Motherland is inspired by stories from the authors father and his German childhood, and letters between her grandparents that were hidden in an attic wall for fifty years. It is the authors attempt to reckon with the paradox of her fathera product of her grandparents fiercely protective love and their status as Mitlufer, Germans who went along with Nazism, first reaping its benefits and later its consequences.
The book about John Michell (1724-93) has two parts. The first and longest part is biographical, an account of Michell ‘s home setting (Nottinghamshire in England), the clerical world in which he grew up (Church of England), the university (Cambridge) where he studied and taught, and the scientific activities he made the center of his life. The second part is a complete edition of his known letters. Half of his letters have not been previously published; the other half are brought together in one place for the first time. The letters touch on all aspects of his career, and because they are in his words, they help bring the subject to life. His publications were not many, a slim book on magnets and magnetism, one paper on geology, two papers on astronomy, and a few brief papers on other topics, but they were enough to leave a mark on several sciences. He has been called a geologist, an astronomer, and a physicist, which he was, though we best remember him as a natural philosopher, as one who investigated physical nature broadly. His scientific contribution is not easy to summarize. Arguably he had the broadest competence of any British natural philosopher of the eighteenth century: equally skilled in experiment and observation, mathematical theory, and instruments, his field of inquiry was the universe. From the structure of the heavens through the structure of the Earth to the forces of the elementary particles of matter, he carried out original and far-reaching researches on the workings of nature.
King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire presents a modern-spelling edition of seventy- five letters exchanged between Buckingham and James. Across the centuries, commentators have condemned the letters as indecent or repulsive. Bergeron argues that on the contrary they reveal an inward desire of king and subject in a mutual exchange of love.
A Woman In Pants! The arrival of Michael Bowen’s bride, married sight unseen by proxy, sends the rancher reeling. With her trousers, cowboy hat and rifle, she looks like a female outlawnot the genteel lady he corresponded with for months. He’s been hoodwinked into marriage with the wrong woman! Selina Farleigh Bowen loved Michael’s letters, even if she couldn’t read them herself. A friend read them to her, and wrote her repliesbut apparently that friend left things out, like Michael’s dream of a wife who was nothing like her. Selina won’t change who she is, not even for the man she loves. Yet time might show Michael the true value of his unlikely wife.
The USS Carondelet had a revolutionary ship design and was the most active of all the Union’s Civil War river ironclads. From Fort Henry through the siege of Vicksburg and from the Red River campaign through the Battle of Nashville, the gunboat was prominent in war legend and literature. This history draws on the letters of Ensign Scott Dyer Jordan and Rear Adm. Henry Walke’s memoirs.
