A biography of an unsung Victorian hero, Joseph Paxton was the man behind the garden design at Chatsworth and the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

"Today one would be hard pressed to choose a "Pre-eminent Victorian," a perfect embodiment of the golden age of innovation and energy. But among the Victorians themselves, it was agreed that one figure towered above the rest. Joseph Paxton bestrode the worlds of horticulture, urban planning, and architecture like a colossus. This was the indispensable man, the self-taught polymath with a solution to every large-scale logistical problem. Rising quickly from humble beginnings, Paxton at 23 became head gardener and architect at Chatsworth, the estate of the sixth Duke of Devonshire. Under Paxton's hands, Chatsworth was transformed into the greatest garden in England, Britain's answer to the hanging gardens of Babylon. Paxton also edited garden periodicals, helped found the London Daily News, and was a Liberal MP for Coventry, but it was his design for the Crystal Palace, home of the Great Exhibition of 1851, that secured his immortality"--

The story that unfolds in this work manifests the pursuit of one of the many historical mysteries that plague the early history of people of African descent in New York State - a mass migration of thousands of African descendants to Washington County, New York at the turn of the 19th century. The impact of this de-valued history and its absence from the historical record has distorted the recollection and remembrance of people of African descent in New York, whose ancestors were trapped in the confinement of enslavement and second-class citizenship. This unrecorded migration transpired while New York was beginning to alter its highly profitable economic system from an enslavement-based economy to a more capitalist system of production. They journeyed to Washington County, families and expectations in tow under the suggestion of a rumor of opportunity and anticipation that a better life was possible for them at the end of this arduous journey. Newly disposed of the day to day dehumanizing nature of enslavement, they struggled to find a more sustainable, prosperous and humane way of life. The correlation between my family, the Van Vrankens and the thousands of other individuals of African descent who migrated to Washington County during this period, is the personal, festering wound of omission that is still not healed or resolved. This work is a continuing byproduct of genealogical research begun by the author in 2000. It represents the second in a series of books relating to his families experiences in early New York. The first Book A Far Cry From Freedom: Gradual Abolition (1799-1827) New York States Crime Against Humanity, was published in 2006.

The names of ancient Egyptian kings such as Cheops, Akhenaten, and Ramesses II have become part of popular culture. Yet, for all the tombs and statuary that have survived over the millennia, surprisingly little remains that speaks to the workings of government, cabals in the palace, political factions, and the private lives of the royal families. In The Book of the Pharaohs, Pascal Vernus and Jean Yoyotte offer an indispensable, basic reference to the full human reality of royal Egypt. The Book of the Pharaohs is an encyclopedia made up of short essays on the pharaohs themselves, as well as on places, dynasties, personages, subjects, and themes relating to the kings and their rule. Entries range from "Adoratrices" (priestesses of Hathor, the Egyptian Aphrodite, whose role was to arouse the erotic impulse in the creator gods) and "Amarna" (the capital created by the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten) to "Scorpion" (who ruled before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt) and "Zero Dynasty" (the designation for pre-pharaonic Egypt). In addition, Vernus and Yoyotte include a substantial essay on the sources for Egyptian history, a bibliography of books for general readers, and a chronological table that organizes the major periods of Egyptian history and notes the most illustrious royal names from each.

Describes and illustrates engineering design and what conditions, events, cultural influences and personalities have brought it to its present state. For professional and student architects and engineers.

From the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution, the Romans to the Regency, few things have mirrored society or been affected by its upheavals as much as the food we eat and the way we prepare it. In this involving history of the British people, Kate Colquhoun celebrates every aspect of our cuisine from Anglo-Saxon feasts and Tudor banquets, through the skinning of eels and the invention of ice cream, to Dickensian dinner-party excess and the growth of frozen food. Taste tells a story as rich and diverse as a five-course dinner.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.