Novel Characters offers a fascinating and in-depth history of the novelistic character from the "birth of the novel" in Don Quixote, through the great canonical works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the most influential international novels of the present day
These books offer remarkable insights into the ideas out of which our present ways of thinking emerged and without which they cannot fully be understood.
A Cultural History of the British Census: Envisioning the Multitude in the Nineteenth Century
The British census plays an unquestioned role in governance today, and the recent digitization of nineteenth century census data has allowed millions of amateur and professional researchers to visualize their national and familial past. This study tells the tangled story of how the census took shape over the early decades of its existence, developing from a simple counting of households during the Napoleonic Wars into a centralized undertaking that involved the governmental and intellectual luminaries of Victorian Britain.
The Bagel - The Surprising History of a Modest Bread
The bagel may have grown out of its New York insularity to become an American icon, but its origins are not what many people have come to believe. Historian Balinska traces the bagel’s history and discovers antecedents in southern Italy and in Muslim northwest China. Despite the oft-repeated legend, the bagel did not originate as a tribute to Polish king Jan Sobieski after the Battle of Vienna in 1683, for documents citing the ring-shaped bread substantially antedate that event. In the nineteenth century, both Jewish and Gentile bakers sold bagels in local eastern European markets.
Corsairs are pirates, and pirates come in many different varieties. There are the pirates who fought off the Barbary Coast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the contemporary pirates who infest the waters of Africa and Asia, and the pirates . . . who look like something else.
