This volume celebrates John M. Najemy and his contributions to the study of Florentine and Italian Renaissance history. Over the last three decades, his books and articles on Florentine politics and political thought have substantially revised the narratives and contours of these fields. They have also provided a framework into which he has woven innovative new threads that have emerged in Renaissance social and cultural history. Presented by his many students and friends, the essays aim to highlight his varied interests and to suggest where they may point for future studies of Florence and, indeed, beyond. -- Amazon.com.
An engaging study of the dilemmas faced by American nursing, which examines the ideology, practice, and efforts at reform of both trained and untrained nurses in the years between 1850 and 1945. Ordered to Care provides an overall history of nursing's development and places that growth within the context of topical questions raised by women's history and the social history of health care. Building upon extensive use of primary and quantitative data, the author creates a collective portrait of nursing, from the work of the individual nurse to the political efforts of its organizations. Dr Reverby contends that nursing's contemporary difficulties are caused by its historical obligation to care in a society that refuses to value caring. She examines the historical consequences of this critical dilemma and concludes with a discussion of why nursing will have to move beyond its obligation to care, and what the implications of this change would be for all of us.
For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florence—as a city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the “Florentine model” to explore the diversity of Italian urban and provincial life—the “many Italies” that stretched from the Apennines to the Mediterranean. This volume brings together a group of sixteen urban, social, religious, and economic historians of late medieval and early modern Italy whose work reflects this shift, and illustrates some of the significant new research directions of the field. At the volume’s core are questions important to all historians of late medieval and early modern Europe: What does the new work on Italy beyond Florence have to say about the traditional definition of the Renaissance, a definition that made Florence its paradigmatic expression? What new questions about the period in general have emerged as a result of decentering the Renaissance? How has the effort to view Florence in a wider set of Italian and Mediterranean political and economic networks shed new light on the history of city states? And how has this work led to a reexamination of the continuities connecting the late medieval world to the early modern period? In exploring the contours of Italy from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the volume creates a landscape against which to evaluate the current state of Florentine studies, the resurgence of Venetian studies, the renewed interest in Italy under Spanish rule, and the development of many other regional and local histories that are increasingly used by scholars to facilitate a broader understanding of Italy as a whole.
For millions of people around the world, Carol Brady is synonymous with motherhood, but growing up as the youngest of ten children in rural Indiana in the aftermath of the Great Depression, Florence Henderson lived a life quite different from that of the quintessential TV mom she later played on television. Florence's father was a dirt-poor tobacco tenant farmer who was nearly fifty years old when he married Florence's twenty-five-year-old mother, and was nearly seventy when Florence was born. Florence's childhood was full of deprivation and abandonment. Her father was an alcoholic at a time when there was no rehab or help for the disease. Their home rarely had electricity or running water. When she was twelve, Florence's mother left the family to work in Cleveland and never returned. Florence opens up about her childhood, as well as the challenges she's faced as an adult, including stage fright, postpartum depression, her extramarital affairs, divorce, her hearing loss, and heart problems. She writes with honesty and wisdom of how her faith and ability to survive has brought her through rough times to a life of profound joy and purpose.
On the basis of extensive archival research, the essays in this volume examine the minutiae of object transaction in the late nineteenth-century art market within its social network and broader historical context.
A vivid recreation of how the governors and governed of early seventeenth-century Florence confronted, suffered, and survived a major epidemic of plague Plague remains the paradigm against which reactions to many epidemics are often judged. Here, John Henderson examines how a major city fought, suffered, and survived the impact of plague. Going beyond traditional oppositions between rich and poor, this book provides a nuanced and more compassionate interpretation of government policies in practice, by recreating the very human reactions and survival strategies of families and individuals. From the evocation of the overcrowded conditions in isolation hospitals to the splendor of religious processions, Henderson analyzes Florentine reactions within a wider European context to assess the effect of state policies on the city, street, and family. Writing in a vivid and approachable way, this book unearths the forgotten stories of doctors and administrators struggling to cope with the sick and dying, and of those who were left bereft and confused by the sudden loss of relatives.
Anne Reading, an ordinary woman from London describes her extraordinary life. In 1855 she travels to the Crimea with Florence Nightingale and nurses the sick and wounded of the British Army. Five years later, she takes a six week voyage to New York aboard a sailing ship. Anne finds work at St. LukeÕs hospital. The following year brings the start of the Civil War. In 1862 Anne leaves St. LukeÕs and travels south to the headquarters of the Union Army in Washington. She was hired by Dorothea Dix, Superintendent of female nurses to the Federal Army and also known as the American Florence Nightingale. AnneÕs saga becomes the story of her life among the wounded. She describes experiences on hospital ships and in a former hotel converted into a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. The diary chronicles the impact of atrocities on the soldiers. The general social unrest which developed in the northern cities as the war continues and the riots against the drafting of young men into the army against their will, makes very interesting reading. Anne married Andrew Furry in October, 1862 and soon gave up nursing and returned to the New York area. She does different work while waiting for him to be released from the army. She provides a detailed account of the death of President Lincoln and an eye witness account of his lying in state and funeral procession through New York in 1865. The diary continues with the FurrysÕ married life in Pennsylvania and New Jersey highlighted with the marriage of AnneÕs younger sister, Jenny and a swimming party at Coney Island. In 1870, Anne FurryÕs mother, Anne Reading writes about her trip to visit her daughter, with another daughter and the diary closes with the two of them returning to Bethnal Green, London, one year later.
The magic of early Renaissance architecture. The notion that numerical proportional systems contribute to the serene, orderly appearance of the basilica of San Lorenzo has long stood as a virtual axiom of architectural history. In this book, Cohen challenges this and many other long-standing preconceptions about proportional systems in the history of architecture. Using Brunelleschi's basilicas of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito as case studies, the author presents a detailed analysis of his comprehensive measurements of these buildings, which he recorded from scaffolding, meticulous observations of the built fabric, and a variety of documentary sources. This book presents a rigorous new approach to an important but little studied area of architectural history and is essential reading for anyone interested in medieval and Renaissance architecture.
