Wonder what Grandma would have used to clean greasy kitchen walls? Cure a sore throat? Conquer insect pests in her vegetable garden? Wonder no longer! Whatever your grandma did to fix and maintain things around the house and garden, it probably worked. That's because the old ways are often the best ways when it comes to solutions for everyday problems, ideas for saving time, and handy advice for getting the job done. And that's where 1,001 Old-Time Household Hints comes in. Find the best hints, tips, and secrets for everything from cooking, cleaning, and home maintenance to pet care, gardening, and holiday celebrations. You'll also find ways to adapt and improve some old-time methods. Discover an amazing variety of useful and clever ideas, including how to: Clean copper pans, using buttermilk and salt Make real sourdough bread the way the pioneers did Fight wrinkles and create kissable lips Use natural ingredients to repair your hair Create your own unique perfume Organize common space in your home Use ivory soap for polishing silver and insect control Safely separate drinking glasses that have been stuck together And more! With 1,001 Old-Time Household Hints on your kitchen table or nightstand, you're always in the good company of an old-timer who's ready to dispense a helpful hint, encouraging word, or sage secret at the turn of a page. 310 color photographs
Paper Secrets is the first book of a family saga involving the Black and Coleman families having mixed feeling for each other. Vivian Black and Louise Coleman were best friends during their childhood years in the 1930's until circumstances led to a ten-year separation. When they meet again in college, Louise is extremely rich and Vivian is attending college on an academic scholarship. They both fall in love with the same handsome, wealthy upperclassmen John Williams from Richmond, VA and the former friends find themselves at odds over for his affection. Louise is used to having her way and doesn't take no for an answer. She is determined to have him and will not let a little thing like his love for Vivian get in the way. Paper Secrets, a story with many misunderstandings, trials, and even lost loved ones for both families caused by the discovery of various pieces of paper. While some family members are anxious to have the secrets revealed, others want them hidden or forgotten forever. Lawsuits and threats of public humiliation are the least of their worries with the secrets looming over their heads.
Tropologies is the first book-length study to elaborate the medieval and early modern theory of the tropological, or moral, sense of scripture. Ryan McDermott argues that tropology is not only a way to interpret the Bible but also a theory of literary and ethical invention. The “tropological imperative” demands that words be turned into works—books as well as deeds. Beginning with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, then treating monuments of exegesis such as the Glossa ordinaria and Nicholas of Lyra, as well as theorists including Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and others, Tropologies reveals the unwritten history of a major hermeneutical theory and inventive practice. Late medieval and early Reformation writers adapted tropological theory to invent new biblical poetry and drama that would invite readers to participate in salvation history by inventing their own new works. Tropologies reinterprets a wide range of medieval and early modern texts and performances—including the Patience-Poet, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, the York and Coventry cycle plays, and the literary circles of the reformist King Edward VI—to argue that “tropological invention” provided a robust alternative to rhetorical theories of literary production. In this groundbreaking revision of literary history, the Bible and biblical hermeneutics, commonly understood as sources of tumultuous discord, turn out to provide principles of continuity and mutuality across the Reformation’s temporal and confessional rifts. Each chapter pursues an argument about poetic and dramatic form, linking questions of style and aesthetics to exegetical theory and theology. Because Tropologies attends to the flux of exegetical theory and practice across a watershed period of intellectual history, it is able to register subtle shifts in literary production, fine-tuning our sense of how literature and religion mutually and dynamically informed and reformed each other.
Contains over a thousand long-standing household tips, covering such aspects as cleaning, decorating, repair and maintenance, holiday celebrations, health, beauty and body care, pet care, houseplants, and kitchen and flower gardening.
