Книги, похожие на «Richard Happer, Abandoned Places: 60 stories of places where time stopped»

For more than two centuries, E pluribus unum – out of many, one – has been featured on America’s official government seals and stamped on its currency. But how did America become ‘one nation, indivisible’? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? In this monumental history, Simon Winchester addresses these questions, bringing together the breathtaking achievements that helped forge and unify America and the pioneers who have toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizens and geography of the USA from its beginnings.Winchester follows in the footsteps of America’s most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators, including Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery Expedition to the Pacific Coast, the builders of the first transcontinental telegraph, and the powerful civil engineer behind the Interstate Highway System. He treks vast swaths of territory, from Pittsburgh to Portland; Rochester to San Francisco; Truckee to Laramie; Seattle to Anchorage, introducing these fascinating men and others – some familiar, some forgotten, some hardly known – who played a pivotal role in creating today’s United States. Throughout, he ponders whether the historic work of uniting the States has succeeded, and to what degree.The Men Who United the States is a fresh, lively, and erudite look at the way in which the most powerful nation on earth came together, from one of our most entertaining, probing, and insightful observers.

Viking Britain author Thomas Williams returns with a brief history of the interaction between the Vikings and the British to tell the story of the occupation of London.Nowhere in England suffered more Viking aggression than London. Between 842 and 1016, the city was subjected to serious assault on at least a dozen separate occasions. Sometimes, she burned and sometimes she surrendered, mostly she stood firm when all others had given up hope; and throughout it all she endured, remaking and remodelling herself, growing strong in adversity, unique in economic power, a crucible of cultures, enterprise and political intrigue: a maker of kings, and – ultimately – their capital.London is a city of spectres, of ghosts walking in the footsteps of other ghosts, and the Viking Age is perhaps its most forgotten shadowland. Memories shimmer through the alluvium and radiate through the pores of Museum collections, street names and stories. Viking London is a short book of the hidden history, archaeology and folklore of London in the Viking Age and its echoes through history. The narrative history that can be told is limited, and this book is, therefore, unorthodox and digressive in its structure and its layering of voices, impressions and characters, stories, objects and buildings.Thomas Williams treats the city as a living, breathing entity, one peopled with individuals shaped and warped by the forces that the urban environment exerts on its inhabitants. In this case, however, it is the forgotten ghosts of the Viking Age that provide the gravitational force – the shaping and distorting mass at the city’s heart.