Books published by publisher Johns Hopkins University Press

Walter Lord―author of such best-sellers as A Night to Remember and A Day of Infamy―brings to life the remarkable events of what we now call The War of 1812―including the burning of Washington and the attack on Baltimore's Fort McHenry that inspired the Francis Scott Key to write what would become our national anthem. Lord gives readers a dramatic account of how a new sense of national identity emerged from the smoky haze of what Francis Scott Key so lyrically called "the dawn's early light."

Diaries of nineteenth-century plantation managers are rare; diaries of French sugar planters are rarer still. Although such works as the diaries of Ella Gertrude Thomas and James Henry Hammond provide insight into the plantation societies of the antebellum South, virtually no contemporary source treats planter-slave relations as extensively, or presents a white planter's views on slave society in as much detail, as do the letters and diary of Pierre Dessalles.Now Elborg Forster and Robert Forster have translated and edited the most historically and socially significant portions of this unusual work. Previously available only in a four-volume French edition, these materials treat a wide range of topics, including the slave economy, management and socialization of the labor force, the role of free blacks in society, the lives led by the plantation owners, and, significantly, black-white relations before, during, and after emancipation.

What happens to automobiles after they are retired but before they are processed as scrap? In this fascinating history, David N. Lucsko takes readers on a tour of salvage yards and wrecked or otherwise out-of-service cars in the United States from the point of view of gearheads—the hot rodders, restoration hobbyists, street rodders, and classic car devotees who reuse, repurpose, and restore junked cars. Junkyards, Gearheads, and Rust is a nuanced exploration of the business of dismantling wrecks and selling second-hand parts. It examines the reinterpretation of these cars and parts by artists as well as their restoration by enthusiasts. It also surveys the origin and evolution of gearhead-oriented yards that specialize in specific types of automobiles; dissects the material and emotional appeal of the salvage yard and its contents among enthusiasts; and examines how zoning and nuisance ordinances have affected both salvage businesses and hobbyists. Lucsko concludes with an analysis of efforts during the last twenty-five years to hasten vehicular obsolescence at the expense of salvage yards, mechanics, and enthusiasts. By examining how cars are salvaged, repurposed, and restored, this book demonstrates that the history of the automobile is much more than a running catalog of showroom novelties.

The women's rights movement grew out of the women's suffrage movement of the mid-1800s and also addressed other women's legal rights issues. The second wave of the movement, which promoted economic, political, and social equality, gained momentum in the 1960s and '70s, when such groups as the National Organization for Women fought for equal pay and laws banning employment discrimination. Clearly written, The Women's Rights Movement is an illuminating introduction to one of the most prominent reform movements of the last 40 years. The book is published by Chelsea House Publishers, a leading publisher of educational material.

In December 1937, four respectable young men in their twenties, all products of elite English public schools, conspired to lure to the luxurious Hyde Park Hotel a representative of Cartier, the renowned jewelry firm. There, the "Mayfair men" brutally bludgeoned diamond salesman Etienne Bellenger and made off with eight rings that today would be worth approximately half a million pounds. Such well-connected young people were not supposed to appear in the prisoner’s dock at the Old Bailey. Not surprisingly, the popular newspapers had a field day responding to the public’s insatiable appetite for news about the upper-crust rowdies and their unsavory pasts.In Playboys and Mayfair Men, Angus McLaren recounts the violent robbery and sensational trial that followed. He uses the case as a hook to draw the reader into a revelatory exploration of key interwar social issues, from masculinity and cultural decadence to broader anxieties about moral decay. In his gripping depiction of Mayfair’s celebrity high life, McLaren describes the crime in detail, as well as the police investigation, the suspects, their trial, and the aftermath of their convictions.

Securing the Commonwealth examines how eighteenth-century American writers understood the highly speculative financial times in which they lived. Spanning a century of cultural and literary life, this study shows how the era's literature commonly depicted an American ethos of risk taking and borrowing as the peculiar product of New World daring and the exigencies of revolution and nation building. Some of the century's most important writers, including Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, and Judith Sargent Murray, believed that economic and social commonwealth―and one's commitment to that commonwealth―might be grounded in indebtedness and financial insecurity. These writers believed a cash-poor colony or nation could not only advance itself through borrowing but also gain reputability each time it successfully paid off a loan. Equally important, they believed that debt could promote communality: precarious public credit structures could exact popular commitment; intricate financial networks could bind individuals to others and to their government; and indebtedness itself could evoke sympathy for the suffering of others. Close readings of their literary works reveal how these writers imagined that public life might be shaped by economic experience, and how they understood the public life of literature itself. Insecure times strengthened their conviction that writing could be publicly serviceable, persuading readers to invest in their government, in their fellow Americans, and in the idea of America itself.

