An authoritative account of everyday life in Regency England, the backdrop of Austen’s beloved novels, from the authors of the forthcoming Gibraltar: The Greatest Siege in British History (March 2018) Nearly two centuries after her death, Jane Austen remains the most cherished of all novelists in the English language, incomparable in the wit, warmth, and insight with which she depicts her characters and life. Yet the milieu Austen presents is only one aspect of the England in which she lived, a time of war, unrest, and dramatic changes in the country’s physical and social landscape. Jane Austen’s England offers a fascinating new view of the great novelist’s time, in a wide-ranging and richly detailed social history of English culture. As in their bestselling book Nelson’s Trafalgar, Roy and Lesley Adkins have drawn upon a wide array of contemporary sources to chart the daily lives of both the gentry and the commoners, providing a vivid cultural snapshot of not only how people worked and played, but how they struggled to survive.

This book shows how modern Brooklyn’s proud urban identity as an arts-friendly community originated in the mid nineteenth century. Before and after the Civil War, Brooklyn’s elite, many engaged in Atlantic trade, established more than a dozen cultural societies, including the Philharmonic Society, Academy of Music, and Art Association. The associative ethos behind Brooklyn’s fine arts flowering built upon commercial networks that joined commerce, culture, and community. This innovative, carefully researched and documented history employs the concept of parallel Renaissances. It shows influences from Renaissance Italy and Liverpool, then connected to New York through regular packet service like the Black Ball Line that ferried people, ideas, and cargo across the Atlantic. Civil War disrupted Brooklyn’s Renaissance. The city directed energies towards war relief efforts and the women’s Sanitary Fair. The Gilded Age saw Brooklyn’s Renaissance energies diluted by financial and political corruption, planning the Brooklyn Bridge and consolidation with New York City in 1898.

A major theme in American history has been the desire to achieve a genuinely republican way of life that values liberty, order, and virtue. This work shows us how new technologies affected this drive for a republican civilization - a question as vital now as ever.

The author has analyzed, sorted, and organized material from almost 500 accounts of travels in Great Britain into a veritable cavalcade of social history. This is a book filled with life and vitality, written with a light touch and always with an eye to social comedy. It presents a true and realistic picture of these people and their periods.

Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.

Examines the phenomenon of human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain and considers how this legacy informs understandings of race and empire today.

James Mylne (1757-1839) taught moral philosophy and political economy in Glasgow from 1797 to the mid-1830s. Rational Piety and Social Reform in Glasgow offers readers Mylne's biography, a summary of his lectures on moral philosophy and political economy, several interpretative essays, and a collation of his introductory lecture. Mylne's moral philosophy lectures cover the intellectual and active powers of man and offer an account of his duties to God, neighbor, and self. He diverges from the "moral sense" and "common sense" traditions associated with Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid in Glasgow. He reinstates reason as the guiding principle of conscience and argues for utility as the predominant criterion of morality. Mylne was also active among the Whig "friends of Mr. Fox" and in the Glasgow Reform Association, for his theory of the sovereignty of reason drove his view of political reform and the concept of value in his lectures on political economy. In a criticism of Adam Smith, Mylne interprets use-value as prior to exchange value, founding it in lawful desires identifiable by a merchant community. Mylne's political opinions and activity among local political reformers and literary societies exemplify the Glasgow Whig tradition.