Download or read book Peasants on the Edge written by William P. Mitchell and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout Latin America and the rest of the Third World, profound social problems are growing in response to burgeoning populations and unstable economic and political systems. In Peru, terrorist acts by the Shining Path guerilla movement are the most visible manifestation of social discontent, but rapid economic and religious changes have touched the lives of almost everyone, radically altering traditional lifeways. In this twenty-year study of the community of Quinua in the Department of Ayacucho, William Mitchell looks at changes provoked by population growth within a severely limited ecological and economic setting, including increasing conversion to a cash economy and out-migration, the decline of the Catholic fiesta system and the rise of Protestantism, and growing poverty and revolution. When Mitchell first began his field studies in Quinua in 1966, farming was still the Quinueños' principal means of livelihood. But while the population was increasing rapidly, the amount of arable land in the community remained the same, creating increased food shortfalls. At the same time, government controls on food prices and subsidies of cheap food imports drove down the value of rural farm production. These ecological and economic factors forced many people to enter the nonfarm economy to feed themselves. Using a materialist approach, Mitchell charts the new economic strategies that Quinueños use to confront the harsh pressures of their lives, including ceramic production, wage labor, petty commerce, and migration to cash work on the coat and in the eastern tropical forests. In addition, he shows how the growing conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism is also an economic strategy, since Protestant ideology offers acceptable reasons for redirecting the money that used to be spent on elaborate religious festivals to household needs and education. The twenty-year span of this study makes it especially valuable for students of social change. Mitchell's unique, interdisciplinary approach, considering ecological, economic, and population factors simultaneously, offers a model that can be widely applied in many Third World areas. Additionally, the inclusion of an entire chapter of family histories reveals how economic and ecological forces are played out at the individual level.
Download or read book Image on the Edge written by Michael Camille and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do they all mean – the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Michael Camille explores that riotous realm of marginal art, so often explained away as mere decoration or zany doodles, where resistance to social constraints flourished. Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive, and amazing the art of the time could be.
Download or read book Dead Peasants written by Larry D. Thompson and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Just terrific... As real as a heart attack, and every bit as suspenseful." --John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of A Plague of Secrets, on The Trial Veteran trial lawyer Larry D. Thompson has decades of courtroom experience in his home state of Texas on controversial and important trials. Now, in Dead Peasants, Thompson has delivered a fast-moving and suspenseful legal thriller featuring a retired lawyer whose life gets turned upside down when a stranger asks for help. Jack Bryant, exhausted after a high-profile career as a lawyer, takes an early retirement in Fort Worth, Texas, where he plans to kick back, relax, and watch his son play football at TCU. But then an elderly widow shows up with a check for life insurance benefits and that is suspiciously made payable to her dead husband's employer, Jack can't turn down her pleas for help and files a civil suit to collect the benefits rightfully due the widow. A chain of events that can't be stopped thrusts Jack into a vortex of killings, and he and his new love interest find themselves targets of a murderer. Gripping, engaging, and written with the authority that only a seasoned lawyer could possess, Dead Peasants is a legal thriller that will stun and surprise you.
Download or read book Crispin At the Edge of the World written by Avi and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this riveting sequel to the Newbery-Award winning Crispin: The Cross of Lead--the second book in a planned trilogy--Avi explores themes of war, religion, and family as he continues the adventures of Crispin and Bear. The more I came to know of the world, the more I knew I knew it not. He was a nameless orphan, marked for death by his masters for an unknown crime. Discovering his name- Crispin-only intensified the mystery. Then Crispin met Bear, who helped him learn the secret of his full identity. And in Bear-the enormous, red-bearded juggler, sometime spy, and everyday philosopher-Crispin also found a new father and a new world. Now Crispin and Bear have set off to live their lives as free men. But they don't get far before their past catches up with them: Bear is being pursued by members of the secret brotherhood who believe he is an informer. When Bear is badly wounded, it is up to Crispin to make decisions about their future-where to go, whom to trust. Along the way they become entangled with an extraordinary range of people, each of whom affects Crispin and Bear's journey in unexpected ways. To find freedom and safety, they may have to travel to the edge of the world-even if it means confronting death itself.
