In 1837, in England and Wales, there were only five provincial cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants. By 1891 there were twenty-three. Over the same period Lo

The contributors cover such seminal topics as modernization, American intellectuals, the origins of the reform movement, the beginnings of the voluntary hospita

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table

The aura and romance of Old California lives on in this treasury of inviting homes. The California House presents the magic of the "golden state," that land of

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses t