This book contains all Hertfordshire material of any importance which was published in The Gentleman's Magazine in the period from 1731 - 1800. It is a rich resource for research: history, news items of every kind, reports of robberies, court proceedings, executions, fires and, of course, the obituaries for which G.M. was particularly famous. Arranged chronologically with a detailed index of names and places and with supplementary listings for births, marriages, bankruptcies and deaths.

This book is about the map of an English county – Hertfordshire – which was published in 1766 by two London mapmakers, Andrew Dury and John Andrews. For well over two centuries, from the time of Elizabeth I to the late 18th century, the county was the basic unit for mapping in Britain and the period witnessed several episodes of comprehensive map making. The map which forms the subject of this book followed on from a large number of previous maps of the county but was greatly superior to them in terms of quality and detail. It was published in a variety of forms, in nine sheets with an additional index map, over a period of 60 years. No other maps of Hertfordshire were produced during the rest of the century, but the Board of Ordnance, later the Ordnance Survey, established in the 1790s, began to survey the Hertfordshire area in 1799, publishing the first maps covering the county between 1805 and 1834. The OS came to dominate map making in Britain but, of all the maps of Hertfordshire, that produced by Dury and Andrews was the first to be surveyed at a sufficiently large scale to really allow those dwelling in the county to visualize their own parish, local topography and even their own house, and its place in the wider landscape. The first section examines the context of the map’s production and its place in cartographic history, and describes the creation of a new, digital version of the map which can be accessed online . The second part describes various ways in which this electronic version can be interrogated, in order to throw important new light on Hertfordshire’s landscape and society, both in the middle decades of the eighteenth century when it was produced, and in more remote periods. The attached DVD contains over a dozen maps which have been derived from the digital version, and which illustrate many of the issues discussed in the text, as well as related material which should likewise be useful to students of landscape history, historical geography and local history.

"This practical and comprehensive guide provides an introduction for family historians to trace their ancestors in Hertfordshire. It is thematic in approach, the chapters incorporating related material on subjects as broad as military ancestors and the poor and the sick"--Publisher's description.

The cultural, political, and economic influences on the changing fortunes of Hertfordshire’s great parks over the past 500 years are examined in this authoritative history. Fascinating accounts of such parks as Hatfield, Moor Park, and Knebworth are illustrated by revisiting each historical era and its prevailing fashions, such as the enthusiasm for deer hunting in the 16th century and the golden age of landscape gardening in the 18th century. Close analysis of each time period’s cartographical sources further supports this fitting record of the county’s green spaces, which ultimately outlines the ongoing decline in Hertfordshire’s parklands, now divided piecemeal between golf courses, schools, and hotels; sold as real estate; or precariously maintained as tourist attractions.

This volume contains original research into aspects of garden history in Hertfordshire.

This study of St Albans covers the period from the Commonwealth to the accession of Anne which embraces religious and political changes of great interest in the life of a town of strongly dissenting opinion.

"Collins elucidates, with great compassion, what it means to be 'normal' and what it means to be human." -Los Angeles Times When Paul Collins's son Morgan was two years old, he could read, spell, and perform multiplication tables in his head...but not answer to his own name. A casual conversation-or any social interaction that the rest of us take for granted-will, for Morgan, always be a cryptogram that must be painstakingly decoded. He lives in a world of his own: an autistic world. In Not Even Wrong, Paul Collins melds a memoir of his son's autism with a journey into this realm of permanent outsiders. Examining forgotten geniuses and obscure medical archives, Collins's travels take him from an English churchyard to the Seattle labs of Microsoft, and from a Wisconsin prison cell block to the streets of Vienna. It is a story that reaches from a lonely clearing in the Black Forest into the London palace of King George I, from Defoe and Swift to the discovery of evolution; from the modern dawn of the computer revolution to, in the end, the author's own household. Not Even Wrong is a haunting journey into the borderlands of neurology - a meditation on what "normal" is, and how human genius comes to us in strange and wondrous forms.