History

This book provides annotated primary documents and artifacts of ordinary people in history. Examines all of world history from the prehistoric era to the present day, in every region of the world, with a special emphasis on non-Western cultures.

Covers history, politics, customs, religion, education, human rights issues, rites of passage, and much more for 533 diverse cultural groups in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, and Europe.

Daily Life in Late Antiquity is the first comprehensive study of lived experience in the Late Roman Empire, from c.250-600 CE. Each of the six topical chapters highlight historical 'everyday' people, spaces, and objects, whose lives operate as windows into the late ancient economy, social relations, military service, religious systems, cultural habits, and the material environment.

This volume focuses on the Byzantine experience of adolescence and addresses crucial questions in the current research: the legal status of adolescents; the mechanisms of transition from childhood to adolescence; the socialization and gradual integration into adult society; adolescents in Byzantine art; psychological aspects of adolescence from medieval to modern times; illnesses of adolescents; adolescents in the western medieval world.

Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300 contains an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe, c. 900-1300. The study focuses on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage, breaking it into three parts: Getting Married - the process of getting married and wedding celebrations; Married Life - the married life of lay couples and clergy, their sexuality, and any remarriage; and Alternative Living - which explores concubinage and polygamy, as well as the single life in contrast to monogamous sexual unions.

Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of those who labored through the era. From sounding the "hue and cry" to alert a village to danger to malting grain for homemade ale, from the gruesome sport of bear-baiting to cuckolding and cross-dressing--the madcap habits and revealing intimacies of life in the time of Shakespeare are vividly rendered for the insatiably curious.

Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of the most perennially fascinating era of British history.

This groundbreaking volume explores the archaeology of African American life and cultures in the Upper Mid-Atlantic region, using sites dating from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Sites in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York are all examined, highlighting the potential for historical archaeology to illuminate the often overlooked contributions and experiences of the region's free and enslaved African American settlers. In addition to extensive archival research, contributors synthesize the material finds of archaeological work in slave quarter sites, tenant farms, communities, and graveyards.

This authoritative history explores the lives, cultures, and societies of America’s farmers from colonial times through the founding of the nation. Noted historian Richard Bushman explains how all farmers sought to provision themselves while still actively engaged in trade, making both subsistence and commerce vital to farm economies of all sizes. The book describes the tragic effects on the native population of farmers’ efforts to provide farms for their children and examines how climate created the divide between the free North and the slave South.

This encyclopedia provides insight into the lives of ordinary Americans who lived during the years of 1815 to 1860. The World of Antebellum America provides readers with the opportunity to understand how people across America lived and worked, what politics meant to them, and how they shaped or were shaped by economics. Includes 40 primary source documents with detailed introductions.

First-hand accounts from workers, housewives, and children help illuminate the significant achievements of the era and their impact on the everyday lives of ordinary people. A chronology, a glossary, more than 40 photographs, and further reading sources complete the work.

Author William K. Klingaman's narrative history of the American home front from December 7, 1941 through the end of 1942, a psychological study of the nation under the pressure of total war. The Darkest Year focuses on Americans' state of mind not only through what they said, but in the day-to-day details of their behavior.