Sources are the raw material of history, but whereas the written word has traditionally been seen as the principal source, historians now recognize the value of sources beyond written documents. In this new edition of History and Material Culture, contributors consider a range of objects - from an eighteenth-century bed curtain to a twenty-first-century shopping trolley - which can help historians develop new interpretations and new knowledge about the past.

Containing two new chapters on healing objects in East Africa and the shopping trolley in the social world, this book...

Sources are the raw material of history, but whereas the written word has traditionally been seen as the principal source, historians now recognize the value of sources beyond written documents. In this new edition of History and Material Culture, contributors consider a range of objects - from an eighteenth-century bed curtain to a twenty-first-century shopping trolley - which can help historians develop new interpretations and new knowledge about the past.

Containing two new chapters on healing objects in East Africa and the shopping trolley in the social world, this book...

Karen Harvey explores the construction of sexual difference and gender identity in eighteenth-century England. Using erotic texts and their illustrations, and rooting this evidence firmly in historical context, Harvey provides a thoroughgoing critique of the orthodoxy of work on sexual difference in the history of the body. She argues that eighteenth-century English erotic culture combined a distinctive mode of writing and reading in which the form of refinement was applied to the matter of sex. Erotic culture was male-centred and it was in this environment, Harvey argues, that men could...

Writers have previously placed the action of kissing into categories: kisses of love, affection, peace, respect and friendship. Each of the essays in this fascinating book take a single kind of kiss and uses it as an index to the past. For rather than offering a simple history of the kiss, this book is about the kiss in history. In this collection, an eminent group of cultural historians have explored this subject using an exceptionally wide range of evidence. They explore the kiss through sources as diverse as canonical religious texts, popular prints, court depositions, periodicals, diaries...

Oldest Ghosts tells of unexplained exploits by the spirits dwelling in St. Augustine, the oldest city of European origin in the United States.

• Judge John Stickney watches from a tree limb above his cemetery monument.
• A Colonial-period ghost hangs laundry in a Spanish courtyard.
• The ghost of Will Green, who died in 1802, routinely enters the bodies of men drinking in a bar.

Some residents and visitors tolerate the playful spirits. Others prefer not to acknowledge them. Either way, the ghosts abide.

Karen Harvey explores the construction of sexual difference and gender identity in eighteenth-century England. Using erotic texts and their illustrations, and rooting this evidence firmly in historical context, Harvey provides a thoroughgoing critique of the orthodoxy of work on sexual difference in the history of the body. She argues that eighteenth-century English erotic culture combined a distinctive mode of writing and reading in which the form of refinement was applied to the matter of sex. Erotic culture was male-centred and it was in this environment, Harvey argues, that men could...

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The Little Republic examines the relationship between masculinity, the household, and domestic patriarchy. How did men engage with domestic life? What did the household mean to men? How could they lay claim to domestic authority? In reconstructing men's own understandings, this volume foregrounds the concept of the 'house' and the associated discourse of 'oeconomy':...