Harold George Scott captures the most memorable moments of Lelia Haller�s career with lavish illustrations and photographs. A pictorial biography of one of the twentieth century�s most notable ballerinas, Lelia documents the career of the only American honored as premi�re danseuse of the Paris Op�ra. Lelia�s experience in the world of dance takes her from beginnings in New Orleans to Germany, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, England, and back to New Orleans, where she opened Studio de Danse. On these travels, she danced alongside other great dancers--such as Italian ballerina, Carlotta Zambelli--and trained under Russian ballet master, Nicolas Legat.

Clopinet, jeune paysan légèrement boiteux et surtout très rêveur s'éloigne du monde des hommes pour se rapprocher des oiseaux... En peu de temps, il devient l'ami et le plus grand connaisseur des oiseaux de la région. Il vaincra un à un tous les obstacles, grâce à ses « ailes de courage », symbole de toute ascension et de liberté...

Soon to be a Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, On Her Own Ground is the first full-scale biography of “one of the great success stories of American history” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Madam C.J. Walker—the legendary African American entrepreneur and philanthropist—by her great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles. The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Sarah Breedlove—who would become known as Madam C. J. Walker—was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty. She spent the better part of the next two decades laboring as a washerwoman for $1.50 a week. Then—with the discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for black women—everything changed. By her death in 1919, Walker managed to overcome astonishing odds: building a storied beauty empire from the ground up, amassing wealth unprecedented among black women, and devoting her life to philanthropy and social activism. Along the way, she formed friendships with great early-twentieth-century political figures such as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

In Lelia's Kiss, Laura Giannetti offers a new perspective on the way gender and marriage were portrayed, imagined, and critiqued on stage during the Italian Renaissance. Going beyond the traditional canon, Giannetti focuses her study on the social and cultural scripts found in a wide array of comedies of the period to reveal the relativity of sex and gender roles and their cultural construction in Renaissance society. Giannetti argues that the comedic dialogue and cross-dressing characters so prevalent in Italian Renaissance comedies played with the presuppositions of the day and engaged with contemporary social norms, expectations, and desires. Cross-dressing female characters reveal the relativity of sex and gender roles, and also present a vision of female empowerment. At the same time, cross-dressing male characters suggest a unique perception of the male life cycle that was more uncertain and contested than often assumed, and show more broadly how masculinity was also socially and culturally constructed. In discussing marriage, sexuality, and gender roles, the comedies deploy a social scripting that not only reflects and comments on the everyday life of the time, but also interacts with it with playful humor and revealing insight.

When A'Lelia Walker died in 1931 after a midnight snack of lobster and chocolate cake washed down with champagne, it marked the end of one of the most striking social careers in New York's history. The daughter of rags-to-riches multi-millionaire Madame C.J. Walker (the washerwoman who marketed the most successful straightening technique for African American hair), A'Lelia was America's first black poor little rich girl, using her inheritance to throw elaborate, celebrity-packed parties in her Westchester Mansion and her 136th Street would-be salon, 'Dark Tower'. In Rough Amusements, third in Bloomsbury's Urban Historicals series, Neihart takes us into the heart of A'Lelia's world-gay Harlem in the 1920s. In tracing its cultural antecedents, he delves into the sexual subculture of nineteenth-century New York, exploring mixed-race prostitution; the bachelorization of New York society; French Balls ("the most sophisticated forum for testing the boundaries of urban sexual behavior"); and The Slide (New York's most depraved nineteenth-century bar). Using A'Lelia's lavish parties as a jumping-off point, Neihart traces the line connecting Davy Crockett's world without women to Walt Whitman's boundless love of beautiful men to A'Lelia's cultivation of the racial, social, and sexual risk that defined the Harlem Renaissance.