Inheritance

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Kate Davies

"Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren were radical friends in a revolutionary age. They produced definitive histories of the English Civil War and the American Revolution, attacked the British government and the United States federal constitution, and instigated a debate on women's rights which inspired Mary Wollstonecraft, Judith Sargent Murray, and other feminists. Drawing on new research (including recently discovered correspondence) this is the first book to consider Macaulay and Warren in the context of the revolutionary Atlantic. In a series of detailed interdisciplinary studies. Davies suggests the centrality of both women to transatlantic political cultures between the middle of the eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth."--BOOK JACKET.

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Andrew Gurr

Introducing this edition, Gary Taylor shows how Shakespeare shaped his historical material, examines controversial critical interpretations, discusses the play's fluctuating fortunes in performance, and analyses the range and variety of Shakespeare's characterization. The first Folio text is radically rethought, making original use of the First Quarto (1600).

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[by] Elizabeth Longford

Capaciously documented, this first volume of a two-volume life of the Duke of Wellington places its author, Lady Longford (author also of Queen Victoria) in the front ranks of 20th century military and political biographers. Through family connections with Wellington's inadequate wife, Kitty Pakenham, she has had access to hitherto untapped family records: her knowledge of his campaigns has enabled her to write knowledgeably of his defeats, victories and frustrations, his brutal discipline and his concern for the welfare of men who called him ""Nosey"" and followed him with grudging confidence. Three months older than Napoleon, Arthur Wesley or Wellesley was born in Ireland in 1769, the second--and awkward--son of a noble family. Poor and without apparent talents, he joined the army and in an appallingly mismanaged winter campaign in 1794 against the French learned how not to run an army or fight a war. Ordered to India in 1796, Arthur made money and enemies and achieved fame, now often forgotten, by defeating Tipoo, Sultan of Mysore, and the ""tumultous"" Mahrattas. Returning to England in 1806, he became involved with the notorious Hariette Wilson and made the mistake of marrying his former Irish sweetheart, Kitty Pakenham. Seat to Spain in 1808 when Napoleon prepared his own downfall by putting his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne, Arthur, after six heartbreaking years drove tile French from the Peninsula, for which he was made Duke of Wellington. On Napoleon's escape from exile in Elba in 1815 he was appointed commander of the allied armies in Belgium, meeting and defeating his old enemy at Waterloo on June 16: the author's account of this battle is one of the best parts of tin amazing book. It is at once stirring biography and stimulating social history, dispassionate and sympathetic, and even it' Wellington hasn't quite the instantaneously identifiable appeal of Victoria, still it will he read widely, Implemented by its selection for April by the Book-of-the-Month Club.

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Edward G. Roddy

Biography of William Madison Wood, one of the central figures in the industrial history of the Merrimack Valley (Massachusetts). Wood (1858-1926) was a textile mill owner of who was considered to be an expert in efficiency. He set out to merge some of the small, struggling mills of New England into one mammoth. By 1899, William Wood had convinced seven such mills to join what he called "The Woolen Trust." In April of that same year the company was incorporated under a new name, The American Woolen Company.