Download or read book Spectres of John Ball written by James G. Crossley and published by Equinox Publishing (UK). This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, the priest John Ball was one of the most infamous or famous figures in the history of English rebels, best known for his saying 'When Adam delved and Eve Span, Who was then the gentleman'. But over the past hundred years his memory has faded dramatically. Along with Wat Tyler, Ball was one of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, a historically remarkable event in that leading figures of the realm were beheaded by the rebels. For a few days in June 1381, the rebels dominated London but soon met their demise, with Ball executed. Ball provided the theological justification for the uprising which he saw in apocalyptic terms. After the revolt, he was soon vilified and received an overwhelmingly hostile press for 400 years as an archetypal enemy of the state and a religious zealot. His reputation was rescued from the end of the eighteenth century onward and for over one hundred years he rivalled Robin Hood and Wat Tyler as a great English folk (and even abolitionist) hero. But his 640-year reception involves much more, of course, and is tied up with the story of what England is or could be.Overall, the book explains how we get from an apocalyptic priest who promoted a theocracy favouring the lower orders and the decapitation of the leading church and secular authorities to someone who promoted democracy and vague notions about love and tolerance. The book also explains why he has gone out of fashion and whether he can make another comeback.
Download or read book Sugar and Society in China written by Sucheta Mazumdar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth. Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and the history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, the author shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade; indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War. But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production or set in motion sustained economic growth.
Download or read book The Ties that Bound written by Barbara A. Hanawalt and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions. Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.
Download or read book Corner of the Living written by Miguel La Serna and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Corner of the Living
Download or read book The Peasant s Dream written by Melanie Dickerson and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The duke's daughter, Adela, masquerades as a peasant for a small taste of freedom . . . until she falls in love with a commoner who has no idea who she really is. In this reverse reimagining of the Cinderella story, secrets and dangerous enemies threaten a fairy-tale romance. Adela, daughter of the powerful Duke of Hagenheim, is rarely allowed outside the castle walls. Longing for freedom, one day she sneaks away to the market disguised as a peasant. There, she meets a handsome young woodcarver named Frederick. Frederick is a poor farmer and the sole provider for his family, and he often has to defend his mother from his father’s drunken rages. He dreams of making a living carving beautiful images into wood, and he is thrilled when the Bishop of Hagenheim commissions him to carve new doors for the cathedral. As Frederick works on the project, he and Adela meet almost daily, and it doesn’t take long for them to fall in love. Even as their relationship grows, her true identity remains hidden from him, and he believes she is a commoner like him. When disaster separates them, Adela and Frederick find themselves caught in the midst of deceptions far more dangerous than innocent disguises. As the powerful lords set against them proceed with their villainous plans, secrets emerge that put Frederick and Adela’s future at risk. Full-length, clean fairy-tale reimagining The final Hagenheim story; can be read as a stand-alone Includes discussion questions for book clubs Also by Melanie Dickerson: The Golden Braid, The Silent Songbird, and The Orphan’s Wish
Download or read book Feeding the People written by Rebecca Earle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost no one knew what a potato was in 1500. Today they are the world's fourth most important food. How did this happen?
Download or read book Remembering Peasants written by Patrick Joyce and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark new history of the peasant experience, exploring a now neglected way of life that once encompassed most of humanity but is vanishing in our time. “What the skeleton is to anatomy, the peasant is to history, its essential hidden support.” For over the past century and a half, and still more rapidly in the last seventy years, the world has become increasingly urban, and the peasant way of life—the dominant way of life for humanity since agriculture began well over 6,000 years ago—is disappearing. In this new history of peasantry, social historian Patrick Joyce aims to tell the story of this lost world and its people, and how we can commemorate their way of life. In one sense, this is a global history, ambitious in scope, taking us from the urbanization of the early 19th century to the present day. But more specifically, Joyce’s focus is the demise of the European peasantry and of their rites, traditions, and beliefs. Alongside this he brings in stories of individuals as well as places, including his own family, and looks at how peasants and their ways of life have been memorialized in photographs, literature, and in museums. Joyce explores a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history and is usually mediated through others. And now peasants are vanishing in one of the greatest historical transformations of our time. Written with the skill and authority of a great historian, Remembering Peasants is a landmark work, a richly complex and passionate history written with exquisite care. It is also deeply resonant, as Joyce shines a light on people whose knowledge of the land is being irretrievably lost during our critical time of climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely, and vitally important, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on history—and the future—remains profoundly relevant.
