|
|
|
The Court of the Last Tsar: Pomp, Power and Pageantry in the Reign of Nicholas II
Praise for The Court of the Last Tsar "Any book by Greg King is a book to be kept and savored He has not only given us a fresh, clear-eyed, and often startling new look at the life of the last Romanovs, but also lived up to the promise of his title. He has shown us how the whole enterprise worked, from Tsar Nicholas to his lowest cook and chambermaid This book is a great work of scholarship--and a wonderful read." --Peter Kurth, author of Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra and Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson "A mammoth, monumental achievement. No other book captures the essence and the entire scope of life at the court of Nicholas II. It's a thoroughly enjoyable and encyclopedic masterpiece that will be a major source for historians and biographers for years to come." --Marlene A. Eilers, author of Queen Victoria's Descendants and publisher of Royal Book News "Greg King has truly written a tour de force. The book is extremely well researched, has over 100 illustrations and is, quite simply, marvelous." --Coryne Hall, author of Little Mother of Russia, Once a Grand Duchess, and Imperial Dancer "Greg King is emerging as one of the leading authorities in today's liveliest field of Russian studies, and this is a major contribution to the study of late Imperial Russia." --Joseph T. Fuhrmann, author of Rasputin and the editor of The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra.
Price: $19.74
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Twentieth-Century Japan - the Emergence of a World Power , No 6)
Using ceremonials such as imperial weddings and funerals as models, T. Fujitani illustrates what visual symbols and rituals reveal about monarchy, nationalism, city planning, discipline, gender, memory, and modernity. Focusing on the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Fujitani brings recent methods of cultural history to a study of modern Japanese nationalism for the first time..
Price: $19.90
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England
Medieval culture was intensely visual. Although this has long been recognised by art historians and by enthusiasts for particular media, there has been little attempt to study social display as a subject in its own right. And yet, display takes us directly into the values, aspirations and, indeed, anxieties of past societies. In this illustrated volume a group of experts address a series of interrelated themes around the issue of display and do so in a way which avoids jargon and overly technical language. Among the themes are family and lineage, social distinction and aspiration, ceremony and social bonding, and the expression of power and authority. The media include monumental effigies, brasses, stained glass, rolls of arms, manuscripts, jewels, plate, seals and coins..
Price: $24.16
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Dressing Up Debutantes: Pageantry and Glitz in Texas (Dress, Body, Culture)
For ninety years, young society women in San Antonio, Texas have donned custom-designed dresses and trains to take part in the Coronation of a queen and her court. These royal robes, which weigh fifty pounds and more and cost an average of $18,000, are highly embellished with rhinestones and beads. The Coronation is part of the ten-day, century-old festival celebrating the final battle of the 1836 Texas revolt against Mexico. This book provides a significant contribution to the study of social elites in Western society through a material culture analysis of the Coronation costumes worn by the Euro-American debutantes. Set against the backdrop of a city undergoing many demographic, socioeconomic, and political changes, the themes of Coronation pageants represent the mythologized ethnic and class history which reinforces the hierarchical positioning of its participants. The royal robes serve as the canvas upon which this theme is carried out. The Coronation, held in a city with a Hispanic majority, has come under attack for its elitism, but participation in it is still important for the old Euro-American aristocracy and for a very few extremely wealthy Hispanic families. Integral to the continuation of this increasingly contested tradition is the emotional appeal that wearing these intricately decorated gowns holds for participants. .
Price: $38.10
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America
This book explores a widely lived yet little remembered facet of America's cultural and political history: the Cold War as experienced at the grassroots level. Here, Fried traces the cresting of modern patriotic observance during World War II and then shows how patriotic and civic activists afterwards labored to recreate a remembered unity and commitment in the tension-filled Cold War era. A variety of national and local entities mounted campaigns "to sell America to the Americans" through "rededication" celebrations like Know Your America Week and Freedom Week. The American Heritage Foundation wheeled out the Freedom Train, which carried seminal documents of the nation's past to railroad depots across the US. Fried revisits the 1950 "Communist invasion" of Mosinee, Wisconsin, when ersatz Stalinists harassed and bullied citizens and the town's eateries served only potato soup and black bread. He also depicts the creation and inauguration of new patriotic events like Loyalty Day and Armed Forces Day. Meticulously researched, this book recreates a colorful, sometimes comical, and always revealing dimension of our history..
Price: $2.47
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century
What images shape Americans' perceptions of their past? How do particular versions of history become the public history? And how have these views changed over time? David Glassberg explores these important questions by examining the pageantry craze of the early twentieth century, a time when thousands of Americans joined in civic celebrations by acting out dramatic episodes from their towns' history. His analysis contributes a new perspective to the debate about the allegedly declining interest of Americans in their own history. At its peak, between 1910 and 1917, pageantry blended elements of the historical oration and the carnival parade and served as a vehicle for local boosterism, patriotic moralizing, and popular entertainment. Many of its promoters, immersed in the world of progressive reform movements, also viewed pageantry as a dramatic public ritual that could bring about social and political transformation. But embedded within the pageant form was a glorification of a distant past at the expense of the present, a facet of American culture that would later become even more prominent. By the mid-twentieth century, Glassberg shows, public imagery had begun to depict the past as something without ongoing significance for either the present or the future. At the same time, narratives of local community developmentt had given way to an emphasis on national unity, and the popularity of pageantry as a way of representing history in civic celebrations waned. By 1937, when Paul Green's The Lost Colony opened in Manteo, North Carolina, the historical pageant had become primarily a professionally produced drama depicting a particular period of the past frozen in time for tourists rather than the reenactment of a larger sweep of town history by and for its residents. Illustrated with more than 100 black-and-white photographs, this portrait of pageantry's development and decline makes public historical celebrations come alive once again..
Price: $24.00
[Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
|
|
|