How rabid dogs, the struggles to contain them, and their power over the public imagination intersected with New York City's rise to urban preeminence. Rabies enjoys a fearsome and lurid reputation. Throughout the decades of spiraling growth that defined New York City from the 1840s to the 1910s, the bone-chilling cry of "Mad dog!" possessed the power to upend the ordinary routines and rhythms of urban life. In Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, Jessica Wang examines the history of this rare but dreaded affliction during a time of rapid urbanization. Focusing on a transformative era in medicine, politics, and urban society, Wang uses rabies to survey urban social geography, the place of domesticated animals in the nineteenth-century city, and the world of American medicine. Rabies, she demonstrates, provides an ideal vehicle for exploring physicians' ideas about therapeutics, disease pathology, and the body as well as the global flows of knowledge and therapeutics. Beyond the medical realm, the disease also illuminates the cultural fears and political contestations that evolved in lockstep with New York City's burgeoning cityscape. Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers offers lay readers and specialists alike the opportunity to contemplate a tumultuous domain of people, animals, and disease against a backdrop of urban growth, medical advancement, and social upheaval. The result is a probing history of medicine that details the social world of New York physicians, their ideas about a rare and perplexing disorder, and the struggles of an ever-changing, ever-challenging urban society.

It is the summer of 1728, and we are in the village of Sherburn, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, with its handsome church, boys’ grammar-school, ancient tavern and tranquil rural population. Below the church lies the site of the palace of the kings of Elmete. Nearby, across the common and past the woods, are the grand houses of commissioner of the peace Squire Hawley at Scarthingwell Hall and magistrate Sir Ralph Gascoigne at Parlington Hall. An apparent conspiracy to re-establish the sixth-century Ancient British kingdom of Elmete has worrying, and sometimes hilarious, consequences for the hapless vicar, whose meagre detective skills are stretched to their limit. Both the squire and Sir Ralph are only too happy to leave it all to the vicar – until, that is, the vicar is arrested for gun-smuggling and the squire disappears. It then transpires, however, that the conspiracy is merely camouflage for a more interesting crime altogether … This neat tale both faithfully recreates the atmosphere of an eighteenth-century Yorkshire village and offers the modern reader rare entertainment. Book reviews online: PublishedBestsellers website.

Based on a study of the letters, diaries and account books of over 100 women from commercial, professional and gentry families, mainly in provincial England, this book provides an account of the lives of genteel women in Georgian times.