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The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence by Louise BranganEveryone familiar with Ireland's history has heard of the Magdalene Laundries, places where fallen women were sent for reform, but few understand that the Laundries were part of a larger carceral system in Ireland. There were prisons, but also asylums, industrial and reformatory schools, Mother and Baby Homes, and County Homes, each of which operated alongside the Magdalene Laundries. Taken together, this system of confinement held over one percent of the Irish population, a staggering rate that outstrips the current rate of mass incarceration in the United States. In writing this book, Louise Brangan has pulled the curtain back on the insecurities of a young nation, showing that Ireland believed that if women could be controlled, so could an entire populace.
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The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity's Most Devastating Pandemic by Thomas AsbridgeIn the mid-fourteenth century, a lethal plague struck the medieval world, causing unimaginable suffering and destruction. The Black Death was unquestionably one of history's defining episodes, yet a critical feature of its progress has often been ignored: the disease was not confined to Europe, but rather affected almost all of the known world, including the Near and Middle East, Byzantium, north Africa and Asia. Tracing the pandemic's course across the medieval globe, "The Black Death" contrasts the experiences of different peoples, including Christians, Muslims, and Jews, charting this catastrophe's transformative effects on diverse aspects of medieval life. Uncovering a story that speaks to our own age, "The Black Death" highlights humankind's capacity for compassion and resilience amidst a global crisis to explain how the medieval world confronted, and ultimately overcame, this shattering pandemic.
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Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack by Willa Hammitt BrownThe folk hero Paul Bunyan stands astride the story of the upper Midwest-a manly symbol of the labor that cleared the vast north woods for the march of industrialization while somehow also maintaining an aura of pristine nature. This conception receives a long overdue and thoroughly revealing correction in "Gentlemen of the Woods", a cultural history of the life and lore of the real lumberjack and his true place in American history.
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The Hardest, Longest Race: Henry Ford and the Cross-Country Contest That Changed America by Eric MoskowitzFrom Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eric Moskowitz comes the riveting story of the first true coast-to-coast automobile race in U.S. history, a fast-paced tale of the gritty and determined drivers who braved hostile terrain, mechanical failure, and, shockingly, sabotage, to take home the gold. "The Hardest, Longest Race" is a colorful tale of ambition and subterfuge, but it is also a love letter to America at the turn of the Twentieth Century. As a seeming people's champion--a car for the masses--traverses the vast nation, Moskowitz brings to vivid life the diverse populace and landscape that it would soon transform.
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