Kirjahaku

A portrait of the influential freemason leader notes his influence on the works of major eighteenth-century artists and his notoriety in royal circles, citing his alleged theft of Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace and his arrest by the Inquisition for heresy. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

This is a paperback edition of a highly acclaimed study of English popular radicalism during the period between the anti-Jacobin government `Terror' of the 1790s and the beginnings of Chartism. Challenging conventional distinctions between `high' and `low' culture, Iain McCalman brilliantly reveals the links between the political underworld and literary culture, poverty, crime, and prophetic religion. Drawing on information from spy reports and contemporary literature, the book traces for the first time the history of the underground revolutionary-republican grouping founded by the agrarian reformer, Thomas Spence. Challenging conventional distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture, McCalman illuminates the darker, more populist sides of Romanticism. His underworld of ideas links the Shelleys to pornographer-revolutionaries and political blackmailers, millenarian prophecy to discourses of blasphemy, black revolution and saturnalian theatricality, and radical journalism to the Grub Street undergrowth of bawdy and pornography which sprang up in the opening years of Queen Victoria's reign. Radical Underworld broadens the conventional boundaries of popular politics and culture by illuminating a political underworld connected with poverty, crime, prophetic religion and literary culture. It is a model of cultural history and a major re-evaluation of its topic.

Since the late 1700s new forms of visual entertainment have tried to simulate the details of nature: reenactment has now become the most widely-consumed form of popular history. This book engages with the quest for definition and appropriate delimitation of reenactment as well as questions about the relationship between realism and affect.

Stretching 1,400 miles along the Australian coast and visible from space, the Great Barrier Reef is home to three thousand individual reefs, more than nine hundred islands, and thousands of marine species, and has alternately been viewed as a deadly maze, an economic bounty, a scientific frontier, and a precarious World Heritage site. Now the historian and explorer Iain McCalman takes us on a new adventure into the reef to reveal how our shifting perceptions of the natural world have shaped this extraordinary seascape. Showcasing the lives of twenty individuals spanning more than two centuries, The Reef highlights our profound desire to conquer, understand, embrace, and ultimately save the world's most complex ocean ecosystem. Opening with the story of Captain James Cook, who sailed unknowingly into the southwest entrance of this vast network of coral outcroppings, McCalman shows how Cook spent months navigating this treacherous underwater labyrinth, struggling to keep his crew alive and his ship afloat, sparring with deceptive shoals and wary native islanders. Through a series of dramatic tales from intrepid explorers, unwitting castaways, inquisitive naturalists, enchanted artists, and impassioned environmentalists who have collectively shaped our ideas about the Great Barrier Reef, McCalman demonstrates how this grand natural wonder of the world was built as much by human imagination as by the industrious, beautiful creatures of the sea. A romantic, historically significant book and a deeply personal journey into the heart of a marine environment in peril, The Reef powerfully captures the delicate relationship between humanity and the natural world.

Award-winning cultural historian Iain McCalman tells the stories of Charles Darwin and his staunchest supporters: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. Beginning with the somber morning of April 26, 1882 the day of Darwin's funeral Darwin's Armada steps back and recounts the lives and scientific discoveries of each of these explorers, who campaigned passionately in the war of ideas over evolution and advanced the scope of Darwin's work.

On an East-African hunting expedition in 1909, Delia Akeley, a forty-year-old American woman, captured a baby female monkey. Delia's loneliness in an isolating patriarchal world, and her long-frustrated desire to adopt a child, had motivated her to nurture the animal. She named the monkey JT Jr and decided to study her interactions with humans.The unique relationship between Delia and JT unlocked Delia's latent talents of research and observation, anticipating both Jane Goodall's chimpanzee writings and Margaret Mead's Samoan ethnographies. However, Delia's love for JT clashed with her husband Carl's obsession to create a temple of African wildlife dioramas at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Nursing Carl's broken body and realising their diverging interests pushed Delia into a breakdown in Uganda, which led to a savage divorce in Manhattan, and the heartbreaking caging of JT in a Washington zoo. Carl's death triggered a long battle between Delia and Carl's widow, who succeeded in obliterating most of Delia's achievements.In Delia Akeley and the Monkey, Iain McCalman uses official records and personal documents to build a story of passionate love and hate among women, men, animals and museums that predates our times but speaks to our present. It illuminates much about human-animal relations and the tyranny of gender inequality, through reinstating an obscured story of a dedicated amateur primatologist.

Since the late 1700s new forms of visual entertainment have tried to simulate the details of nature: reenactment has now become the most widely-consumed form of popular history. This book engages with the quest for definition and appropriate delimitation of reenactment as well as questions about the relationship between realism and affect.

Known to his enemies as 'The Bingil Bay Bastard', John Busst, a Bendigo-born Melbourne bohemian artist, moved to tropical Bedarra Island in North Queensland and underwent an extraordinary transformation to become one of Australia's most successful conservationists. In the 1960s and early 70s Busst led campaigns to protect two of Australia's most important and endangered environments — saving lowland rainforests from destruction and the Great Barrier Reef from reckless resource mining for oil, gas, cement and fertiliser. A plan Busst likened to 'bulldozing the Taj Mahal to make road gravel'. Along the way Busst obtained the active support of five current or future prime ministers — Holt, Whitlam, Gorton, Hawke and Fraser.This inspiring biography, from award-winning historian Iain McCalman, is a timely reminder that the passionate commitment of ordinary citizens is crucial to achieving truly transformative environmental change.

Giuseppe Balsamo was born in the mid-eighteenth century in the slums of Palermo, Sicily, he would rise from obscurity to become the legendary Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, whose dangerous charm and reputed healing would make him the darling - and bane - of upper-crust Europe.