Voices From The Back Stairs

Historic house museums--one of the most prevalent types of history museums in the country--have long depicted the owners of the house and their families, but representing the servants has introduced a unique set of challenges. While museum professionals have increasingly incorporated women, immigrants, African Americans, and other minorities into portrayals of the past, these portrayals often show an idealistic world without class antagonisms or ethnic conflict. Exploring the domestic conflicts that may have existed between mistress and servant often creates a more vivid and believable experience for guests. Through her examination of the pitfalls of interpretation, Pustz offers advice for museum professionals on programming accurate and compelling depictions of those who lived their lives in the back stairs and kitchen rather than in the parlor. Based on extensive surveys of historians at historic house museums, this informative study presents examples of successful interpretation programs, including those that have made the kitchen and servants' quarters the most popular stops on the tour. Pustz encourages museum curators to look beyond the archives of their own institution and explore other era-appropriate sources, including advertising and housekeeping guides, when trying to create a complete picture of the house's servants, who often left behind few records.

Volume contains: 137 NY 500 (McCarthy v. McCarthy) 137 NY 510 (Kirk v. Kirk) 137 NY 621 (Hoffman v. Wight) 137 NY 631 (Peo ex rel U.S. Trust Co. of N.Y. v. Barker) 137 NY 631 (Pope v. Briggs) 138 NY 48 (Hyman v. Hauff) 138 NY 57 (Spofford v. Pearsall) Unreported Case (McCarthy v. McCarthy)

"William Tallon was a creature of extremes: though intensely loyal, he was also a dangerous risk-taker; though charming, he could also be vicious; though considerate and amusing, he could be ruthless and predatory. For much of his life he was driven by two demons: a powerful sex drive and an intense, almost pathological love for the Queen Mother..." From humble beginnings as a shopkeeper's son in Coventry to 'Page of the Backstairs' at Clarence House, William Tallon, or 'Backstairs Billy' as he came to be known, entered royal service at the age of fifteen. Over the next fifty years, he became one of the most notorious and flamboyant characters ever to have graced the royal household - the one servant the Queen Mother just could not do without. While others came and went, he remained by her side, becoming one of her most trusted friends and confidants. The fascinating life story of the man who spent more than half a century working for one of the world's most elusive institutions, Backstairs Billy provides a rare glimpse of what the royals really get up to behind closed doors...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (The New York Times) comes a piercing novel of race, class, love, and war in America. Twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the daughter of a gentleman farmer, has come to a university town as a student. When she takes a job as a part-time nanny for a mysterious and glamorous family, she finds herself drawn deeper into their world and forever changed. “An indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11…. Moore has written her most powerful book yet.” —The New York Times

For thirty-two years Ken Steele lived with the devastating symptoms of schizophrenia, tortured by inner voices commanding him to kill himself, ravaged by the delusions of paranoia, barely surviving on the ragged edges of society. In this powerful and inspiring story, Steele tells the story of his hard-won recovery from schizophrenia and how activism and advocacy helped him regain his sanity and go on to give hope and support to so many others like him. His recovery began with a small but intensely dramatic moment. One evening in the spring of 1995, shortly after starting on Risperdal, a new antipsychotic medicine, he realized that the voices that had tormented him for three decades had suddenly stopped. Terrified but also empowered by this new freedom, Steele rose to the challenge of creating a new life. Steele went on to become one of the most vocal advocates of the mentally ill, earning the respect not only of patients and families but also of professionals and policymakers all over America through his tireless devotion to a cause that transformed his life and that of countless others. The Day the Voices Stopped will endure as Ken Steele's testament for all who struggle with this heartbreaking disease.

In the scorching summer of 1976—the hottest since records began—Christopher Norton, his wife Laura and their young daughter Faye settle into their new home in north London. The faded glory of the Victorian house is the perfect place for Norton, a composer of film soundtracks, to build a recording studio of his own. But soon in the long, oppressively hot nights, Laura begins to hear something through the crackle of the baby monitor. First, a knocking sound. Then come the voices.For Norton, the voices mark an exciting opportunity. Putting his work to one side, he begins the project of a lifetime—a grand symphony incorporating the voices±—and becomes increasingly obsessed with one voice in particular. Someone who is determined to make themselves heard . . .

Do women in classical Hollywood cinema ever truly speak for themselves? In Echo and Narcissus, Amy Lawrence examines eight classic films to show how women's speech is repeatedly constructed as a "problem," an affront to male authority. This book expands feminist studies of the representation of women in film, enabling us to see individual films in new ways, and to ask new questions of other films. Using Sadie Thompson (1928), Blackmail (1929), Rain (1932), The Spiral Staircase, Sorry,Wrong Number, Notorious, Sunset Boulevard (1950) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Lawrence illustrates how women's voices are positioned within narratives that require their submission to patriarchal roles and how their attempts to speak provoke increasingly severe repression. She also shows how women's natural ability to speak is interrupted, made difficult, or conditioned to a suffocating degree by sound technology itself. Telephones, phonographs, voice-overs, and dubbing are foregrounded, called upon to silence women and to restore the primacy of the image. Unlike the usage of "voice" by feminist and literary critics to discuss broad issues of authorship and point of view, in film studies the physical voice itself is a primary focus. Echo and Narcissus shows how assumptions about the "deficiencies" of women's voices and speech are embedded in sound's history, technology, uses, and marketing. Moreover, the construction of the woman's voice is inserted into the ideologically loaded cinematic and narrative conventions governing the representation of women in Hollywood film.