Download or read book The Greatest Knight written by Thomas Asbridge and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned scholar Thomas Asbridge brings to life medieval England’s most celebrated knight, William Marshal—providing an unprecedented and intimate view of this age and the legendary warrior class that shaped it. Caught on the wrong side of an English civil war and condemned by his father to the gallows at age five, William Marshal defied all odds to become one of England’s most celebrated knights. Thomas Asbridge’s rousing narrative chronicles William’s rise, using his life as a prism to view the origins, experiences, and influence of the knight in British history. In William’s day, the brutish realities of war and politics collided with romanticized myths about an Arthurian “golden age,” giving rise to a new chivalric ideal. Asbridge details the training rituals, weaponry, and battle tactics of knighthood, and explores the codes of chivalry and courtliness that shaped their daily lives. These skills were essential to survive one of the most turbulent periods in English history—an era of striking transformation, as the West emerged from the Dark Ages. A leading retainer of five English kings, Marshal served the great figures of this age, from Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to Richard the Lionheart and his infamous brother John, and was involved in some of the most critical phases of medieval history, from the Magna Carta to the survival of the Angevin/Plantagenet dynasty. Asbridge introduces this storied knight to modern readers and places him firmly in the context of the majesty, passion, and bloody intrigue of the Middle Ages. The Greatest Knight features 16 pages of black-and-white and color illustrations.
Download or read book Peasants and Kings written by Emma Slate and published by Tabula Rasa Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2020-10-02 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From USA Today & Wall Street Journal best-selling author Emma Slate comes a billionaire standalone romance. Hadrian Rhys is every woman’s dream. The Scottish billionaire is handsome and shockingly masculine. He looks like a modern Viking in a suit. At first glance, he’s perfect… But something dark lurks beneath the surface of his manufactured facade. And it entices me in spite of my better judgement. So, when he offers me a contract to spend six months with him on his private island, I say yes. Night after night in his bed, Hadrian makes me unravel. He plays my body like he owns it. But he doesn’t just want my pleasure—he wants my ultimate surrender. He demands the truth from me, and begins to uncover carefully guarded secrets… Secrets my mother died to protect. Over time, I want to give in. What is it about this man that makes me want to yield? Why does my resistance crumble in his presence? My mother warned me not to trust anyone. But maybe—just maybe—Hadrian Rhys is powerful enough to save us both from what’s coming…
Download or read book Peasant and Nation written by Florencia E. Mallon and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peasant and Nation offers a major new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Florencia Mallon provides a groundbreaking analysis of their effect on the evolution of these nation states. As political history from a variety of subaltern perspectives, the book takes seriously the history of peasant thought and action and the complexity of community politics. It reveals the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance, the exploitation and the reciprocity, that coexist in popular political struggle. With this book Mallon not only forges a new path for Latin American history but challenges the very concept of nationalism. Placing it squarely within the struggles for power between colonized and colonizing peoples, she argues that nationalism must be seen not as an integrated ideology that puts the interest of the nation above all other loyalties, but as a project for collective identity over which many political groups and coalitions have struggled. Ambitious and bold, Peasant and Nation both draws on monumental archival research in two countries and enters into spirited dialogue with the literatures of post-colonial studies, gender studies, and peasant studies.
Download or read book Now is the Time written by Melvyn Bragg and published by Sceptre. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gripping novel, Melvyn Bragg brings an extraordinary episode in English history to fresh, urgent life. At the end of May 1381, the fourteen-year-old King of England had reason to be fearful: the plague had returned, the royal coffers were empty and a draconian poll tax was being widely evaded. Yet Richard, bolstered by his powerful, admired mother, felt secure in his God-given right to reign. But within two weeks, the unthinkable happened: a vast force of common people invaded London, led by a former soldier, Walter Tyler, and the radical preacher John Ball, demanding freedom, equality and the complete uprooting of the Church and state. And for three intense, violent days, it looked as if they would sweep all before them. Now is the Time depicts the events of the Peasants' Revolt on both a grand and intimate scale, vividly portraying its central figures and telling an archetypal tale of an epic struggle between the powerful and the apparently powerless.
Download or read book Rethinking the Economics of War written by Cynthia J. Arnson and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays questions the adequacy of explaining today's internal armed conflicts purely in terms of economic factors and re-establishes the importance of identity and grievances in creating and sustaining such wars. Countries studied include Lebanon, Angola, Colombia and Afghanistan.
Download or read book The Peasants written by Władysław Stanisław Reymont and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 1178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
