All information sourced from publishers.
Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, Patrick Joyce
For over the past century and a half, and most notably over 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 vital 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 memorialised in photographs, literature, and in museums. Joyce explores a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented, and is usually mediated through others, in human history – and now peasants are vanishing in one of the greatest historical transformations of our time.
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History, Selena Wisnom
When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen: the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, 7th century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal’s library to the ground – yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform: the first written language in the world.
More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on Earth can read it. In this captivating new book, Assyriologist Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories – in short, a culture without which our lives today would be unrecognisable.
The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilisation at once strange and strangely familiar: a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity’s first civilisation: their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe.
Queen James: A New History About the Life and Loves of Britain’s First King, Gareth Russell
King James Stuart fell in love three times – with a Scottish lord, a knight and George Villiers, “the handsomest man in the whole world”. He was infatuated three more times – with a Highland earl, a Welsh lord and an English spy.
This new book puts James – genius, liar, spendthrift, idealist, witch-hunter – and the men he loved at the centre of one of the most dramatic stories in British royal history.
Beginning with the brutal and mysterious murder of his father in 1567, James’s life encompassed kidnapping, witchcraft trials, torture, his mother’s beheading, poison, political radicalism, religious fundamentalism, a queen’s alleged abortion, passionate sex, strong love, stronger hate, espionage, brothels, and a decade-long love affair that ended in assassination.
Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, Agnes Arnold-Forster
In Nostalgia, historian Agnes Arnold-Forster blends neuroscience and psychology with the history of medicine and emotions to explore the evolution of nostalgia from 17th-century Switzerland (when it was held to be an illness that could, quite literally, kill you) to the present day (when it is co-opted by advertising agencies and politicians alike to sell us goods and policies).
This is a story of a social and political emotion, vulnerable to misuse, and one that reflects the anxieties of the age. It is also a clear-eyed analysis of what we are doing now, how we feel about it and what we might want to change about the world we live in.
Is This Working?: The Jobs We Do, Told by the People Who Do Them, Charlie Colenutt
For the best part of two years Charlie Colenutt travelled the country to talk to a hundred strangers, from all walks of life about their jobs: What did they do for a living? Why did they do it? Did they like it?
They met in coffee shops, chain pubs or front rooms. Through hearing people tell their stories, he found out the number of birds killed a day in a poultry factory, the order in which patients are woken up in care homes, and the reasons why you shouldn’t smile when you are shown your bonus in an investment bank. He spoke with the church minister who, maddened by his email inbox, has come to feel more like an administrator than a spiritual leader; the cleaner who became so frustrated by the lack of change in her local area that she ran to be a councillor and won; the baker who used to hate touching flour; and the trade union organiser, not pressured by hours or targets, but by the cause.
The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital, Leopoldina Fortunati, translated from the Italian by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono
Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labour globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyse the sphere of reproduction, redefining the value of the individual’s life and the labour performed in the home.
Released in English for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction is a foundational text and an essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorisations of “immaterial”, “affective,” and “caring” labour, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature.
