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A guide to the history behind the world of Harry Potter--just in time for the last Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part II) Harry Potter lives in a world that is both magical and historical. Hogwarts pupils ride an old-fashioned steam train to school, notes are taken on parchment with quill pens, and Muggle legends come to life in the form of werewolves, witches, and magical spells. This book is the first to explore the real history in which Harry's world is rooted. Did you know that bezoars and mandrakes were fashionable luxury items for centuries? Find out how Europeans first developed the potions, spells, and charms taught at Hogwarts, from Avada Kedavra to love ...
Is cleanliness next to Germanness, as some nineteenth-century nationalists insisted? This book explores the relationship between gender roles, domesticity, and German national identity between 1870–1945. After German unification, approaches to household management that had originally emerged among the bourgeoisie became central to German national identity by 1914. Thrift, order, and extreme cleanliness, along with particular domestic markers (such as the linen cabinet) and holiday customs, were used by many Germans to define the distinctions between themselves and neighboring cultures. What was bourgeois at home became German abroad, as 'German domesticity' also helped to define and underwrite colonial identities in Southwest Africa and elsewhere. After 1933, this idealized notion of domestic Germanness was racialized and incorporated into an array of Nazi social politics. In occupied Eastern Europe during WWII Nazi women's groups used these approaches to household management in their attempts to 'Germanize' Eastern European women who were part of a large-scale project of population resettlement and ethnic cleansing.
The first look at the history behind Stephenie Meyer's bestselling Twilight series, timed to release with the third movie, Eclipse The characters of the Twilight Saga carry a rich history that shapes their identities and actions over the course of the series. Edward, for instance, may look like a seventeen-year-old teen heartthrob, but was actually born in 1901 and died during the Spanish Influenza of 1918. His adopted sister, Alice, was imprisoned in an insane asylum in 1920 and treated so badly there that even becoming a vampire was a welcome escape. This book is the first to explore the history behind the Twilight Saga's characters and their stories. You’ll learn about what life might h...
Nancy Reagin analyzes the rhetoric, strategies, and programs of more than eighty bourgeois women's associations in Hanover, a large provincial capital, from the Imperial period to the Nazi seizure of power. She examines the social and demographic foundations of the Hanoverian women's movement, interweaving local history with developments on the national level. Using the German experience as a case study, Reagin explores the links between political conservatism and a feminist agenda based on a belief in innate gender differences. Reagin's analysis encompasses a wide variety of women's organizations--feminist, nationalist, religious, philanthropic, political, and professional. It focuses on the ways in which bourgeois women's class background and political socialization, and their support of the idea of 'spiritual motherhood,' combined within an antidemocratic climate to produce a conservative, maternalist approach to women's issues and other political matters. According to Reagin, the fact that the women's movement evolved in this way helps to explain why so many middle-class women found National Socialism appealing.
The historic and mythic elements of the American Old West—covered wagon trains, herds of buffalo, teepee villages, Indigenous warriors on horseback, cowboys on open ranges, and white settlers “taming” a wilderness with their plows and log cabins—have exerted a global fascination for more than 200 years and became the foundation for fan communities who have endured for generations. This book examines some of those communities, particularly German fans inspired by the authors of Westerns such as Karl May, and American enthusiasts of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series. But the Old West (like all visions of the past) proved to be shifting cultural terrain. In bot...
A guide to the history that informs the world of Star Trek?just in time for the next JJ Abrams Star Trek movie For a series set in our future, Star Trek revisits the past constantly. Kirk and Spock battle Nazis, Roman gladiators, and witness the Great Depression. When they're not doubling back on their own earlier timelines, the crew uses the holodeck to spend time in the American Old West or Victorian England. Alien races have their own complex and fascinating histories, too. The Star Trek universe is a sci-fi imagining of a future world that is rooted in our own human history. Gene Roddenberry created a television show with a new world and new rules in order to comment on social and politi...
Germans have been one of the most mobile and dispersed populations on earth. Communities of German speakers, scattered around the globe, have long believed they could recreate their Heimat (homeland) wherever they moved, and that their enclaves could remain truly German. Furthermore, the history of Germany is inextricably tied to Germans outside the homeland who formed new communities that often retained their Germanness. Emigrants, including political, economic, and religious exiles such as Jewish Germans, fostered a nostalgia for home, which, along with longstanding mutual ties of family, trade, and culture, bound them to Germany. The Heimat Abroad is the first book to examine the problem ...
You've read the books. You've seen the films. Now get inside the heads of your favorite Twilight characters (just like Edward can!) in The Psychology of Twilight. Explore the minds and motives of Bella, Edward, Jacob, and more with a deeper look at the series that's captured the hearts—and psyches—of millions. Find out: How Edward and Jacob match up in an evolutionary psychology smackdown for Bella's—and our—affection Whether Bella's motorcycle-riding and cliff diving in New Moon are suicidal—or her salvation Why vampires and werewolves aren't so different after all (at least psychologically) The emotional appeal of love stories like Bella and Edward's Why being a part of Twilight fandom is good for your psychological health Snuggle up on the closest chaise, and get ready to revisit the Twilight Saga—with some professional help.
The women's movement is perhaps the most baffling of the recent social reforms to sweep the United States. It is composed of numerous distinct groups, each with specific interests and goals, each with individual leaders and literature. What are the philosophies behind these groups? Who are their leaders and how have their ideas evolved? Do they have a vital connection with the women's movement of the past? And where are feminist groups headed? In this study that brilliantly illuminates the literature and purposes of feminists, What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement, Gayle Graham Yates has produced the first comprehensive history of feminist women's groups. Concentrating chiefly on the mo...
Explores what happened when Germans from three different empires were forced to live together in Poland after the First World War.