Regent Street is one of the best known streets in London. This book traces its development from a royal scheme devised for the Prince Regent by his favourite architect, John Nash, in the 19th century to its role as the 'destination street' of today. It was celebrated as the 'avenue of superfluities' - full of modish shops providing clothes, British and imported dress material, and luxuries like fans, furs and jewellery. So successful were the shopkeepers that rebuilding was necessary by the end of Queen Victoria's reign. Fashionable new shops and department stores in Portland stone replaced Nash's stucco, creating the Regent Street so familiar today, despite two World Wars.
The author, an eminent historian of London, traces the creation of the whole area from the clubs of Waterloo Place along the whole length of Regent Street to the villas of Regent's Park, and discusses the problems its projectors had to overcome. She records the many talented architects and inventive shopkeepers who established the street as a fashionable quarter, and traces the many changes and problems faced by landlords and occupiers in keeping their street in the forefront of style for two centuries.
Cabell Library DA685.R42 H6 2008
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The Crusades were the bridge between medieval and modern history, between feudalism and colonialism. In many ways, the little explored later Crusades were the most significant of them all, for they made the crisis truly global. The Last Crusaders is about the period's last great conflict between East and West, and the titanic contest between Habsburg-led Christendom and the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From the great naval campaigns and the ferocious struggle to dominate the North African shore, the conflict spread out along trade routes, consuming nations and cultures, destroying dynasties, and spawning the first colonial empires in South America and the Indian Ocean.
Green is the Orator follows on Sarah Gridley's brilliant first collection, Weather Eye Open, in addressing the challenge of representing nature through language. Gridley's deftly original syntax arises from direct experience of the natural world and from encounters with other texts, including the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" and the writings of Charles Darwin, Peter Mark Roget, William Morris, William James, and Henri Bergson. Gridley's own idiom is compressed, original, and full of unexpected pleasures. This unusual book, at once austere and full of life, reflects a penetrating mind at work--one that is thinking through and re-presenting romantic and modernist traditions of nature. 
Fierce Angels explores and explodes the idea of the "strong black woman" as never before. Authoritative yet deeply personal and daringly confessional, Sheri Parks's bold new study of the black female's role as communal savior and martyr will challenge and change anyone who reads it.