Social History

'I tried to contact my own GP last week. I counted 19 redials and 20 minutes on hold before I was able to speak to a receptionist... only to be told that all the appointments for the day had gone. My experience echoes a familiar tale told up and down...

In ancient, pre-literate cultures across the globe, tribal elders had encyclopedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across a landscape, identify the stars in the sky and recite the history of their people. Yet today, most of us...

A Telegraph Book of 2018 An Observer Pick of 2018 A New Statesman Book of 2018 A definitive history and anarchic celebration of the fight for women's right to vote; 'A huge achievement' Rachel Cooke, Observer 'Glorious' Sunday Times 'A...

The astonishing story of the project that launched Mass Observation In the late 1930s the Lancashire town of Bolton witnessed a ground-breaking social experiment. Over three years, a team of ninety observers recorded, in painstaking detail, the everyday...

Why do we have so many dialects in England? Why do we not all speak in standard English? How has our history shaped and influenced the language we speak today? In a Manner of Speaking is a fun and fascinating exploration of spoken English that...

The Leaping Hare is a rare and remarkable book about every aspect of the life and legend of the wild hare, exploring nature, poetry, folklore, history and art. A frequent feature in the mythology of many cultures, the hare has been linked with mystery...

Martin Luther King left an indelible mark on 20th-century American history through his leadership of the non-violent civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The election of Barack Obama as America's first black president in November 2008 has...

Kathleen Clifford was born in 1909. Her family lived in a tiny flat near Paddington Station and her earliest memories were of the smell of horses and the shrill whistle of steam trains. For a girl from the slums there was really only one option once...

WINNER OF THE LAKELAND BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2022You dreamed of being a journalist and the dream has come true. You love working for your local paper . . . although not everything is as you imagined.You embarrass yourself with a range of celebrities,...

In 1837, in England and Wales, there were only five provincial cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants. By 1891 there were twenty-three. Over the same period London's population more than doubled.In this companion volume to Victorian People and Victorian...

'A moving microhistory of working-class girlhood' BBC History MagazineIt is 1937 in a northern mill-town and a class of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are writing about their lives, their world, and the things that matter to them. They tell of...

Foucault continues on the theme of his 1978 course by focusing on the study of liberal and neo-liberal forms of government and concentrating in particular on two forms of neo-liberalism: German post-war liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781639362851Author Dan JonesFormat HardbackPage Count 432Imprint Pegasus BooksPublisher Pegasus BooksWeight(grams) 1089gDimensions(mm) 256mm * 204mm * 20mm

Winner of the 2017 Nautilus Silver Award! This fresh perspective on crucial questions of history identifies the root metaphors that cultures have used to construct meaning in their world. It offers a glimpse into the minds of a vast range of different...

Acclaimed The Science of Discworld centred around an original Pratchett story about the wizards of Discworld. In it they accidentally witnessed the creation and evolution of our universe, a plot which was interleaved with a Cohen & Stewart non-fiction...

'Beguiling ... Limpidly written, effortlessly learned' William Boyd, TLS, Books of the YearIn November 1838 Frederic Chopin, George Sand and her two children sailed to Majorca to escape the Parisian winter. They settled in an abandoned monastery at...

Revised and updated throughout, the fourth edition of A Brief History of Ancient Greece presents the political, social, cultural, and economic history and civilization of ancient Greece in all its complexity and variety. Written by six leading ancient...

The imminent demise of the nation-state in the face of global capitalism and supra-national agencies like the United Nations has often been predicted, yet in practice the death of the state seems unimaginable: indeed terrorist activity and corporate...

From the foremost historian of 20th century Spain, A People Betrayed is the story of the devastating betrayal of Spain by its political class, its military and its Church. This comprehensive history of modern Spain...

This unique landmark oral history uses first-hand accounts from ordinary men and women who were there. Gripping, poignant, surprising and even humorous, the personal experiences of these soldiers, civilians, marines and medics from both sides tell us...

'Bristles with provocative insights into the tangled liaisons of sex and self' Times Higher EducationIn the third volume of his acclaimed examination of sexuality in modern Western society, Foucault investigates the Golden Age of Rome to reveal a ...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780525511281Author Gary NoesnerFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Random House Trade PaperbacksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams)...

This book makes use of a privately held archive of the old periodical Illustrated Police News to describe strange, macabre and uncanny episodes from the Victorian era. Dog-Faced Men are exhibited on stage, the doctors congregate around the bed of the...

Ten chapters, ten women and many stories of heartbreak, including her own: Xinran once again takes us right into the lives of Chinese women and their lost daughters. Whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions or...

This collection explores folklore and folkloristics within the diverse and contested national discourses of Britain and Ireland, examining their role in shaping the islands' constituent nations from the eighteenth century to our contemporary moment of...

Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, Cundill History Prize, Fage and Oliver Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award Winner of the Historical Writers' Association Non-Fiction Crown 2020Winner of the American...

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO COUNT? WHY ARE HUMANS THE ONLY SPECIES ON EARTH THAT CAN DO IT? WHERE DID COUNTING COME FROM? HOW HAS IT SHAPED SOCIETIES ALONG THE WAY? AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? Counting is an innovative, erudite, world-wrapping journey through...

The Reign of Terror continues to fascinate scholars as one of the bloodiest periods in French history, when the Committee of Public Safety strove to defend the first Republic from its many enemies, creating a climate of fear and suspicion in...

THE CRIMES. THE STORIES. THE LAW 'Fascinating' - Sunday Times 'Masterful' - Judith Flanders 'A page-turning read' - Prof. David...

An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR?...

A lively new history of London told through twenty-five buildings, from iconic Georgian townhouses to the Shard   A walk along any London street takes you past a wealth of seemingly ordinary buildings: an Edwardian church, modernist postwar council...

A House Unlocked is Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively's classic memoir.The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents' country house Golsoncott. Years later, as the house was sold out of the...

_______'A history book that should be read by all' - Stylist. Set against the background of the campaign for women to win the vote, this is a story of the ordinary people effecting extraordinary change. 1913: the last long summer before the war. The...

It is April 1946. Evelyn Sert, twenty years old, a hairdresser from Soho, sails for Palestine, where Jewish refugees and idealists are gathering from across Europe to start a new life in a brand-new country. In the glittering, cosmopolitan, Bauhaus...

'Ruth is the queen of living history - long may she reign.'Lucy WorsleyA large black cast iron range glowing hot, the kettle steaming on top, provider of everything from bath water and clean socks to morning tea: it's a nostalgic icon of a Victorian way...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age 2007.Book InformationISBN 9780812978704Author George VecseyFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint Modern Library...

'A history of modern Spain told through one of world football's most intense rivalries' Independent'Sports Book of the Year' Sunday TimesIt's Messi vs Ronaldo, it's Catalonia vs Castilla. It's the nation against the state, freedom fighters vs Franco's...

'Victorians Undone is the most original history book I have read in a long while' Daily Mail A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR * AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR A groundbreaking account of what it...

A Waterstones Travel Book of the Year 2023 A funny, warm and timely meditation on identity and belonging, following the scenic route along the England-Wales border: Britain's deepest faultline. There is a...

Yang Jisheng's Tombstone is the book that broke the silence on of one of history's most terrible crimesMore people died in Mao's Great Famine than in the entire First World War, yet this story has remained largely untold, until now. Still banned in...