Your heart will be set afire with The Duke Diaries, the third book in Sophia Nash’s Royal Entourage series set in Regency England. After a wild, scandalous night, Rory Lennox, the Duke of Abshire, finds himself in the bed of his sworn enemy’s wholesome sister, Verity Fitzroy. To protect her honor and keep the peace, he agrees to marriage, but it’s an engagement neither is happy about—until unimaginable occurrences make them view the other in a new, passionate light. RITA Award–winning author Sophia Nash is a master of the historical romance who has created unforgettable, compelling characters with powerful emotions and intense sensuality. Sparkling and smart, The Duke Diaries is a wickedly fun romp that will leave you breathless.
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage is a 15th-century grimoire, or book of magic, that includes instructions on how an individual can make contact with their Holy Guardian Angel. Few occultists have dared to follow the instructions, known as the "operation," hidden within the text. Fewer yet have been successful. Even the famous Aleister Crowley failed to complete it. Over a six-month period in 1977, Ramsey Dukes attempted the Abramelin operation. The Abramelin Diaries is his account of what transpired when he attempted to contact his Holy Guardian Angel. It provides a retrospective commentary on what the operation did for Dukes, along with its value and significance. It also includes a brief history of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage and its magical tradition. This is a book for serious occultists only.
In his diary, Antera Duke (ca.1735-ca.1809) wrote the only surviving eyewitness account of the slave trade by an African merchant. A leader in late eighteenth-century Old Calabar, a cluster of Efik-speaking communities in the Cross River region, he resided in Duke Town, forty-five miles from the Atlantic Ocean in what is now southeast Nigeria. His diary, written in trade English from 1785 to 1788, is a candid account of daily life in an African community at the height of Calabar's overseas commerce. It provides valuable information on Old Calabar's economic activity both with other African businessmen and with European ship captains who arrived to trade for slaves, produce, and provisions. This new edition of Antera's diary, the first in fifty years, draws on the latest scholarship to place the diary in its historical context. Introductory essays set the stage for the Old Calabar of Antera Duke's lifetime, explore the range of trades, from slaves to produce, in which he rose to prominence, and follow Antera on trading missions across an extensive commercial hinterland. The essays trace the settlement and development of the towns that comprised Old Calabar and survey the community's social and political structure, rivalries among families, sacrifices of slaves, and witchcraft ordeals. This edition reproduces Antera's original trade-English diary with a translation into standard English on facing pages, along with extensive annotation. The Diary of Antera Duke furnishes a uniquely valuable source for the history of precolonial Nigeria and the Atlantic slave trade, and this new edition enriches our understanding of it.
Prince Felix Youssoupov was heir to the richest fortune in Russia, and husband to Princess Irina Romanov. He was also involved in the murder of the notorious Rasputin, but protected from prosecution by his Romanov connection. Using recently unearthed sources, this book explores the story of this colourful pair, shedding new light on their lives.
Chiefly a record of the life and descendants of Washington Duke. He was born 20 Dec 1820 to Taylor Duke and Dicey Jones. He married Mary Caroline Clinton in 1842. They were the parents of two children. She died in 1847. He married Artelia Toney in Dec 1852. They were the parents of three children. She died in 1858. He died 8 May 1905.
Following in the successful wake of The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres, The Dukes of Hazzard debuted in January 1979 and quickly became a staple of CBS-TV's Friday night lineup. With its wild mix of wacky car chases and spectacular vehicle wrecks, bumbling sheriffs, greedy politicians, and its rambunctious lead players (the Duke boys and curvaceous Daisy Duke), it's little wonder the program developed such a strong and loyal viewership. This is the first book devoted to the genesis and production of the hit program, tracing its 1970s origin through to its recent, highly-rated "reunion" movie on CBS-TV. The author conducted extensive interviews with cast and technical talent to explore this beloved show - revealing for the first time many behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the week-to-week filming of the series. In this lively and factual presentation of the long-running TV series (1979-85), no trivia point is left unanswered about the amazing clan of Dukes and their colorful nemeses Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane and Boss Hogg.
In Gilded Age America, Arctic explorers were fabulous celebrities—assured of riches and near-immortality so long as they reached the North Pole first. Of the many attempts to meet that goal, three American expeditions, launched from the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land, ended in abject failure, their exploits consigned to near-oblivion. Even so, these ventures—the Wellman expedition (1898–99), the Baldwin-Ziegler (1901–2), and the Fiala-Ziegler (1903–5)—have much to tell us about the personalities, politics, and economics of exploration in their day. In The Greatest Show in the Arctic, the first book to chronicle all three expeditions, P. J. Capelotti explores what went right and what, in the end, went tragically wrong. The cast of colorful characters from the Franz Josef Land forays included Walter Wellman, a Chicago journalist and bon vivant running from debts, his mistress, and an illegitimate daughter; Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, a deranged meteorologist with a fetish for balloons and a passion for Swedish conserves; and Anthony Fiala, a pious photographer in search of God in the Arctic. Featuring an international cast of supporting characters worthy of a three-ring circus, The Greatest Show in the Arctic follows each of the three expeditions in turn, from spectacular feats of financing to their bitter ends. Along the way, the explorers accumulated considerable geographic knowledge and left a legacy of place-names. Through close study of the expeditions’ journals, Capelotti reveals that the Franz Josef Land endeavors foundered chiefly because of poor leadership and internal friction, not for lack of funding, as historians have previously suspected. Presenting tales of noble intentions, novel inventions, and epic miscalculations, The Greatest Show in the Arctic brings fresh life to a unique and underappreciated story of American exploration.
