Amber has always been waiting for her time. Her moment. When she gets to the age of fifty-five and finds that her moment has not shown up, she decides to take on an offer from three decades earlier that has recently been renewed and get her ass into space. Well, she needs a bit of prep for the journey, and the reset involves rejuvenating her hair, skin, eyes, muscles, organs, and gets her into the best shape that her genetics will allow. At the request of the Avatar of Terra, Amber agrees to travel the star systems to become the governess to the imperial princess of the Possitt system. The imperial regent is the princess’s uncle, and it was him that had the idea for the governess from an alien world with certain modifications. Being able to punch through steel had not be in Amber’s original specifications, but she is adapting and learning to enjoy her new position in a world where she isn’t allowed to meet anyone’s eyes. It is a minor inconvenience that she is willing to live with for the chance to help a scared young woman become the empress she was meant to be.

This complex account by a German governess examines households, families, and slavery in Brazil, and bears witness to how “the world the slaveholders made” would soon collapse. Ina von Binzer’s letters, published in German in 1887 and translated into English for this book, offer a rare view of three very different elite family households during the twilight years of Brazil’s Second Empire. Her woman’s gaze contrasts markedly with other contributions to the contemporary travel literature on Brazil that were nearly entirely written by men. Although von Binzer covers a multitude of topics—ranging from the management of households and plantations, the behavior of slaves and slaveowners, and the agricultural production of coffee and sugar to examinations of family relations, childrearing, culinary repertoires, and life on the street—the common theme running through her letters is the dawning perception that the world the slaveholders made could not long endure. She delves into the inevitable arrival of abolition as a national issue and a nascent movement—a destiny that her employers could no longer ignore. In recounting her conversations with them, she offers her own insights into their opinions and behaviors that make for a fascinating insider’s view of a world about to disappear. Von Binzer’s letters are prefaced by a valuable historical introduction that surveys the contexts of slavery’s slow demise after 1850 and offers new biographical research on von Binzer and the prominent families who employed her. A map of her travels together with dozens of photographs contemporary with her residence in Brazil provide visual documentation complementary to her letters.

Alexander I, one of Russia’s greatest emperors, beloved of his subjects for his many liberalizing works and reforms domestically, and for his astounding—and unexpected—victory over the presumably invulnerable Napoleon Bonaparte, reigned from 1801 to late 1825. But despite his many glittering successes at home and abroad, his immense power and wealth, the tsar was throughout his life a troubled man. Caught up in the personal and political maelstrom between his domineering grandmother Catherine the Great and his highly neurotic and volatile father Paul I, Alexander came to the throne as a result of a coup mounted against his father in March 1801. Although not an active participant in the plot, and reassured that the plan was to depose and exile the unpopular Paul, not to harm him, Alexander was devastated when the takeover turned violent and his father was assassinated. That cloud under which he acceded to the throne never lifted, and throughout his reign he often confided to family and friends his desire to thrust off the burdens of state and retire to some quiet place to live out the rest of his life. By 1825, his popularity waning, the health of his wife becoming more fragile by the day, he decided to remove himself and a bare-bones court to Taganrog, a remote town near the Crimea. A few weeks after his arrival there, he suddenly fell ill and died on November 19, 1825. Or did he? Ever since that day, rumors have swarmed that the young and still-vigorous tsar—he was only forty-eight—had staged his death to expiate the sin that refused to leave him, the sin of patricide. The legend has it that his “reincarnation” took the form of a starets, the humble and holy men who wandered throughout nineteenth-century Russia doing good works. That starets, brilliant and uncommonly erudite, was one Feodor Kuzmich. So widespread and persistent was the belief that Tsar Alexander and Feodor Kuzmich were one and the same that the great Leo Tolstoy planned to write a book on the subject. Imperial Legend, with a deft touch and a fresh voice, “solves” one of the most intriguing royal mysteries of the past two centuries.

Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.