Golden Days includes twenty oral histories of women who graduated from Mississippi State College for Women (now Mississippi University for Women) at least fifty years ago. From Mary Ellen Weathersby Pope's (1926) description of a teaching career beginning just before the 1927 Delta flood to Juanita McCown Hight's (1934) account of campus conversations with violinist Jascha Heifetz and writer/adventurer Richard Halliburton, these stories illustrate the profound influence of the nation's first public college for women on the lives of the storytellers. Vivid reminiscences about life on campus recall a different world of blue uniforms, rigid rules, and demanding faculty. Even after many decades, these women still clearly remember particular teachers who inspired and pushed them to succeed, midnight dormitory pranks played on long-suffering "social advisers," and the spring Zouave marching drills directed by the indomitable Emma Ody Pohl. Whether they graduated in 1926 or 1956, there is a common thread running through these memories: an appreciation for academic life, strong leadership, cultural experiences that enriched lives, a recognition that the university gave self-confidence to pursue unusual or difficult careers, and a gratitude for remarkable friendships which have lasted a lifetime. The Southern Women's Institute of Mississippi University for Women provides a foundation for research and inclusive outreach through the study of women in both traditional and non-traditional roles. The Institute's research focuses on the history of MUW and the position women hold in the culture and foundation of the South both today and in the future.

The social history of New Zealand's gold rushes, as used by Eleanor Catton in her research for The Luminaries. A thorough and carefully researched history of the gold rushes in New Zealand. Based on sound scholarship and aimed at the general reader it's accessibly written in a clear, clean and lively style. The scope is the social history of the goldfields of colonial New Zealand, from the 1850s to the 1870s. The book opens with a survey of worldwide rushes in the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, when for the first time in history a great wheeling movement of gold diggers began to revolve from continent to continent. The main body of the book looks at all the rushes, large and small, that took place in the colony: Coromandel, Golden Bay, Otago, Marlborough, the West Coast and Thames. The early chapters of the main body survey rushes chronologically; the later chapters look at rushes thematically. 'I owe a debt of gratitude to . . . Stevan Eldred-Grigg's history of the New Zealand gold rushes Diggers, hatters & whores.' Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

Lake County, established May 27, 1887, was carved from portions of Orange and Sumter counties. The Legislature had defined borders but allowed the twenty-two hundred plus registered voters to decide where to place the county seat. Four elections and a courtroom battle later, Tavares, on August 10, 1888, finally became the official seat. The selection process lasted 440 days from start to finish.An 1880 dream of two Orlando Attorneys, Tavares was founded on a historic parcel known as "Hull Place", the homestead of pioneers James and Nancy Hull. The lawyers however did not purchase the land directly from the Hull's. Attorneys Alexander St. Clair-Abrams and partner Robert L. Summerlin bought the undeveloped property, with its "bearing grove", from the estate of George C. Brantley.Platted as a city in 1881, Tavares, when Lake County was formed in 1887, had 20 trains daily passing through its downtown corridor, "more than any Florida depot", said an 1887 visiting correspondent. In six years Tavares, the darling community of Orange County, had blossomed into a Florida railroad hub at the center of 40 plus want-to-be neighboring towns in two counties that, as of May 27, 1887, became 40 plus want-to-be Lake County communities.TAVARES: Darling of Orange County, Birthplace of Lake County, is the story of how Florida's "Great Lake Region" transitioned from a 19th century wilderness into a vibrant Citrus Belt district. Amazing pioneers dared to dream big - dared to imagine creating such places as Leesburg, Lady Lake, Mount Dora, Montverde, Eldorado, Eustis, Umatilla, Astor, Clermont, Yalaha, and Tavares, to name a few. This is a story of triumph over tragedy; of homesteaders becoming town builders; of steamboats and railroads forging a new homeland, and of remarkable men and women who made it happen. There is even a touch of mystery and intrigue. This is the story of the earliest days of settlement of Florida's Lake County.

For much of the twentieth century, New Zealand historians, like most Western scholars, largely took it for granted that as modernity waxed religion would wane. Secularization--the fading into insignificance of religion--would distinguish the modern era from previous ages. Until the 1980s, only a handful of scholars around the world raised serious empirical and theoretical questions about a Grand Theory that had become central to the self-understanding of the social sciences and of the modern world. Heated debates since then, and the unmistakable resurgence of world religions, have raised fundamental questions about the empirical and theoretical adequacy of secularization theory, and especially about how far it applies outside Europe. This volume revisits New Zealand history when secularization is no longer taken for granted as the Only Big Story that illuminates the country's social and cultural history. Contributors explore how New Zealanders' diverse religious and spiritual traditions have shaped practical, everyday concerns in politics, racial and ethnic relations, science, the environment, family life, gender relations, and other domains.