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Historical Sketches of New Haven

by Ellen Strong Bartlett

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Ellen Strong Bartlett was an evocative and prolific writer. Historical Sketches of New Haven is in part a collection of her writings that appeared in New England Magazine and The Connecticut Quarterly, and offer a wonderful portrait of New Haven, Connecticut. Bartlett offers centuries of history, photographs, architectural analysis, folklore and more.

Bartlett was born in 1848 to Ellen Root Strong and John Newton Bartlett in New Haven, CT. One of Bartlett’s books was Bits from Great Grandmother’s Diary, a collection of insight from her great grandmother who lived in Farmington and experienced the Revolutionary War. She served as the editor for Connecticut as a Colony and as a State as well.

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Resistance: Reflections on Survival, Hope and Love

Poetry by William Morris, Photography by Jackie Malden

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Resistance is a book of poems with photographs or a book of photographs with poems depending on your perspective. The book is comprised of three sections titled respectively: On Survival, On Hope, and On Love. The poems range from the expression of impassioned pleas for deliverance from constraint and evil to the simple affirmation of romantic love. With poetry by William Morris and photography by Jackie Malden, this book is dedicated to Veronica, Jackie’s cousin and William’s wife.

Bios
William Morris
William Morris heads the Next Century Foundation, an international charity devoted to fostering peace and reconciliation in war zones. He is a former broadcaster, editor and publisher. He lives and works in Ludgvan, Cornwall. He is eclectic in his writing, composing everything from nonsense verse to novels, one of which, titled Springfield the Novel, was also published by Westphalia Press. Awarded an honorary doctorate by Bolton University for his work promoting peace in the Middle East, William is a frequent traveler to pivotal Mid East countries such as Iraq, Egypt, Gaza, and Libya. William is often accompanied in his travels by Ambassador Mark Hambley, who has acted as an informal ear and critic for this work.

Jackie Malden
Jackie Malden is an artist and photographer based in Oxford, England. She walks every day with her little dog Teddy, and photographs nature … anything that catches her eye, from the emergence of the smallest wild flower to the vastness and beauty of a sunset. Natural light is the inspiration for many of the images in this book with spring and autumn being favourite seasons. In keeping with her love of nature, she is also a paper collage artist specialising in British birds and wildlife. She exhibits in the annual Oxfordshire Artweeks, and cards of her work sell in shops around the UK as well as online, under her married name Jackie Richards: http://www.lovefromtheartist.com.

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War Scenes I Shall Never Forget

by Carita Spencer

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In this work, Carita Spencer offers some sketches of her experiences during World War I, along with photos, and even a menu. Spencer offered the work as an American going overseas to document the war, and to report her findings back to the United States. The scenes can be quite graphic, as war is.Spencer catalogued experiences predominantly by Belgian, French and English soldiers, nurses, doctors, Red Cross officials, and others. Unlike many war narratives, which focus solely on combat, Spencer’s narrative discusses the impact on the average citizen as well, noting how young girls were making lace to sell to benefit the soldier, the constant fear of “aero bombs”, and of a town where “nearly everyone…was ill with a touch of asphyxiating gas.” It is the hope of many of these shared recollections that the horrors of war be prevented. Spencer illustrates how deeply the pain, bloodshed and ruin permeate.

This new edition is dedicated to the faculty and students of the American Military University.

 

 

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Some African Highways: A Journey of Two American Women to Uganda and the Transvaal

by Caroline Kirkland, Introduction by Lieutenant-General Baden-Powell

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Much of this work originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Caroline Kirkland’s goal was to encourage other Americans, particularly women, to make the voyage into Uganda and parts of East Africa. Kirkland described her journey as “made with entire safety and great comfort…where else can you look out from railway carriage windows and see zebras, gnus, giraffes, hyneas, and even lions as you steam through a land?” While this work is greatly valuable as a travelogue by a female traveler, it is not unbound from the social mores of the time. For example, Kirkland also describes Uganda as for,

“the lover of strong contrasts, of high lights and black shadows, of wonderful scenery, of great spaces, of all that is new and free and sitting, I recommend a trip to this dark, mysterious, violent and enchanting country. We two women only touched the surface of it, but we were ever conscious of much we could not see, nor hear, nor formulate, but which exists in a land teeming with fierce and savage life.”

Kirkland took the journey with her mother, and an Italian maid, Nannina, who was to work for Kirkland’s sister residing in Central Africa. Her work includes a historical sketch, and numerous photographs.

 

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Illustrated Sketches of Death Valley: and Other Borax Deserts of the Pacific Coast

by John R. Spears

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John R. Spears was born in 1850 in Van Wert, Ohio. Though an inveterate traveler, particularly out west, he ended up residing in Little Falls, New York. He wrote a great deal, particularly for the
New York Sun, and his books include The Port of Missing Ships and Other Stories of the Sea (1896), The Story of Nee England Whalers (1908), and The Story of the American Merchant Marine (1910). A great deal had been written about life in gold and silver mining camps, as well as the terrain surrounding them. However, Spears felt less attention had been paid to the desert, and wanted to depict the life in Death Valley, which he described as, “a gruesome story of a rugged  country…a story, too, of apparent paradoxes and of wonders.” Spears’ photographs offer a useful historical record of Death Valley, its people and animals, as they were in the 1890s.

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The Old Spanish Missions of California: A Historical and Descriptive Sketch

by Paul Elder

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There were twenty one Spanish missions in California, established between 1769 and 1833 by Catholic priests to spread Christianity. Paul Elder collected various snippets of California history and compiled it in this work with quotes from various primary sources and photographs of numerous missions across the state, which presents a romanticized view of their founding. This work only portrays a partial and sanitized tale of the Spanish missions in California and their impact. The missions relied on agriculture to fund themselves, and sought to convert and colonize the Native people and their land. Multiple rebellions against the missions occurred since the missionaries sought to destroy native culture, and in the process, they transmitted communicable diseases which killed thousands. Missions did not just exist in California, but also Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Florida.

 

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Old Chinatown: Turn of the Century Photographs of San Francisco’s Chinatown

by Arnold Genthe and Will Irwin

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This volume is one of a number of Westphalia titles significant in the story of the not always happy and often controversial Chinese contact with Western society. In the American case, despite appreciation by scholars for Chinese civilization, cries against Chinese immigration began in response to the development of the transcontinental railroad that saw the arrival of immigrants exploited as cheap labor. The first restrictive Act passed on May 6, 1882, and was the start of a series of increasingly more restrictive laws against Chinese, such as the Act to Prohibit the Coming of Chinese Persons into the United States, known more popularly as the Geary Act of May 1892. It wasn’t until the Immigration Act of October 1965 when the exclusionary practices were lifted, despite President Truman’s signing of the Act to Repeal the Chinese Exclusion Acts, to Establish Quotas and for Other Purposes in December of 1943.

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The History of Photography

Edited and Introduced by Daniel Gutierrez-Sandoval

The life of George Eastman is very much a part of the history of contemporary photography. Founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, Eastman was an enthusiastic photographer himself who became instrumental in bringing photography to the mainstream. He invented the first commercial film, as well as the first Kodak cameras designed to be accessible to anyone, at a time when photography entailed expensive and complicated processes reserved only for trained and professional photographers. His inventions also became the basis for the development of the first motion pictures, making Eastman perhaps one of the most important figures in the formation of our modern image-based culture.