History - General

When the author discovered that he knew very little about his grandparents he decided to write his memoirs, so that his granddaughters would be able to understand their Granddad a little better, and that they might learn from his mistakes. The book reflects his memories of Luton and other factors that impacted on his life, including his sight loss.

As war clouds gathered over Europe there was nothing to do but wait, and dance. 1939 may have been the last season of peace, but it was also the the last flutter of Thirties Society, marked by balls, house parties, and the pop of champagne corks.

Being a housewife in the 1950s was quite different from today. After the independence of the wartime years, many women now had to leave their jobs when they married. This book includes anecdotes and homemaking hints from 1950's housewives, providing a poignant insight into their lives.

A delightful compendium of memories which will appeal to all who grew up in this post-war decade, whether in town or country, wealth or poverty. Games and hobbies, holidays, music and fashion, all bring back this decade of childhood, and jog memories about all aspects of life.

To the young people of today, the 1960s seem like another age. But for those born around this time, this era of childhood is like yesterday. From James bond to Barbie dolls and frilly shirts, life was very different to how it is now. This delightful compendium of memories will appeal to all who grew up in this incredible decade, whether in town or country, wealth or poverty.

A vivid evocation of rural life first published in 1969, in which the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War, the concerns of the younger farm workers, and the personal recollections of a host of villagers paint a moving portrait of an English village in Suffolk.

Whilst we hear and read much about the suffering of those at the Front during the First World War, we rarely realise the pain and stress suffered by those left at home. Here some of the oldest survivors share their memories of four years of hardship, terror, loss and a bittersweet victory.

A collection of childhood memories from the 1930s to the present day. It includes contributions from many famous names: Judi Dench, Richard Burton, Frank Muir to name but a few.

This is a portrait of America in the 1920s, an era of invention, glamour and excess. It was punctuated by terrifying events including the march down Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue by the Ku Klux Klan, but also produced a glittering array of artists, musicians and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Charlie Chaplin.

The Apache attack helicopter is the British Army's most awesome weapons system. Deployed for the first time in Afghanistan, it has already passed into legend. The only thing more incredible than the Apache itself are the pilots that fly her. For the first time, Apache Dawn tells their story - and their baptism of fire in the unforgiving battle of Helmand province.

The extraordinary true story of the invention of European porcelain focusing on alchemist Johann Frederick Bottger who inadvertently discovered the arcanum; Johan Gregor Herold, an ambitious artist who developed colours and patterns of unparalleled brilliance and Johann Joachim Kaendler, a virtuoso sculptor who used the Meissen porcelain to invent a new art form.

Bill Bryson takes an inwards look at all human life through a domestic telescope. Because, as Bryson says, our homes aren't refuges from history. They are where history begins and ends.

In 1964 Mary Whitehouse became the unlikely figurehead of a mass movement: the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association. For almost forty years she waged war against the programme makers, pop stars and playwrights who she felt were dragging British culture into a sewer of blasphemy and obscenity. X rated, contains offensive language.

Across the foldyard from Sally Coulthard's North Yorkshire farmhouse, stands an old stone barn. When she discovered a set of witches' marks on one of its internal walls, she began to wonder about the lives of the people who had once lived and worked there.

Both the intimate story of a building and its hinterland, and a wider social history, The Barn explores a hidden corner of rural Britain that has witnessed remarkable changes. From the eighteenth-century Enclosures to the Second World War, the fortunes of the Barn have been blown, like a leaf in a gale, by the unstoppable forces of new agriculture and industry. Seismic shifts in almost every area of society were all played out here in miniature - against a backdrop of scattered limestone villages and the softly rolling Howardian Hills.

From 1816 to 1845 John Barrow sent out teams of naval officers to do geographical and hydrographical surveys of unknown areas. Their lack of preparation makes this a tale of dangerous comedy and harrowing personal endeavour.

Before We Were Trans is a new and different story of gender, that seeks not to be comprehensive or definitive, but - by blending culture, feminism and politics - to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories. Transporting us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to North America, the stories this audiobook tells leave questions and resist conclusions. They are fraught with ambiguity, and defy modern Western terminology and categories - not least the category of 'trans' itself. But telling them provides a history that reflects the richness of modern trans reality more closely than any previously written.

Using an impressive range of source materials, including literary memoirs, the transcripts of burglary trials and upholsterer's ledgers, this is a detailed insight to home life in Georgian England from a wide cross-section of society.

Dido Belle was the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy captain and a slave woman, adopted by the Earl of Mansfield. As Lord Chief Justice of England he would preside over the drowning of 142 slaves by a shipping company. This is the story of a family that defied convention, the legal trial that exposed the cruelties of slavery and the woman who challenged notions of race at the highest rank.

Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates Jr's legendary Harvard course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, these writers used words to create a liveable world - a "home" - for Black people destined to live in a bitterly racist society. This is a community that defined and transformed itself in defiance of oppression and lies; a collective act of resistance and transcendence that is at the heart of its self-definition.

Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be 'Black', and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand, to call into being a more just and equitable future. This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of - and resisted confinement in - the black box that this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, from its founding to today. It is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.

In this acclaimed study of the black presence in Britain during the First World War, Stephen Bourne illuminates fascinating stories of black servicemen of African heritage. These accounts of the fights for their 'Mother Country' are charted from the outbreak of war in 1914 to the conflict's aftermath in 1919, when black communities up and down Great Britain were faced with anti-black 'race riots' despite their dedicated services to their country at home and abroad.

Although born in pre-Revolutionary China Esther Cheo Ying was brought up in the Midlands. She returned to China in 1949 hoping to find a sense of belonging. Sympathetic to the Communist Revolution, she joined the Red Army and worked in the new People’s Republic but, despite everything, dissatisfaction gradually crept in.

In 1845, a disaster struck Ireland. Overnight, a mysterious blight attacked the potato crops, turning the potatoes black and destroying the only real food of nearly six million people. This fascinating account tells the story of the men, women, and children who made every attempt to survive and hang on to hope.

In this freewheeling history of modern Britain, Cathy Newman writes about the pioneering women who defied the odds to make careers for themselves and alter the course of modern history - women who achieved what they achieved while dismantling hostile, entrenched views about their place in society. Learn about a developmental biologist, a WW1 correspondent and an engineer, among others.

Back in 1950 Pamela Rhodes became one of the first policewomen in the country, when the force's new female recruits faced a sceptical public in rural Yorkshire. But soon, spending her days on the streets, she came to know the neighbourhood and the extraordinary characters who lived on the right, as well as wrong, side of the law.

From the earliest forays of peoples in hand-hewn canoes through uncharted waters to the routes now taken daily by supertankers in their thousands, maritime networks form a continuum of interaction and interconnection across the globe: 90 per cent of global trade is still conducted by sea. This is history of the grandest scale and scope, and from a bracingly different perspective - not, as in most global histories, from the land but from the boundless seas.

The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche.

From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae.

Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices.

This is Winifred's story written as a tribute to her by her son. Poverty, tragedy, love and wry humour are all to be found in abundance. It is also the story of working class life in the first half of the 20th century and it portrays a culture, which although still within living memory, has long since disappeared.

One morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London's Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. It was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds...Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever.

Calibre Audio was set up in 1974 by three pioneering and tenacious women. They had a vision to bring the joy of audiobooks to anyone with a disability who found reading print difficult or impossible. With recollections from volunteers, narrators, staff and supporters this story tells the first chapter of Calibre’s amazing 50-year journey to become a national charity whose impact now provides a lifeline to so many.

Calibre has made a big difference to the lives of thousands of people - an incredible feat when you consider that all it had to start with was the spark of an idea and only a kitchen table from which to grow it.

Jennifer Worth relates her experiences as a midwife in London’s East End during the 1950’s. She witnessed both brutality and tragedy but also met with kindness and understanding, all mixed with a good sprinkling of cockney humour.. The book succeeds in being both funny and very moving.

INCLUDES A FOREWORD WITH CLARA AMFO

In 2013, film and culture critic Zeba Blay was one of the first people to coin the viral term #carefreeblackgirls on Twitter. As she says, it was "a way to carve out a space of celebration and freedom for Black women online."

In this collection of essays, Blay expands on this initial idea by delving into the work and lasting achievements of influential Black women in American culture - writers, artists, actresses, dancers, hip-hop stars - whose contributions often come in the face of bigotry, misogyny, and stereotypes. Blay celebrates the strength and fortitude of these Black women, while also examining the many stereotypes and rigid identities that have clung to them.

In writing that is both luminous and sharp, expansive and intimate, Carefree Black Girls seeks a path forward to a culture and society in which Black women and their art are appreciated and celebrated.

Cathedrals are among the most imposing, astonishing, and inspiring buildings in Europe. Regardless of faith, their architectural daring has never ceased to spark wonder. This guide traces the development of the cathedral from its earliest beginnings as a Bishop's house, up to the most extravagant contemporary designs around the world. In doing so, it sheds light on social, religious, and architectural history, as well as bringing the story of these extraordinary buildings to life.

In a contest of change, which century from the past millennium would come up trumps? Imagine the Black Death took on the female vote in a pub brawl, or the Industrial Revolution faced the Internet in a medieval joust - whose side would you be on? In this hugely entertaining book, celebrated historian Ian Mortimer takes us on a whirlwind tour of Western history, pitting one century against another in his quest to measure change.

In 2018 Britain will celebrate the centenary of women getting the vote. Here, six centenarians who lived that change, tell of what they saw, how they were treated, who they loved, what they did and where they are now.

A fascinating account of the lives of British children born in India during the Raj, many of whom endured dangerous voyages and lengthy family separations when they were sent to be educated in chilly British boarding schools.

When Susan Goodman, herself a child in WWII, appealed for wartime stories from her peers the response was overwhelming. Nostalgic, funny, everyday or tragic - the responses produced a rich tapestry of life in WWII through the eyes of children.