Blenheim Revisited

"Blenheim Palace (/blnm/) (pronounced "Blen-im") is a monumental country house situated in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England, residence of the dukes of Marlborough. It is the only non-royal non-episcopal country house in England to hold the title of palace. The palace, one of England's largest houses, was built between 1705. and circa 1724. UNESCO recognised the palace as a World Heritage Site in 1987. Its construction was originally intended to be a gift to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough from a grateful nation in return for military triumph against the French and Bavarians at the Battle of Blenheim. However, it soon became the subject of political infighting, which led to Marlborough's exile, the fall from power of his duchess, and irreparable damage to the reputation of the architect Sir John Vanbrugh."--Wikipedia.

In 1854, a group of engineers and railroad businessmen drew a straight line from Philadelphia to the New Jersey coast, built a railroad along the line, and created Atlantic City. From the 1850s to the 1950s, the city attracted the creme of American society and the working class alike and gave birth to the beauty pageant, rolling chair, boardwalk, saltwater taffy, jitney, and the successful Monopoly board game. But the onset of air travel in the 1950s and the aging grand hotels brought Atlantic City to its knees. The opening of Resorts International in 1978 and the prosperous gaming business that followed in its wake helped the city rise from its own ashes, and a year-round tourism industry exploded. Garish and opulent casino hotels replaced many of the boardwalk dowagers, and new palaces transformed the once desolate marina section into a vibrant destination.

This unique resource will be an enormous aid and impetus to Churchill studies. It lists over 600 works, with annotations, and includes sections listing an additional 5,900 entries covering book reviews, significant articles, and chapters from books. Separate author and title indexes will allow the user to locate specific entries. The book's aim is to direct students, researchers, and bibliophiles to the entire corpus of works about Churchill.

This is a history of a great English house, from its conception and building in the opening decade of the 18th century, to the burial of Winston Churchill in the early 1960s. Not just its famous inhabitants are covered, but also the servants and workmen who kept it functioning.

The first major biography of Winston Churchill to focus on his inner life and psychology 'An extraordinary biography...Pearson...has a sensitive pen, matching the wit of his subject, and shows perceptive intuition towards the delicate relationships between the members of the Churchill family and their assorted spouses and lovers.' International Journal on World Peace He was a lion of a man who helped shape the course of this century with his relentless ambition and fierce political instincts. Few have matched Winston Churchill's cunning or force of will. Few have seen the equal of his audacity on the battlefield or the determination with which he strove toward his own ideal of greatness. At the height of his power, he seemed to embody the ideals of the empire he helped sustain: valor, pride, and above all, tradition. His sense of personal destiny was rooted deeply in the legacy of his birth-right, the heritage of his family, and the awesome responsibility of being born Churchill. In The Private Lives of Winston Churchill, first published in 1991, John Pearson takes us behind the myth of Churchill and deep into the psychology of a dynasty that some have called the most complicated Anglo-American family of this century. In doing so, he reveals, in rich portraits, some of the family's greatest, most charismatic, and most deeply troubled members and shows us the real, private Winston Churchill.

More than 650 landmarks are covered, ranging from ancient monuments such as Stonehenge, to contemporary engineering feats such as the World Trade Center in New York City. The concisely-written entries describe when the landmark was built, who built it, why it was built, its dimensions, how it was constructed, and any problems encountered during construction. Additional features include: numerous photographs; biographies of important builders and designers; glossary; chronology of dates in civil engineering from 3000 BC to the present; listings of tallest buildings, longest bridges, and highest dams, and a geographical index which locates the structures by country.

The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

Sir Winston Churchill’s paternal grandmother and the mother of Randolph Churchill, the 7th Duchess of Marlborough, has been a minor figure in many works, yet hers is a fascinating story. Frances Anne Emily Vane-Tempest-Stewart’s family background, as well as her own life, is steeped in great historical names and occasions, from being the eldest daughter of Wellington’s second-in-command in the Napoleonic Wars to being a lifelong personal friend of Queen Victoria. Frances’ arrival at Blenheim Palace in 1843 as the bride of John Winston, 7th Marquess of Blandford, resulted in the great ancestral seat’s regeneration, and from there she gave loyal support not only to her husband and her younger son, Randolph, but also to her famous grandson, Winston Churchill, shaping his character, ambitions and later achievements. Alongside the influence she had over her family, her own crowning achievement was the part she played in averting the effects of the Irish potato famine of 1879, which threatened to repeat the extensive loss of life of the 1840s famine. Churchill’s Grandmama is an absorbing, remarkable biography that restores a most gracious woman to her proper place at Blenheim.

A tantalizing, droll study of the idiosyncratic existence of the very rich, through the unexpected lens of the naturalist. Journalist Richard Conniff probes the age-old question "Are the rich different from you and me?" and finds that they are indeed a completely different animal. He observes with great humor this socially unique species, revealing their strategies for ensuring dominance and submission, their flourishes of display behavior, the intricate dynamics of their pecking order, as well as their unorthodox mating practices. Through comparisons to other equally exotic animals, Conniff uncovers surprising commonalities.