A short and gentle overview of mediaeval life in a large city. It lightly covers the class structure of society, local government, guilds, pageantry and punishment. The author has an easy, rhythmic style which leaves the reader wanting to find out more.

ACROSS CHINA ON FOOTBy EDWIN JOHN DINGLEINTRODUCTORYThe scheme. Why I am walking across Interior China. Leaving Singapore. Ignorance of life and travel in China. The China for the Chinese cry. The New China and the determination of the Government. The voice of the people. The province of Yuen-nan and the forward movement. A prophecy. Impressions of Saigon. Comparison of French and English methods. At Hong-Kong. Cold sail up the Whang-poo. Disembarkation. Foreign population of Shanghai. Congestion in the city...

Twelve short stories of real girls who have influenced the history of their times.

Elia Peattie was an outspoken journalist and social activist who gave her attention to such areas as orphanages, charity hospitals, the Wounded Knee massacre, capital punishment, and the like. The Precipice is partially based on the life of her close friend Katherine Ostrander, a social work pioneer, and tells of the evolution of Kate Barrington after her college years and with it the evolution of society as a whole and women in particular in pre-World War I America. Friendship, romance, betrayal, searchings of the soul, dreams, and shattered hopes -- all the stuff of life -- bring Kate to full realization of her true self. (Introduction by Mary Schneider)

The writer of the following letters is a young woman who lost her husband in a railroad accident and went to Denver to seek support for herself and her two-year-old daughter, Jerrine. Turning her hand to the nearest work, she went out by the day as house-cleaner and laundress. Later, seeking to better herself, she accepted employment as a housekeeper for a well-to-do Scotch cattle-man, Mr. Stewart, who had taken up a quarter-section in Wyoming. The letters, written through several years to a former employer in Denver, tell the story of her new life in the new country...

This is a sequel to Letters of a Woman Homesteader in which Elinore Rupert (Pruitt) Stewart describes her arrival and early years on a Burntfork Wyoming ranch in 1909-1913. The letters are written to her elderly friend, Mrs. Coney, in Denver. In the present collection of letters, Elinore describes a lively excursion on horseback and wagon into the Wyoming wilderness during July-October 1914. Her traveling companions are her husband “Mr. Stewart,” their three oldest children, and kind-hearted, opinionated neighbor Mrs...

The Donner Party was a group of California-bound American settlers caught up in the “westering fever” of the 1840s. After becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846–1847, some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism. Although this aspect of the tragedy has become synonymous with the Donner Party in the popular imagination, it actually was a minor part of the episode. The author was about 4 at the time. The first part of the book accounts the tragic journey and rescue attempts; the last half are reminiscences of the child orphan, passed from family to family while growing up.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the premier movers in the original women’s rights movement, along with Susan B. Anthony, her best friend for over 50 years. While Elizabeth initially stayed home with her husband and many babies and wrote the speeches, Susan went on the road to bring the message of the women’s rights movement to an often hostile public. When black men were given the vote in 1870, Susan and Elizabeth led the women’s rights establishment of the time to withhold support for a bill that would extend to black men the rights still denied for women of all colors...

Elizabeth Bancroft went to England with her husband, historian George Bancroft, for three of the most dynamicy years in European hstory. As Ambassador to England from the United States, George moved in the highest circles. In his wife’s letters to their sons, her uncle, her brother, and Mrs. Polk (the President’s wife), we see glimpses not only of early Victorian English life, but also of Queen Victoria herself! Mrs. Bancroft speaks of dinners with Benjamin Disraeli, visits to Wordsworth, weekends in the country with Louis Napolean and Sir Robert Peel with such matter of fact aplomb that one cannot help being impressed.

This is the autobiography of Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who bought her freedom with the money she earned as a seamstress. She eventually worked for Mary Lincoln. It is a fascinating book, filled with many recollections of her own life and her interactions with the Lincolns and other members of the government elite.

Author Elizabeth Latimer synthesizes notes from a variety of sources to produce this summary of the nation of France in the 19th century. (Summary by Cathy Barratt)

INFLUENCES OF GEOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT ON THE BASIS OF RATZEL'S SYSTEM OF ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY BY ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE PREFACE The present book, as originally planned over seven years ago, was to be a simplified paraphrase or restatement of the principles embodied in Friedrich Ratzel's _Anthropo-Geographie_. The German work is difficult reading even for Germans. To most English and American students of geographic environment it is a closed book, a treasure-house bolted and barred. Ratzel himself realized that any English form could not be a literal translation, but must be adapted to the Anglo-Celtic and especially to the Anglo-American mind...

“If you have visions of a middle-aged parasol-bearing lady smiling sweetly from her carriage as she tours Bendigo think again. In 1852, 20 year old clergyman’s daughter Ellen and her brother boarded ship for Melbourne then set off to walk to Bendigo. Dressed in her blue serge skirt which doubled as nightwear, she camped under a tent made of blankets, had mutton, damper and tea most meals and on arrival lent her hand to gold washing. And seemed to enjoy it !And amongst other things she tells of colonial life , transportation, emigration and other gold-fields.But you will need to listen to hear more about bush-rangers and orphans as well as what she did with her parasol.”