The Great Cat Massacre

Author : Robert Darnton
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 0465010482
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Cat Massacre written by Robert Darnton and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.

Author : Hilda Kean
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022631846X
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Cat & Dog Massacre written by Hilda Kean and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tragedies of World War II are well known. But at least one has been forgotten: in September 1939, four hundred thousand cats and dogs were massacred in Britain. The government, vets, and animal charities all advised against this killing. So why would thousands of British citizens line up to voluntarily euthanize household pets? In The Great Cat and Dog Massacre, Hilda Kean unearths the history, piecing together the compelling story of the life—and death—of Britain’s wartime animal companions. She explains that fear of imminent Nazi bombing and the desire to do something to prepare for war led Britons to sew blackout curtains, dig up flower beds for vegetable patches, send their children away to the countryside—and kill the family pet, in theory sparing them the suffering of a bombing raid. Kean’s narrative is gripping, unfolding through stories of shared experiences of bombing, food restrictions, sheltering, and mutual support. Soon pets became key to the war effort, providing emotional assistance and helping people to survive—a contribution for which the animals gained government recognition. Drawing extensively on new research from animal charities, state archives, diaries, and family stories, Kean does more than tell a virtually forgotten story. She complicates our understanding of World War II as a “good war” fought by a nation of “good” people. Accessibly written and generously illustrated, Kean’s account of this forgotten aspect of British history moves animals to center stage—forcing us to rethink our assumptions about ourselves and the animals with whom we share our homes.

Author : Robert Darnton
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465010482
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Cat Massacre written by Robert Darnton and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.

Author : Katie Davies
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1442445130
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Cat Conspiracy written by Katie Davies and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cat goes conspicuously missing in this hilarious pet mystery from the team that created "The Great Hamster Massacre" and "The Great Rabbit Rescue." Illustrations.

Author : Gareth Rubin
Publisher : Kings Road Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1782197680
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Cat Massacre - A History of Britain in 100 Mistakes written by Gareth Rubin and published by Kings Road Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1914, a train pulled into a provincial British railway station. The porter, a curious chap, asked the regiment of soldiers where they were from. "Ross-shire," one called down, but the porter heard "Russia." And so began a rumor that led to Germany losing World War I. Often the history we learn at school is only half the story. We hear of heroic deeds and visionary leaders, but we never hear about the people who turned up late for court and thereby changed the law, or who stood in the wrong queue at university and accidentally won a Nobel Prize. "The Great Cat Massacre: A History of Britain in 100 Mistakes" demonstrates that the nation is as much a product of error as design. Through chapters on religion, law, culture, war, science, and politics, it reveals such things as how an edict from Pope Gregory IX helped spread the Black Death, how the sister of cricketer John Willes invented overarm bowling, and how, had a letter not been lost, Disraeli might never have become prime minister. This book is history told through human failings, schoolboy errors, bad luck, and extraordinary consequences; a history of mishearing, misdiagnosis, and misinterpretation a history that you won t find in the textbooks."

Author : Katie Davies
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0857077147
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Hamster Massacre written by Katie Davies and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A very natural and honest version of life's events from the perspective of a young girl - from her suspicions about her neighbours, to her rocky friendship with the girl next door; from the sudden death of her beloved granny to her relentless quest for a pet hamster, only to then find it mysteriously slaughtered - which kickstarts a local investigation of 'suspects'.

Author : Laleh Khalili
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1786634813
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sinews of War and Trade written by Laleh Khalili and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How shipping is central to the very fabric of global capitalism In our networked world, the realities governing the international movement of freight are easily forgotten. But maritime transport remains the bedrock of trade. Convoys perpetually crisscross the oceans, carrying gas, oil, ore – indeed, every type of consumable and commodity. These movements, though practically invisible, mean that control of the seas is vital in an age when no nation can survive on domestic products alone. Professor and author Laleh Khalili travelled the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean aboard gigantic container ships to investigate the secretive and sometimes dangerous world of maritime trade. What she discovered was strangely disturbing: brutally exploited seafarers enduring loneliness and risking injury to keep the cogs of trade turning. In the Arabian peninsula’s ports, forbidden places encircled by barbed wire and moats of highways, the dockers struggle for benefits and political rights, as they have for generations. Environmental catastrophes threaten with increasing intensity and frequency. Around the oil-trading nations of the Middle East, a history of British colonialism, modern US imperialism, and local autocracies combine to worsen the conditions of modern seafarers, and piracy persists near the Horn of Africa. From her research riding the sea lanes and visiting the major Middle Eastern ports, Khalili has produced a book that exposes the frayed and tense sinews of modern capital, a physical network without which none of our more abstracted webs and systems could operate.

Author : Robert Darnton
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393314427
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-revolutionary France written by Robert Darnton and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1996 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Darnton's work is one of the main reasons that cultural history has become an exciting study central to our understanding of the past.

Author : Robert Darnton
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190678003
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Literary Tour de France written by Robert Darnton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publishing industry in France in the years before the Revolution was a lively and sometimes rough-and-tumble affair, as publishers and printers scrambled to deal with (and if possible evade) shifting censorship laws and tax regulations, in order to cater to a reading public's appetite for books of all kinds, from the famous Encyclopédie, repository of reason and knowledge, to scandal-mongering libel and pornography. Historian and librarian Robert Darnton uses his exclusive access to a trove of documents-letters and documents from authors, publishers, printers, paper millers, type founders, ink manufacturers, smugglers, wagon drivers, warehousemen, and accountants-involving a publishing house in the Swiss town of Neuchatel to bring this world to life. Like other places on the periphery of France, Switzerland was a hotbed of piracy, carefully monitoring the demand for certain kinds of books and finding ways of fulfilling it. Focusing in particular on the diary of Jean-François Favarger, a traveling sales rep for a Swiss firm whose 1778 voyage, on horseback and on foot, around France to visit bookstores and renew accounts forms the spine of this story, Darnton reveals not only how the industry worked and which titles were in greatest demand, but the human scale of its operations. A Literary Tour de France is literally that. Darnton captures the hustle, picaresque comedy, and occasional risk of Favarger's travels in the service of books, and in the process offers an engaging, immersive, and unforgettable narrative of book culture at a critical moment in France's history.

Author : Katie Davies
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0857077155
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Great Rabbit Rescue written by Katie Davies and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joe has gone to live with his dad, leaving behind his beloved pet rabbit. Anna and Suzanne try to look after it for him, but when the rabbit becomes ill, they're convinced it's because it's missing Joe. Now Joe is sick too. The girls are certain that Joe and the rabbit will die unless they are reunited soon… But can Anna and Tom and Suzanne pull off The Great Rabbit Rescue in time?