Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Landless Households in Rural Europe, 1600-1900
First comparative study of landless households brings out their major role in European history and society.
When the Potato Failed
The decade that gave rise to the term 'the Hungry Forties' in Europe is often regarded, and rightly so, as one of deprivation, unrest, and revolution. Two events, the Great Irish Famine and the various political events of '1848', stand out. This book is the first to discuss the subsistence crisis of the 1840s in a truly comparative way. This subsistence crisis may be divided into two rather distinct elements. On the one hand, the failure of the potato caused by the new, unfamiliar fungus, phytophthera infestans, which first struck Europe in mid-1845, resulted in a catastrophe in Ireland that killed about one million people, and radically transformed its landscape and economy. Poor potato cro...
Feeding the People
Almost no one knew what a potato was in 1500. Today they are the world's fourth most important food. How did this happen?
The Transmission of Well-being
What does well-being mean when we talk about men and women in the past? Their sheer chances of survival, their protection from want, their social status, their individual agency and their self-esteem were all strongly mediated by the family, the predominant social institution. Family laws and customs of family formation created differences between insiders and outsiders in terms of well-being. Within families, there were strong differences in autonomy, status and freedom between the genders and generations. The book offers a fascinating exploration of gender differences in well-being in many regions of historic Europe, with some comparative perspectives. It explores how historic family systems differed with respect to choosing a marriage partner, transmitting property, living and care conditions of widows and widowers and the position of children born out of wedlock.
Sowing
Twenty-three major databases containing historical longitudinal population data are presented and discussed in this volume, focusing on their aims, content, design, and structure. Some of these databases are based on pure longitudinal sources, such as population registers that continuously observe and record demographic events, including migration and family and household composition. Other databases are family reconstitutions, based on birth, marriage and death records. The third and last category consists of semi-longitudinal databases, that combine, for instance, civil records and censuses and/ or tax registers. The volume traces the origins of historical longitudinal databases from the 1...
Famine
Famine remains one of the worst calamities that can befall a society. Mass starvation--whether it is inflicted by drought or engineered by misguided or genocidal economic policies--devastates families, weakens the social fabric, and undermines political stability. Cormac Ó Gráda, the acclaimed author who chronicled the tragic Irish famine in books like Black '47 and Beyond, here traces the complete history of famine from the earliest records to today. Combining powerful storytelling with the latest evidence from economics and history, Ó Gráda explores the causes and profound consequences of famine over the past five millennia, from ancient Egypt to the killing fields of 1970s Cambodia, f...
The Lion's Share
This is the most in-depth analysis of inequality and social polarization ever attempted for a preindustrial society. Using data from the archives of the Venetian Terraferma, and compared with information available for elsewhere in Europe, Guido Alfani and Matteo Di Tullio demonstrate that the rise of the fiscal-military state served to increase economic inequality in the early modern period. Preindustrial fiscal systems tended to be regressive in nature, and increased post-tax inequality compared to pre-tax - in contrast to what we would assume is the case in contemporary societies. This led to greater and greater disparities in wealth, which were made worse still as taxes were collected almost entirely to fund war and defence rather than social welfare. Though focused on Old Regime Europe, Alfani and Di Tullio's findings speak to contemporary debates about the roots of inequality and social stratification.
Once We Were Strangers
Little attention has been paid to the settlement of Germans in Kansas, and Roberta Reb Allen’s Once We Were Strangers helps to fill that void. It is both the saga of an immigrant family told within the larger social, political, and economic context of the day and a scholarly exploration of the settlement patterns and the diverse choices made by German pioneers. Starting in the small village of Ebhausen in the Black Forest of the Kingdom of Württemberg in what is now Germany, Allen follows the fortunes of the Lodholzes, who journeyed across the Atlantic and eventually settled on the plains of the Kansas Territory in Marshall County. Based on nearly 200 family letters and documents translat...
Funding the Rise of Mass Schooling
This book presents expert analysis on how the remarkable rise of mass schooling was funded during the nineteenth century. Based on rich source materials from rural Swedish school districts, and drawing up evidence from schooling in countries including France, Germany, England and the U.S., Westberg examines the moral considerations that guided economic practices and sheds new light on how the advent of schooling did not only rest upon monies, but also on grains, firewood and cow fodder. Exploring school districts’ motives and economic culture, this book shows how schooling was neither primarily guided by frugal impulses nor motivated by a fear of the growing working classes. Instead, schoo...
Master Kierkegaard: The Complete Journals
In this serial work of religious historical fiction, Magda, a "fallen woman" from Berlin turned maidservant in the house of Sren Kierkegaard, seeks the full life that has thus far eluded her. Two journals set in the summer of 1847 record Magda's responses to the Luther Bible, Goethe's Faust, and her elusive yet compelling master, who is simultaneously crafting his Works of Love. Three journals set in the fall, winter, and "people's spring" of 1847 and 1848 reflect Magda's ongoing engagement with secular and sacred writings, her sporadic yet intimate interactions with her master, the precariousness of her position in his household, and the rapidly changing social landscape, at the same time as Kierkegaard begins, revises, or completes several of his most existential and prophetic works. A sixth journal set in the summer of 1848 reveals Magda's final disposition. Is she judged, or is she saved?
