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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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"... one of the most coherent and unified collaborative works in the field of Russian history." -- American Historical Review

"This book excels in capturing the colors, tastes, sounds, and smells of Imperial Russia's rapidly growing, ethnically divided cities... " -- Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"... must reading for those interested in Russian urban and social history." -- Slavic Review

"This is a rich and informative book... "  -- Journal of Social History

From the Great Reforms that began in the 1860s to the revolutions of 1917, the Russian Empire experienced a period of explosive urban growth. This unique and important volume examines the changes it brought in eight of the Empire's largest cities.

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Publisher: Salem, Mass., S. PerleyPublication date: 1922Subjects: Gowen familyNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

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The romance and drama of the duel has made it an enduring attraction in novels, plays, and operas; but it takes on a deeper significance when considered in its social, evolutionary setting.From medieval times, the privilege of duelling was regarded as a badge of rank, an assertion of preeminence by Europe's dominant classes.This book describes the evolution of the duel from its medieval origins to the early 20th century.It also looks at the opinions about duelling in different areas and historical eras, as reflected in legislation, church pronouncements, and the works of writers such as Montesquieu and Walter Scott.Kiernan discusses the duel as something unique to Europe and its colonies, its practice in Ireland and Scotland compared with English practice, what women thought of it, and how it contributed to the development of an officer corps, throwing new light on the long ascendancy of aristocratic classes and their values in European history. ... Read more

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Shadow Genealogies explores identity transformations among minority populations under conditions of intense sociopolitical change.Based on intensive fieldwork in the Republic of Macedonia, this study chronicles the fragmentation of the Sehirli, once widespread urban Muslim communities in Macedonia, into Turkish and Albanian elements throughout the formative years of former Yugoslavia.Illustrating the dynamics of identity construction and alteration that extend beyond contemporary ethnic divisions in the Balkans, Shadow Genealogies offers a fresh perspective on the flexibility and sophistication that divided societies require if they are to survive as integrated, cohesive social units.

Shadow Genealogies weaves together the life histories of more than two hundred individuals across ninety well-known Muslim families in Macedonia. Through their voices, the book displays change where it is least expected; in ethnic identities in a country torn apart by ethnic strife. Re-creating identities under pressure forces communities to act like "cultural cannibals" who destroy and consume their own meaningful categories to emerge with alternative definitions or acceptable modes of survival. Ultimately, their stories suggest the deficiency of ethnicity as a political category in the face of opulent memories. Juxtaposing anthropological insights on ethnicity, religion and gender with unique observations on the migrations and identity politics of urban Muslim populations in the region, this book raises seminal questions about the role of culture and identity in the Balkans. ... Read more

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Ancestry-tracing is fun; it brings history to life and itgives a greater sense of personal identity. Our ancestors become realpeople, part of each of them still living in us, theirdescendants. They may have been ordinary, blue-blooded or famous, butwhatever they were the search itself is rewarding; while thesatisfaction of knowing is permanent and a proper source ofpride. Tracing a family history and gradually constructing oneÆs oneunique pedigree is an absorbing hobby, a never-ending detectiveinvestigation. This book tells the beginner exactly how to set aboutit: how to collect information from living relatives, how to make fulluse of all existing clues and traditions, how and where to findwritten records and what information they can be expected to provideas well as the likely problems that may be encountered and possibleways to solve them. Many books have been written for the would-begenealogist but none has ever equalled the success of Arthur Willis'sGenealogy for Beginners, first published in 1955, when there was noup-to-date text book on the subject. This seventh edition, published20 years after WillisÆs death in 1983, has been completely revised andrewritten, and is once again the most up-to-date and readable guideand the best buy for today's beginner in family history. ... Read more

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Nobility, Land and Service in Medieval Hungary is the first Western language account of medieval landholding and noble society in Hungary. Rady indicates that although all noble land was held by the ruler, a complex web of relationships still permeated the Hungarian nobility. In his discussion of the institutions of lordship, clientage and office-holding, the author draws direct parallels between medieval Hungary and its better-known Western neighbors.
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Customer Reviews (1)

A Page-Turner
Martyn Rady tries to express the complicated role of Hungarian nobility in Nobility, Land, and Service in Medieval Hungary. Rady, a professor of Central European History at School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at the University College London who has an emphasis on the legal history of Eastern and Central Europe, follows the chronological order in which nobles were established and developed in Hungary. He shows nobles worked in featly to their king and as corporate agents in an increasingly bureaucratic state while upholding demands of local lords of whom they were also in service. The examples used from primary and secondary sources supports an evolution of Hungarian nobility, as an institution, from a close, blood-bond between the king and his men to the bickering land-hungry bureaucrats they became, a progression parallel to the nobility of Western Europe. Overall a page-turner for the moderate scholar of Medieval Hungarian history.
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The first volume, after a general introduction setting the essays in context, has extended individual studies of the nobilities of Britain, the Dutch Republic, France, and the Spanish and Italian peninsulas. ... Read more