It's not something easily owned up to, but every family in the country will have come into contact with head lice, either through embarrassing personal experience or by grizzly tales told by friends and relations. The world is teeming with head lice. Both a manual and an entertaining read, The Little Book of Nits is small enough to be purchased as an impulse buy, but also serious enough for it to be a useful addition to the home reference library. Broken down into bite-sized pieces are full details of the history and biology of head lice, advice on how to spot an infestation and the many different ways of dealing with it, natural versus chemical treatments, gadgets and combs, and other aspects of our relationship with these annoying arthropods. Inside, we'll learn that most of what you have been told or think you know is wrong. Is it any wonder we can't get rid of them? Throughout, the book is illuminated with amusing anecdotes, myths, pictures, cartoons, silly stories and interesting facts. Presented clearly and objectively, it is a quick reference tool for parents and carers, and an entertaining little guide to these most irritating of insect.
In this informed and lyrical collection of interwoven essays, Lisa Knopp explores the physical and cultural geography of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte, rivers she has come to understand and cherish. At the same time, she contemplates how people experience landscape, identifying three primary roles of environmental perception: the insider, the outsider, and the outsider seeking to become an insider. Viewing the waterways through these approaches, she searches for knowledge and meaning. Because Knopp was born and raised just a few blocks away, she considers the Mississippi from the perspective of a native resident, a “dweller in the land.” She revisits places she has long known: Nauvoo, Illinois, the site of two nineteenth-century utopias, one Mormon, one Icarian; Muscatine, Iowa, once the world’s largest manufacturer of pearl (mussel shell) buttons; and the mysterious prehistoric bird- and bear-shaped effigy mounds of northeastern Iowa. On a downriver trip between the Twin Cities and St. Louis, she meditates on what can be found in Mississippi river water—state lines, dissolved oxygen, smallmouth bass, corpses, family history, wrecked steamboats, mayfly nymphs, toxic perfluorinated chemicals, philosophies. Knopp first encountered the Missouri as a tourist and became acquainted with it through literary and historical documents, as well as stories told by longtime residents. Her journey includes stops at Fort Bellefontaine, where Lewis and Clark first slept on their sojourn to the Pacific; Little Dixie, Missouri’s slaveholding, hemp-growing region, as revealed through the life of Jesse James’s mother; Fort Randall Dam and Lake Francis Case, the construction of which destroyed White Swan on the Yankton Sioux Reservation; and places that produced unique musical responses to the river, including Native American courting flutes, indie rock, Missouri River valley fiddling, Prohibition-era jazz jam sessions, and German folk music. Knopp’s relationship with the Platte is marked by intentionality: she settled nearby and chose to develop deep and lasting connections over twenty years’ residence. On this adventure, she ponders the half-million sandhill cranes that pass through Nebraska each spring, the ancient varieties of Pawnee corn growing at the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, a never-broken tract of tallgrass prairie, the sugar beet industry, and the changes in the river brought about by the demands of irrigation. In the final essay, Knopp undertakes the science of river meanders, consecutive loops of water moving in opposite directions, which form around obstacles but also develop in the absence of them. What initiates the turning that results in a meander remains a mystery. Such is the subtle and interior process of knowing and loving a place. What the River Carries asks readers to consider their own relationships with landscape and how one can most meaningfully and responsibly dwell on the earth’s surface. Winner of the 2013 Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction Honorable Mention for the Association for Literature and the Environment's 2013 Environmental Creative Nonfiction Award
"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.
Explore how everyday people living in eighteenth-century England dealt with sickness, accidents, and disease in this unpublished kitchen book from 1737. Bridget Lane, a typical British housewife and lady of the house, treated her family for the physical ills that befell them. She gathered more than 150 cures and remedies, compiling them along with her unique insights into healing principles and practices of the time. Edited with detailed commentary by Vincent DiMarco, a longtime scholar of medieval literature, this text examines how Bridget Lane's cures relate to folk- and herbal medicine traditions, whether recipes preserved vestiges of magic and spiritual healing, details on ingredients and their effects, and ways certain recipes have been adapted to the modern kitchen. Based on a comprehensive analysis of how the people of the eighteenth-century understood ailments, Mrs. Lane's guide and the attendant commentary is intended for students, lovers of history, and anyone interested in the social sciences. Join an eighteenth-century housewife and discover all she did in the kitchen to protect and help her family with It Has Helped to Admiration.