Stephen L. Dyson has spent a lifetime studying and teaching the history of ancient Rome. That unparalleled knowledge is reflected in his magisterial overview of the Eternal City.Rather than look only at the physical development of the city -- its buildings, monuments, and urban spaces -- Dyson also explores its social, economic, and cultural histories. This unique approach situates Rome against a background of comparative urban history and theory, allowing Dyson to examine the dynamic society that once thrived there. In his personal effort to reconstruct the city, Dyson populates its streets with the hurried politicians, hawking vendors, and animated students that once lived, worked, and studied there, bringing the ancient city to life for a new generation of students and tourists. Dyson follows Rome as it developed between the third century BC and the fourth century AD, dividing the great megalopolis into distinct neighborhoods and locales. He shows how these communities, each with its own unique customs and colorful inhabitants, eventually grew into the great imperial capital of the Italian Empire. Dyson integrates the full range of sources available -- literary, artistic, epigraphic, and archaeological -- to create a comprehensive history of the monumental city. In doing so, he offers a dramatic picture of a complex and changing urban center that, despite its flaws, flourished for centuries.

In this text, Ford offers an account of the relationship between urban architecture - especially vernacular architecture - and the spatial arrangement and development of cities in North America. From office towers in the central business district to commercial strips in the edge city, Ford shows how changes in the built environment parallel changes in urban economies and human culture. Focusing on ordinary structures rather than famous landmarks, the book aims to provide a guide to understanding the changing character of any urban landscape.

Authoritative and engaging, this volume from the Walker's Mammals series focuses on marsupials, pouched animals whose unusual method of reproduction―between egg laying and placental birth―places them in a unique category among mammals. A comprehensive guide to the biology and distribution of marsupials, this book includes common and scientific names, size and physical traits, habitat and ecology, behavior and social interactions, reproduction, life span, and conservation. The text is coupled with illustrations from the collections of leading photographers and the world's greatest museums. An introduction by marsupial expert Christopher R. Dickman describes the evolution and current status of marsupials and reveals why they add so much intrigue to the natural world.

"The history of the Civil War is the stories of its soldiers," writes Ronald S. Coddington in the preface to Faces of the Confederacy. This book tells the stories of seventy-seven Southern soldiers -- young farm boys, wealthy plantation owners, intellectual elites, uneducated poor -- who posed for photographic portraits, cartes de visite, to leave with family, friends, and sweethearts before going off to war. Coddington, a passionate collector of Civil War--era photography, conducted a monumental search for these previously unpublished portrait cards, then unearthed the personal stories of their subjects, putting a human face on a war rife with inhuman atrocities. The Civil War took the lives of 22 of every 100 men who served. Coddington follows the exhausted survivors as they return home to occupied cities and towns, ravaged farmlands, a destabilized economy, and a social order in the midst of upheaval. This book is a haunting and moving tribute to those brave men. Like its companion volume, Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories, this book offers readers a unique perspective on the war and contributes to a better understanding of the role of the common soldier.

Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block.Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American family provided the key to economic growth in the antebellum Chesapeake. To maximize profits in the burgeoning regional industries, slaveholders needed to employ or hire out a healthy supply of strong slaves, which tended to scatter family members. From each generation, they also selected the young, fit, and fertile for sale or removal to the cotton South. Conscious of this pattern, the enslaved were sometimes able to negotiate mutually beneficial labor terms―to save their families despite that new economy.Moving focus away from the traditional master-slave relationship in a staple-crop setting, Schermerhorn demonstrates through extensive primary research that the slaves in the upper South were integral to the development of the region’s modern political economy, whose architects embraced invention and ingenuity even while deploying slaves to shoulder the burdens of its construction, production, and maintenance. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom proposes a new way of understanding the role of American slaves in the antebellum marketplace. Rather than work against it, as one might suppose, enslaved people engaged with the market somewhat as did free Americans. Slaves focused their energy and attention, however, not on making money, as slaveholders increasingly did, but on keeping their kin out of the human coffles of the slave trade.