households that both served and shaped their families. It was a vision that spoke eloquently to her contemporaries, who were busily creating exhibitions of early American life in museums, staging historical pageants and other forms of patriotic celebration, and furnishing their own domestic interiors.

Honoring the memory of Professor Alan Everitt--who advanced the fruitful notion of the \"county community\" during the 17th century--this volume proposes some modifications to Everitt's influential hypotheses in the light of the best recent scholarship.

Bridging the fields of indigenous, early American, memory, and media studies,On Recordsilluminates the problems of communication between cultures and across generations. Andrew Newman examines several controversial episodes in the historical narrative of the Delaware (Lenape) Indians, including the stories of their primordial migration to settle a homeland spanning the Delaware and Hudson Rivers, the arrival of the Dutch and the first colonial land fraud, William Penn's founding of Pennsylvania with a Great Treaty of Peace, and the \"infamous\" 1737 Pennsylvania Walking Purchase. As Newman demonstrates, the quest for ideal records-authentic, authoritative, and objective, anchored in the past yet intelligible to the present-has haunted historical actors and scholars alike. Yet without \"proof,\" how can we know what really happened?On Recordsarticulates surprising connections among colonial documents, recorded oral traditions, and material and visual cultures. Its comprehensive, probing analysis of historical evidence yields a multifaceted understanding of events and reveals new insights into the divergent memories of a shared past.

The Archaeology of the Medieval English Monarchy looks at the period between the reign of William the Conqueror and that of Henry VIII, bringing together physical evidence for the kings and their courts. John Steane looks at the symbols of power and regalia including crowns, seals and thrones. He considers Royal patronage, architecture and ideas on burials and tombs to unravel the details of their daily lives supported with many illustrations.