Local History

"Telling a multispecies history of Central Park from the 1850s until the 1970s, Dawn Day Biehler illuminates the vibrant lives of humans and animals in the park, showcasing stories of decorative sheep, nesting swans, capering monkeys, and escaped bison as well as New Yorkers' attempts to reconfigure their relationships to the land and animals and claim spaces for recreation and leisure. Ultimately, Biehler shows how Central Park has always been a place where power and belonging have been contested by animals and humans alike"--

From humble beginnings in rural America, I grew up in the forest near a wild river destined to work on important engineering projects that would affect the lives of millions of people.Finding the loves of my life and the critical decisions which sometimes ended those relationships and changed my future.The stories of the many people who helped to propel me toward my goal and their contributions that would eventually bring me in a full circle and return home again to where it all began.

An accessible history of St Albans from its beginnings to the present day highlighting the city's significant events and people

A fascinating portrait of Whitstable presented through a remarkable collection of historical postcards.

Explore the Hampshire town of Romsey in this fully illustrated A-Z guide to its history, people and places.

A history of Ledbury

The Emergency in Colour brings wartime Ireland to life in dramatic color.Through extensive research, the photos presented here have been painstakingly hand-colorized by photographer John O'Byrne, showing what life on the island was like in extraordinary times.There are over 200 photographs from across the country, many of which have never been published before, all of them accompanied by fascinating and accessible captions from historian Michael B. Barry.

America's Switzerland, a companion volume to This Blue Hollow, is the first comprehensive history of Rocky Mountain National Park and its neighboring town, Estes Park, during the decades when travel became a middle-class rite of summer.

The Clearances are well known as one of the darkest periods of Highland history. Over a hundred-year period somewhere in the region of 150,000 people evicted from the land they had worked for generations; many were forced to start new lives overseas. The human cost was enormous, but there were huge consequences for the Highland economy too as the land was put to different uses.This book details the Clearances as they affected the island of Mull - the Hebridean hub for the emigrant ships which left for the New World. Peter Macnab discusses the influences which changed crofting in the 18th and 19th centuries, the triggers for migration, the crofter protests, the Napier Commission of 1883 and the introduction of various laws to provide security of tenure.Having been brought up in what likely was the last poorhouse in the Hebrides, where his father was governor, Peter Macnab was able to hear directly the stories and about the cruelties suffered. This makes his book a uniquely fascinating perspective on a complex and significant period of Scottish history.

This is Glasgow journalist Cliff Hanley's sparkling, unsentimental and uproariously funny account of growing up in the Gallowgate and then Shettleston in the 1920s and 1930s and his working life as a radio broadcaster and journalist in the 1940s and 1950s. One of the great Glasgow classics, first published in 1957, back in print after many years.

In Conservative Americanism, the author traces Conservative Americanist ideology between 1854 to 1861 and argues that Border Southerners who joined the American or Know Nothing Party were nativists who believed that foreigners and foreign ideas threatened the institution of slavery and the stability of the Union.

Why did Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries know so little about their past and even less about those who controlled their history? Is the historical narrative the only legitimate medium through which the past can be made known? Are novelists and historians as far apart as convention has it? In an age when history grounds any claims to national status, these are important questions and they have implications for how Scottish history has evolved, and how Scottish identity has been understood up to the present day.Scottish history is not simply the distillation of Scotland's past: authors shape what we know and how we judge our forebears. This book investigates who decided which Scottish voices of the past would be heard in history's pages and which would ultimately be silenced. It sketches a picture of a narrow and privileged cultural elite that responded belatedly to a more democratic age and only slowly embraced women writers and the interests of 'average' Scots. Integrating historical fiction and popular histories in its appreciation of the Scottish historical imaginary, it most importantly tells the story of why, despite the interests of politicians and others, a truly British history has never emerged.

London: A City in Pictures is a visual memento and celebration of the city's unique character and rich mix of diverse cultures.