5 History / Military eBooks

In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage by Vicky Holmes
Transnational Encounters between Germany and Korea: Affinity in Culture and Politics Since the 1880s (Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies) by Joanne Miyang Cho
The Lost Child in Literature and Culture by Mark Froud
Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century by Joan D. Chittister
Vexed with Devils: Manhood and Witchcraft in Old and New England by Erika Gasser

*In Bed with the Victorians: The Life-Cycle of Working-Class Marriage by Vicky Holmes

English | 13 Dec. 2017 | ISBN: 3319603892 | 140 Pages | PDF | 1.39 MB
This book examines the life-cycle of Victorian working-class marriage through a study of the hitherto hidden marital bed. Using coroners’ inquests to gain intimate access to the working-class home and its inhabitants, this book explores their marital, quasi-marital, and post-marital beds to reveal the material, domestic, and emotional experience of working-class marriage during everyday life and at times of crisis. Drawing on the recent approach of utilising domestic objects to explore interpersonal relationships, the marital bed not only provides a rereading of the experiences of the working-class wife but also brings the much maligned or simply overlooked working-class husband into the picture. Moreover, it also extends our understanding of the various marriage-like arrangements existing throughout this class. Moving through the marital life-cycle, this book provides a greater understanding of marriages from the outset, during childbirth, at times of strife and marital breakdown, and upon the death of a spouse.

*Transnational Encounters between Germany and Korea: Affinity in Culture and Politics Since the 1880s (Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies) by Joanne Miyang Cho

English | 15 Nov. 2017 | ISBN: 1349952230 | 328 Pages | PDF | 3.86 MB
This book examines the history of the German-Korean relationship from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing on the nations’ varied encounters with each other during the last years of the Yi dynasty, the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era. With essays from a range of internationally respected scholars, this collection moves between history, diplomacy, politics, education, migration, literature, cinema, and architecture to uncover historical and cultural intersections between Germany and Korea. Each nation has navigated the challenges of modernity in different ways, and yet traditional East-West dichotomies belie the deeper affinities between them. This book points to those affinities, focusing in particular on the past and present internal divisions that perhaps make Germany and Korea as similar as Germany and Japan.

*The Lost Child in Literature and Culture by Mark Froud

English | 25 Dec. 2017 | ISBN: 1137584947 | 210 Pages | PDF | 1.47 MB

*Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century by Joan D. Chittister

English | January 9th, 2017 | ASIN: B01MUA6H2V, ISBN: 0824525949 | 204 Pages | EPUB | 5.35 MB
This new edition of a classic religious text combines the timeless wisdom of Benedict of Nursia's Rule with the perceptive commentary of a renowned Benedictine mystic and scholar. In her new introduction to the Rule, the author boldly claims that Benedict's sixth-century text is the only one of great traditions that directly touches the contemporary issues facing the human community—stewardship, conversion, communication, reflection, contemplation, humility, and equality.
Tracing Benedict's original Rule paragraph by paragraph, it expands its principles into the larger context of spiritual living in a secular world and makes the seemingly archaic instructions relevant for a contemporary audience. A new foreword, updated content, an appendix, and a recommended calendar for reading the entries and commentaries make this an invaluable resource for solitary or communal contemplation

*Vexed with Devils: Manhood and Witchcraft in Old and New England by Erika Gasser

English | July 7th, 2017 | ASIN: B06W9F21BT, ISBN: 1479831794 | 219 Pages | EPUB | 0.28 MB
Stories of witchcraft and demonic possession from early modern England through the last official trials in colonial New England.
Those possessed by the devil in early modern England usually exhibited a common set of symptoms: fits, vomiting, visions, contortions, speaking in tongues, and an antipathy to prayer. However, it was a matter of interpretation, and sometimes public opinion, if these symptoms were visited upon the victim, or if they came from within. Both early modern England and colonial New England had cases that blurred the line between witchcraft and demonic possession, most famously, the Salem witch trials. While historians acknowledge some similarities in witch trials between the two regions, such as the fact that an overwhelming majority of witches were women, the histories of these cases primarily focus on local contexts and specifics. In so doing, they overlook the ways in which manhood factored into possession and witchcraft cases.
Vexed with Devils is a cultural history of witchcraft-possession phenomena that centers on the role of men and patriarchal power. Erika Gasser reveals that witchcraft trials had as much to do with who had power in the community, to impose judgement or to subvert order, as they did with religious belief. She argues that the gendered dynamics of possession and witchcraft demonstrated that contested meanings of manhood played a critical role in the struggle to maintain authority. While all men were not capable of accessing power in the same ways, many of the people involved—those who acted as if they were possessed, men accused of being witches, and men who wrote possession propaganda—invoked manhood as they struggled to advocate for themselves during these perilous times. Gasser ultimately concludes that the decline of possession and witchcraft cases was not merely a product of change over time, but rather an indication of the ways in which patriarchal power endured throughout and beyond the colonial period.
Vexed with Devils reexamines an unnerving time and offers a surprising new perspective on our own, using stories and voices which emerge from the records in ways that continue to fascinate and unsettle us.