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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Turn: Washington’s Spies, now an original series on AMC Based on remarkable new research, acclaimed historian Alexander Rose brings to life the true story of the spy ring that helped America win the Revolutionary War. For the first time, Rose takes us beyond the battlefront and deep into the shadowy underworld of double agents and triple crosses, covert operations and code breaking, and unmasks the courageous, flawed men who inhabited this wilderness of mirrors—including the spymaster at the heart of it all. In the summer of 1778, with the war poised to turn in his favor, General George Washington desperately needed to know where the British would strike next. To that end, he unleashed his secret weapon: an unlikely ring of spies in New York charged with discovering the enemy’s battle plans and military strategy. Washington’s small band included a young Quaker torn between political principle and family loyalty, a swashbuckling sailor addicted to the perils of espionage, a hard-drinking barkeep, a Yale-educated cavalryman and friend of the doomed Nathan Hale, and a peaceful, sickly farmer who begged Washington to let him retire but who always came through in the end. Personally guiding these imperfect everyday heroes was Washington himself. In an era when officers were gentlemen, and gentlemen didn’ t spy, he possessed an extraordinary talent for deception—and proved an adept spymaster. The men he mentored were dubbed the Culper Ring. The British secret service tried to hunt them down, but they escaped by the closest of shaves thanks to their ciphers, dead drops, and invisible ink. Rose’s thrilling narrative tells the unknown story of the Revolution–the murderous intelligence war, gunrunning and kidnapping, defectors and executioners—that has never appeared in the history books. But Washington’s Spies is also a spirited, touching account of friendship and trust, fear and betrayal, amid the dark and silent world of the spy.
How did pre-industrial London build the biggest water supply industry on earth? Beginning in 1580, a number of competing London companies sold water directly to consumers through a large network of wooden mains in the expanding metropolis. This new water industry flourished throughout the 1600s, eventually expanding to serve tens of thousands of homes. By the late eighteenth century, more than 80 percent of the city’s houses had water connections—making London the best-served metropolis in the world while demonstrating that it was legally, commercially, and technologically possible to run an infrastructure network within the largest city on earth. In this richly detailed book, historian Leslie Tomory shows how new technologies imported from the Continent, including waterwheel-driven piston pumps, spurred the rapid growth of London’s water industry. The business was further sustained by an explosion in consumer demand, particularly in the city’s wealthy West End. Meanwhile, several key local innovations reshaped the industry by enlarging the size of the supply network. By 1800, the success of London’s water industry made it a model for other cities in Europe and beyond as they began to build their own water networks. The city’s water infrastructure even inspired builders of other large-scale urban projects, including gas and sewage supply networks. The History of the London Water Industry, 1580–1820 explores the technological, cultural, and mercantile factors that created and sustained this remarkable industry. Tomory examines how the joint-stock form became popular with water companies, providing a stable legal structure that allowed for expansion. He also explains how the roots of the London water industry’s divergence from the Continent and even from other British cities was rooted both in the size of London as a market and in the late seventeenth-century consumer revolution. This fascinating and unique study of essential utilities in the early modern period will interest business historians and historians of science and technology alike.
Dictionaries are a powerful genre, perceived as authoritative and objective records of the language, impervious to personal bias. But who makes dictionaries shapes both how they are constructed and how they are used. Tracing the craft of dictionary making from the fifteenth century to the present day, this book explores the vital but little-known significance of women and gender in the creation of English language dictionaries. Women worked as dictionary patrons, collaborators, readers, compilers, and critics, while gender ideologies served, at turns, to prevent, secure, and veil women's involvements and innovations in dictionary making. Combining historical, rhetorical, and feminist methods, this is a monumental recovery of six centuries of women's participation in dictionary making and a robust investigation of how the social life of the genre is influenced by the social expectations of gender.
Putting police power into the centre of the picture of capitalism The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.
