From the Pulitzer-Prize–winning historian, an absorbing family saga of Virginia slavery and the earthshaking rebellion led by Nat Turner.This powerful history of Virginia slavery is grounded in the daily life of a struggling plantation, Tower Hill, owned by generations of a local merchant family. A persistent debt that is both commercial and emotional drives the Blows—husbands and wives, fathers and sons—to turmoil and madness. The enslaved Blacks at Tower Hill liv...

The Nat Turner rebellion of August 1831, the iconic uprising of enslaved people in the United States, was much more extensive than we have understood. This powerful exploration of a Tidewater Virginia plantation reveals how the daily resistance of the enslaved was heightened by spiritual beliefs to seek the divine overthrow of a wicked world.Tower Hill draws on a previously untapped family archive to reveal the routines of daily life and the fraught family...

In the simmering heat of August 1967, a kaleidoscopic minivan carrying a band of hippies – adorned with long hair, beards, beads, sandals, and granny dresses – pulls up at the gates of Ft. Gordon, Augusta, GA, then the heartland of the Military Police. Their mission is unconventional: to instruct the 25th Infantry Division, 60th Mine Scout Dog Platoon in harnessing the keen senses of dogs to detect landmines, trip wires, and hidden tunnels. The air crackles with animosity as two worlds col...

A journey through the history of this railway that brought passengers to the English seaside for fifty years. Includes maps and photos.The Southwold Railway was a delightful example of one of East Anglia's minor railways: A 3ft gauge railway, single track, just over eight miles long from Halesworth (connections to London) across the heathland and marshes of East Suffolk to the seaside resort and harbor of Southwold.This book collates the research and memori...

This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark's life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor here sets ...

Relive the history of Edinburgh through the eyes of those who witnessed it.From one of the earliest mentions of its name in the sixth century to the Covid lockdowns of the twenty-first, this is a magnificent portrait of one of the world's great cities in its many iterations, from 'Edinburgh, the sink of abomination' to the Athens of the North and everything – including the home of the Enlightenment, the Festival City, the Aids Capital of Europe and a Mecca for tourists seeking ta...

**A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024A masterful history of the Civil War and its reverberations across the continent by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.**In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America’s three largest countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—all transformed themselves into nations. The Amer...

This is the story of Glasgow through the eyes of those who lived it.Glasgow: The Autobiography tells the story of the fabled, former Second City of the British Empire from its origins as a bucolic village on the rivers Kelvin and Clyde, through the tumult of the Industrial Revolution to the third millennium.Including extracts from an astonishing array of contributors from Daniel Defoe, Dorothy Wordsworth and Dr Johnson to Evelyn Waugh and Dirk Bogarde, it also feat...

Discover the people and places of colonial Boston during the tumultuous years of rebellion—illustrations included.In 1764, a small town in the British colony of Massachusetts ignited a bold rebellion. When Great Britain levied the Sugar Act on its American colonies, Parliament was not prepared for Boston's backlash.For the next decade, Loyalists and rebels harried one another as both sides revolted and betrayed, punished and murdered. But the rebel leaders ...

A man returns to France to unravel the truth about his father's actions during WWII in "a novel of scope, substance and strength all too rare today" ( Spectator).Widely acclaimed as Allan Massie's finest novel, A Question of Loyalties explores the complexities of loyalty, nationality, and family legacy after the horrors of World War II. Rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, this powerful book is "addictively narrated . ...

Motivate and nurture every pupil with bespoke support and inclusive, age-appropriate content for those working towards Second Level Maths in secondary schools.This rigorous approach guides learners through mathematical concepts with worked examples, plenty of practice and opportunities to check that skills are secure before moving on.Covering all CfE Second Level Benchmarks, this ready-made and differentiated course puts progression for all pupils at the he...

In this book, Alan Taylor reveals that the history of Dorset’s oil starts in the 1850s with attempts to extract oil and gas from mined oil shale at Kimmeridge. By the early twentieth century exploration geologists had realised the significance of oil seeps and other geological features found along the Dorset coast. It seemed that oil might lie in the rock strata at specific locations deep under the Dorset countryside. The author explains how exploration drilling, during a period of eighty ...