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Familial Forms is the first full-length study to examine how literary writers engaged the politics of genealogy that helped define the 'century of revolution.' By demonstrating how conflicts over the family-state analogy intersected with the period's battles over succession, including: the ascent of James I, the execution of Charles I, disputes over the terms of the Interregnum government, the Restoration of Charles II, the Exclusion Crisis, the deposition of James II, the ascent of William and Mary, and Anne's failure to produce a surviving hear, this study provides a new map of the seventeenth-century politics of family in England. Beginning with a reconsideration of Jacobean patriarchalism, Familial Forms focuses on the work of John Milon, Lucy Hutchinson, John Dryden, and Mary Astell. From their contrasting political and gendered positions, these authors contemplated and contested the relevance of marriage and kinship to government. Their writing illuminates two crucial elements of England's conflicts. First, the formal qualities of poems and prose tracts reveal that not only was there a competition among different versions of the family-state analogy, but also a competition over its very status as an analogy. Second, through their negotiations of linear and non-linear forms, Milton, Hutchinson, Dryden, and Astell demonstrate the centrality of temporality to the period's political battles. Though genealogy could serve as a source of monarchic authority, its unpredictable details always threatened to undermine royal power. For this reason, deployments of the family-state analogy often tried to contain, or sometimes even erase reproduction from their imagery. A particularly potent strategy for this difficult task entailed the isolation or elimination of maternity from the picture. Twenty-first century scholars have inadvertently replicated this omission by focusing on the family-state analogy and neglecting the importance of reproduction to seventeenth-century debates. Not only has this left us with a partial understanding of these political disputes in general, it leaves a particular gap in our understanding of the issues of gender in these conflicts. By investigating the intersection of the lineal and the analogical, the reproductive as well as the paternal, this study fills these critical gaps. Through close textual analysis of poetry, political tracts, parliamentary records, and non-literary genealogies, Familial Forms offers a fresh understanding of the seventeenth-century politics of genealogy. It also provides new answers to long-standing critical questions about the poetic form of canonical works, such as Paradise Lost and Absalom and Achitophel, and illuminates the political significance of newly-canonical works by women writers, including Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeoreum, Hutchinson's Order and Disorder, and Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. ... Read more

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Was the Habsburg monarchy an empire like those of Great Britain, France or Spain?Drawing upon modern theoretical perspectives on European expansion to answer this question, the author argues that the Habsburg holdings did indeed constitute a form of European imperialism. She examines the role of the interaction between Habsburg rulers, territorial estates, and religious institutions in the expansion of the empire.The book then goes on to explore the reorientation of these relationships through the impact of the European Enlightenment, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and more.
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Taking as its guiding thread the theme of genealogy, the book gives a broadly chronological and impressively manageable presentation of the whole sweep of Levinas's work. Balanced and finely grained, Llewelyn confronts questions of method, Heidegger, phenomenology, the theme of sensibility, religion, enjoyment, femininity, eros, justice and the political. The book reaches a stunning climax in a series of chapters that give a hesitant but tolerant discussion of the question of God in Levinas, the relation to Levinasian ethics to Nietzschean genealogy, and an extraordinary discussion of metaphor that leads into a wholly original analysis of Levinas's poetics and metaphorics. ... Read more

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Hereditary rule once dominated European politics. A few families, believing in divine rule, controlled the destinies of millions before they were ousted. This book takes an irreverent look at the monarchs with disturbing passions, the empress of sex and the king into a peculiar form of bribery.Amazon.com Review
From the madness of King George to the equine escapades of Catherine the Great, from the intramural squabbles of Elizabeth and Di to the staggeringly decadent exploits of Charles X: in this gossipy chronicle of regal shenanigans, British journalist Karl Shaw dishes plenty of dirt--and ably demonstrates why royal watching is such a satisfying hobby.

Was there ever a good monarch? To judge by Shaw's account, it's unlikely. Instead, he writes, "Every monarchy in Europe has at some time or another been ruled over by a madman," adding in passing that only Bavaria's King Ludwig had the good grace to turn his madness into a source of tourist revenue for his subjects' descendants. Of the mad and the downright curious there's no shortage in these pages, as Shaw delivers anecdote after anecdote concerning the demented, sometimes awful, sometimes entertaining behavior of the likes of Germany's Frederick the Great, who "drank up to forty cups of coffee a day for several weeks in an experiment to see if it was possible to exist without sleep"; Russia's Catherine I, "a raddled old alcoholic with bloodshot eyes, wild and matted hair and clothes soiled with urine stains ... [who] once survived an assassination attempt too drunk to realize that anything had happened"; and England's Queen Mary, "the only known royal kleptomaniac," whose aides would surreptitiously gather the knickknacks she'd lifted from her subjects' parlors and return them with muffled apologies.

