A turban is a strip of cloth folded and wrapped around the head; however, this description includes multifarious forms across space and time. This bookfollows the turban as it moves from the Arabian Peninsula through the Ottoman Empire to Europe and the Americas. It directs the reader's gaze from traditional and religious uses of the turban into the realms of international trade, Renaissance art and contemporary fashions. Turbans, as this book shows, have moved in and out of Western cultur...

This enlightening narrative takes a look at the wedding night—its origins, history, customs, cultural expressions, and fictional representations through the ages.Though just outside of public view, the wedding night is loaded with expectation and consequence. The Wedding Night: A Popular History is an entertaining, accessible, touching, and humorous volume that looks at the previously unexplored topic of wedding history "between the sheets." Covering a kal...