Author: Elizabeth Norton File Type: epub The Boleyn family appeared from nowhere at the end of the fourteenth century, moving from peasant to princess in only a few generations. The women of the family brought about its advancement, beginning with the heiresses Alice Bracton Boleyn, Anne Hoo Boleyn and Margaret Butler Boleyn who brought wealth and aristocratic connections. Then there was Elizabeth Howard Boleyn, who was rumoured to have been the mistress of Henry VIII, along with her daughter Mary and niece Madge, who certainly were. Anne Boleyn became the kings second wife and her aunts, Lady Boleyn and Lady Shelton, helped bring her to the block. The infamous Jane Boleyn, the last of her generation, betrayed her husband before dying on the scaffold with Queen Catherine Howard. The next generation was no less turbulent and Catherine Carey, the daughter of Mary Boleyn fled from England to avoid persecution under Mary Tudor. Her daughter, Lettice was locked in bitter rivalry with the greatest Boleyn lady of all, Elizabeth I, winning the battle for the affections of Robert Dudley but losing her position in society as a consequence. Finally, another Catherine Carey, the Countess of Nottingham, was so close to her cousin, the queen, that Elizabeth died of grief following her death. The Boleyn family was the most ambitious dynasty of the sixteenth century, rising dramatically to prominence in the early years of a century that would end with a Boleyn on the throne.About the AuthorElizabeth Norton gained her first degree from the University of Cambridge, and her Masters from the University of Oxford. She is the author of ten books on the Tudors. She lives in London.

Author: Dana D. Nelson File Type: pdf Commons Democracy highlights a poorly understood dimension of democracy in the early United States. It tells a story that, like the familiar one, begins in the Revolutionary era. But instead of the tale of the Founders high-minded ideals and their careful crafting of the safe framework for democracy--a representative republican government--*Commons Democracy examines the power of the democratic spirit*, the ideals and practices of everyday people in the early nation. As Dana D. Nelson reveals in this illuminating work, the sensibility of participatory democratic activity fueled the involvement of ordinary folk in resistance, revolution, state constitution-making, and early national civic dissent. The rich variety of commoning customs and practices in the late colonies offered non-elite actors a tangible and durable relationship to democratic power, one significantly different from the representative democracy that would be institutionalized by the Framers in 1787. This democracy understood political power and liberties as communal, not individual. Ordinary folk practiced a democracy that was robustly participatory and insistently local. To help tell this story, Nelson turns to early American authors--Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Caroline Kirkland--who were engaged with conflicts that emerged from competing ideals of democracy in the early republic, such as the Whiskey Rebellion and the Anti-Rent War as well as the enclosure of the legal commons, anxieties about popular suffrage, and practices of frontier equalitarianism. While Commons Democracy is about the capture of democracy for the official purposes of state consolidation and expansion, it is also a story about the ongoing (if occluded) vitality of commons democracy, of its power as part of our shared democratic history and its usefulness in the contemporary toolkit of citizenship. **

Author: Samantha Bennett File Type: pdf In 1978, Siouxsie and the Banshees declared We dont see ourselves in the same context as other rocknroll bands. A decade later, and in the stark aftermath of a devastating storm, the band retreated to a 17th-century mansion house in the deracinated Sussex countryside to write their ninth studio album, Peepshow. Here, the band absorbed the bygone, rural atmosphere and its inspirational mise en scene, thus framing the record cinematically, as Siouxsie Sioux recalled, It was as if we were doing the whole thing on the set of The Wicker Man. Samantha Bennett looks at how Siouxsie and the Banshees Peepshow is better understood in the context of film and film music (as opposed to popular music studies or, indeed, the works of other rocknroll bands). Drawing upon more than one hundred films and film scores, this book focuses on Peepshows deeply embedded historical and aesthetic (para)cinematic influences How is each track a reflection of genre film? Who are the various featured protagonists? And how does Peepshows diverse orchestration, complex musical forms, atypical narratives and evocative soundscapes reveal an inherently cinematic record? Ultimately, Peepshow can be read as a soundtrack to all the films Siouxsie and the Banshees ever saw. Or perhaps it was the soundtrack to the greatest film they never made. **

Author: Michel Houellebecq File Type: epub In 2008, two of the most celebrated of French intellectuals began a ferocious exchange of letters. In their inimitably confrontational correspondence, they lock horns on everything, including literature, sex, politics, family, fame and even - naturally - themselves. This title features their letters.