Royal Babylon is a guilty pleasure of a book, and one that does a fine job of explaining, in Shaw's tongue-in-cheek words, "why most continentals can't get enough of royalty, provided it isn't their own." --Gregory McNamee ... Read more

Customer Reviews (40)

Genetics in action
It was a much better book than anticpated. I had no idea what genetic problems the European royals faced.
This was our start to this years book club about royality. I feel that this gave a perspective that none of us expected or had perceived existed. And between us all we have read many books about royality. We will read our future choices about our royality and courtiers with a different perspective. Reality sometimes diminishes our images of people in this case it enhances.

Below a 1
My wife, who has an interest in good historical fiction was reading this. I picked it up and started reading the section on Peter III of Russia. About 50% wrong. Then about Paul I, again, about 50% wrong. And so it went. Facts, factoids, and just plain "stories". Oddly, the author leaves out some juicy stuff that actually happened!

as if Joan Rivers had written your high school history textbook
This book is fabulously hilarious.Each page has at least one memorable zinger, and each paragraph guarantees a laugh or two or more.It's as if every naughty salacious rumor about Europe's royals were gathered in one scrapbook.The mind reels as you move from country to country.Which one had the most disgusting royals?--England, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, Portugal?According to this book, they all tie for first place.

If I were playing Word Bingo while reading this book, I would want my card to have the following words on it:inbreeding, syphilis, dwarf, ugly, madness, idiot, homosexual, insanity, transvestite, debauchery, dysfunctional, and (a new one to me) paradomaniac. These words pop up with almost frightening regularity.

I doubt if any of your history teachers ever shared these hilarious bizarre and perverted stories with you, but you need to read this book to find out the following:

-- Who thought she had swallowed a grand piano made of glass?
-- Who smelled like an open sewer?
-- Who was toothless and replaced her missing teeth with squares of wax?
-- Who had a 102-inch waist?
-- Who broke the heads off phosphorus matches and drank them dissolved in milk?
-- Who found her ex-lover's head pickled in alcohol in a jar by her bed?
-- Whose dog snatched and ate his heart during an autopsy?
-- Who drank seven bottles of champagne almost every evening?
-- Who ate toad excrement as an aphrodisiac?
-- Who wanted to soar above some mountains in a car drawn by peacocks?
-- Who kicked hussars to death and fired live rats from cannons?

For the answers to these and many other pressing questions, you must read this book.You will be alternately horrified and amused.

Granted there are some problems.The author tends to repeat himself as we move from chapter to chapter.And there are some factual clunkers (Charles II of Spain died in 1700, not 1770), but these little things pale when you consider how stunningly shocking the entire book is.It's impossible to have too much Dirt on these crazy royals.

good read
This book was full of compelling stories. Slightly worn when arrived, but in good condition.

Entertaining but not necessarily history
Kenneth Anger's notorious Hollywood Babylon created the archetype for this kind of expose literature. It's more or less like eating junk food--it tastes great at first but becomes tiresome after awhile. I'm very impressed with Shaw's coverage: all the major ruling families of Europe are represented here including Bourbons, Habsburgs, Hanoverians, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs, Saxe-Coburgers, and Wittelsbachs. In more than 300 pages, Royal Babylon chronicles the excesses, sexual and otherwise, of various members of the royal families of Europe. It's entertaining although not free from errors. For example, in discussing the murder of Rasputin, Shaw states that "While Rasputin sat and waited for the arrival of the Princess Irena, Yusupov set up a gramophone and played the only record they had, 'I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,' over and over." All the accounts I've ever seen of this incident point to "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and not the George M. Cohan tune as the one played in the background by the conspirators. The description on the back cover of the paperback edition says "Royal Bablyon (sic) is history, but not as they teach it in school, and it underlines in side-splitting fashion Queen Victoria's famous warning that it is unwise to look too deeply into the royal house of Europe." The sloppiness of such an obvious spelling error makes one wonder about the quality of the editing in this book. Royal Babylon lacks an index, which would seem to indicate that the publishers see this book more as entertainment than history. The book comes with a bibliography. Most of the titles in the bibliography are books published within the last 30 or 40 years and all appear to be secondary, rather than primary sources. Given the scabrous nature of many of these anecdotes, I think it would have made sense to provide footnotes so that the reader can judge the veracity of the sources for these stories. Again, I suspect that the publisher was just looking to publish something that would be gossipy and entertaining. However, the biggest shortcoming, at least in my paperback copy, is the lack of pictures. Shaw spends a great deal of time describing the unattractiveness of many of these profligate royals so how come there are no pictures so that we can draw our own conclusions? This is definitely a fun book to read except that you'll come away from it feeling empty.
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