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If Walls Could Talk: An intimate history of the home
Lucy Worsley · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAt Home: A Short History of Private Life
Bill Bryson · 560 pages
"As I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how glorious it was that this was exactly how this land must have looked to centuries of people, quietly going about their daily business – eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavouring to be amused – and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mo
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe · 416 pages
One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all the while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, stagi
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York
Luc Sante · 414 pages
Luc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets--scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Charles Mackay · 410 pages
America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines
Gail Collins · 592 pages
From the women peering worriedly over the side of the Mayflower to feminists having a grand old time protesting beauty pageants and bridal fairs, America's Women tells the story of how women shaped the nation and our vision of what it means to be female in America. Spanning wars, the pioneering days, the fight for suffrage, the Depression, the era of Rosie the Riveter, the civil rights movement, a
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
Tony Horwitz · 432 pages
Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. He joins "hardcore" reenactors; witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war; finds that Ande
To Marry an English Lord
Gail MacColl, Carol Wallace · 403 pages
In 1895, nine American girls married peers of the British realm. It was the peak year of a social phenomenon that began when the entrenched members of old New York snubbed these "new money" families after the Civil War, sending them off to England in quest of class. MacColl presents a rich tapestry of essays, sidebars, fact-filled boxes, and lively anecdotes to chronicle the era respresnted by Dow
The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Hallie Rubenhold · 352 pages
The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault)
P.J. O'Rourke · 267 pages
With his typical wit and keen analysis, O'Rourke looks at the way the post-war generation somehow came of age by never quite growing up and somehow created a better society by turning society upside down.
Sex with the Queen: 900 Years of Vile Kings, Virile Lovers, and Passionate Politics
Eleanor Herman · 322 pages
Explores the sexual lives of some of the most beloved and infamous female rulers, including Catherine the Great, Marie Antoinette, and the bastion of virtue, Queen Victoria.
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
Ronald Hutton · 501 pages
Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War
Virginia Nicholson · 312 pages
In 1919 a generation of young women discovered that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round, and the statistics confirmed it. After the 1921 Census, the press ran alarming stories of the 'Problem of the Surplus Women - Two Million who can never become Wives...'. This book is about those women, and about how they were forced, by a tragedy of historic proportions, to stop depending on m
The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England
Barbara A. Hanawalt · 364 pages
Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation
Elissa Stein, Susan Kim · 270 pages
In this hip, hilarious and truly eye-opening cultural history, menstruation is talked about as never before. Flow spans its fascinating, occasionally wacky and sometimes downright scary story: from mikvahs (ritual cleansing baths) to menopause, hysteria to hysterectomies - not to mention the Pill, cramps, the history of underwear, and the movie about puberty they showed you in 5th grade. Flow answ
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson · 635 pages
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. She interviewed more than a t
A Queer History of the United States
Michael Bronski · 287 pages
"A Queer History of the United States is groundbreaking and accessible. It looks at how American culture has shaped the LGBT, or queer, experience, while simultaneously arguing that LGBT people not only shaped but were pivotal in creating our country. Using numerous primary documents and literature, as well as social histories, Bronski's book takes the reader through the centuries--from Columbus'
Revelations of the Medieval World
Georges Duby, Philippe Aries · 672 pages
The second volume of "A History of Private Life" is a treasure trove of rich and colorful detail culled from an astounding variety of sources. This absorbing "secret epic" constructs a vivid picture of peasant and patrician life in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries.
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
Colin Woodard · 371 pages
The author describes eleven rival regional "nations" in the United States (Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, New France, El Norte, the Left Coast, the Far West, and First Nation), and how these deep roots continue to influence our politics today.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen · 628 pages
This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of
Austerity Britain, 1945-51
David Kynaston · 692 pages
"Austerity Britain launches the groundbreaking series Tales of a New Jerusalem, which will tell the story of Britain from VE Day in 1945 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 as never before." "Coursing through Austerity Britain is an astonishing variety of contemporary voices - vivid, unselfconscious, and unaware of what the future holds. Judy Haines, a Chingford housewife, gamely endures
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940
George Chauncey · 496 pages
The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century. *Gay New York* brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Ibram X. Kendi · 592 pages
Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative,