A historical study of how increased access to ice—decades before refrigeration—transformed American life.During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans depended upon ice to stay cool and to keep their perishable foods fresh. Jonathan Rees tells the fascinating story of how people got ice before mechanical refrigeration came to the household. Drawing on newspapers, trade journals, and household advice books, Before the Refrigerator expla...

Trace three millennia of religious history and discover how an ancient community survived exile to shape world theology. Perfect for an educational commute, this awe-inspiring narrative transforms complex cultural studies into an accessible, gripping timeline of human resilience.Whether you are a lifelong learner seeking spiritual context or a history buff diving into antiquity, this reflective journey illuminates the unbreakable spirit of the Jewish diaspora. Witness the dramatic ...

The wartime adventures of the legendary SOE agent Harry Rée, told in his own wordsA school teacher at the start of the war, Harry Rée renounced his former pacifism with the fall of France in 1940. He was deployed into a secret branch of the British army and parachuted into central France in April 1943.Harry showed a particular talent for winning the confidence of local resisters, and guided them in a series of dramatic sabotage operations, before getting in...

This book provides a descriptive, episodic yet analytical synthesis of industrialization in America. It integrates analysis of the profound economic and social changes taking place during the period between 1877 and the start of the Great Depression. The text is supported by 30 case studies to illustrate the underlying principles of industrialization that cumulatively convey a comprehensive understanding of the era.

A fascinating examination of the controversial work of Harvey Wiley, the founder of the pure food movement and an early crusader against the use of additives and preservatives in food.Though trained as a medical doctor, chemist Harvey Wiley spent most of his professional life advocating for "pure food"—food free of both adulterants and preservatives. A strong proponent of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, still the basis of food safety legislation in the United S...

How we keep food cold while the house stays warm.Only when the power goes off and food spoils do we truly appreciate how much we rely on refrigerators and freezers. In Refrigeration Nation, Jonathan Rees explores the innovative methods and gadgets that Americans have invented to keep perishable food cold—from cutting river and lake ice and shipping it to consumers for use in their iceboxes to the development of electrically powered equipment that ushered i...

What do we really know about the food we eat? A firestorm of recent food-fraud cases – from the honey-laundering scandal in the USA, to the forty-year-old frozen ‘zombie’ meat smuggled into China, to horsemeat passed off as beef in the UK – suggests fraudulent and intentional acts of food adulteration are on the rise.Jonathan Rees examines the complex causes and surprising effects of adulteration and fraud across the global food chain. Covering comestibles of all kinds from around t...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.It may be responsible for a greater improvement in human diet and longevity than any other technology of the last two thousand years-but have you ever thought seriously about your refrigerator? That box humming in the background displays more than you might expect, even who you are and the society in which you live. Jonathan Rees examines the past, present, and future of the ho...

This innovative book brings paired documents on twelve subjects together to showcase different perspectives on the same historical topic. In so doing, it helps students grapple with the complicated nature of history, how it is made, and how historians interpret the past. The carefully selected primary documents in Counterpoints promote student analysis and a deeper understanding of historical events. As editor Jonathan Rees says in the Introduction, “Introducing p...

The Fulton Fish Market stands out as an iconic New York institution. At first a neighborhood retail market for many different kinds of food, it became the nation’s largest fish and seafood wholesaling center by the late nineteenth century. Waves of immigrants worked at the Fulton Fish Market and then introduced the rest of the city to their seafood traditions. In popular culture, the market—celebrated by Joseph Mitchell in The New Yorker—conjures up images of the bustling...

'Astonishing ... enjoy its riches slowly, and savour every generous, erudite and undogmatic page' Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times'We English men have wits,' wrote the clergyman Ralph Lever in 1573, and, 'we have also framed unto ourselves a language.'Witcraft is a fresh and brilliant history of how philosophy became established in English. It presents a new form of philosophical storytelling and challenges what Jonathan Rée calls the 'condesc...

In 'Becoming a Philosopher' Jonathan Rée describes the extraordinary lives of some of most influential thinkers of the past four hundred years and the radical and sometimes bizarre ideas that emerged from them. In so doing he challenges the notion of philosophy as a set of fixed ideas to be arranged and catalogued like botanical specimens. Rather, the philosophical life is revealed, as Kierkegaard has described, as one of relentless struggle, a never-ending 'dance in the service of thought...