I am the guardian of the graveyard the keeper of the gate. I winnow souls and spirits in a job I love and hate. I list your joys and blessings, your terrors and your fears. I gather up the hours and stitch together days and years. I am the watcher of the sleeper come rest, abide with me. Ill rock and hold and love you for all eternity.

The book consists of excerpts from interviews of senior members of State College Friends Meeting. The narrators who lived through the Great Depression tell of their difficult childhoodand yet in most cases one they regarded as happy. Some of the conscientious objectors during WWII tell of life in CPS camps; others speak of using nonviolent methods with mental patients, while still others relate the story of the human guinea experiments some of them participated in. Of those who did relief work after the war overseas, probably the most exciting tales are told by the four who worked with the Friends Ambulance Unit in China. They happened to be located close to where the Nationalists and the Communists were fighting.

Polzonetti reveals how revolutionary America inspired eighteenth-century European audiences, and how it can still inspire and entertain us.

In early eighteenth-century texts, the gypsy is frequently figured as an amusing rogue; by the Victorian period, it has begun to take on a nostalgic, romanticized form, abandoning sublimity in favour of the bucolic fantasy propagated by George Borrow and the founding members of the Gypsy Lore Society. Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period argues that, in the gap between these two situations, the figure of the gypsy is exploited by Romantic-period writers and artists, often in unexpected ways. Drawing attention to prominent writers (including Wordsworth, Austen, Clare, Cowper and Brontë) as well as those less well-known, Sarah Houghton-Walker examines representations of gypsies in literature and art from 1780-1830, alongside the contemporary socio-historical events and cultural processes which put pressure on those representations. She argues that, raising troubling questions by its repeated escape from the categories of enlightenment discourses which might seek to 'know' or 'understand' in empirical ways, the gypsy exists both within and outside of conventional English society. The figure of the gypsy is thus available to writers and artists to facilitate the articulation of dilemmas and anxieties taking various forms, and especially as a lens through which questions of knowledge and identity (which is often mutable, and troubling) might be focussed. .

Gypsies, Egyptians, Romanies, and—more recently—Travellers. Who are these marginal and mysterious people who first arrived in England in early Tudor times? Are claims of their distant origins on the Indian subcontinent true, or just another of the many myths and stories that have accreted around them over time? Can they even be regarded as a single people or ethnicity at all? Gypsies have frequently been vilified, and not much less frequently romanticized, by the settled population over the centuries. Social historian David Cressy now attempts to disentangle the myth from the reality of Gypsy life over more than half a millennium of English history. In this, the first comprehensive historical study of the doings and dealings of Gypsies in England, he draws on original archival research, and a wide range of reading, to trace the many moments when Gypsy lives became entangled with those of villagers and townsfolk, religious and secular authorities, and social and moral reformers. Crucially, it is a story not just of the Gypsy community and its peculiarities, but also of England's treatment of that community, from draconian Elizabethan statutes, through various degrees of toleration and fascination, right up to the tabloid newspaper campaigns against Gypsy and Traveller encampments of more recent years.