Tag Archives: History

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Ramayana Unravelled: Lesser Known Facets of Rishi Vālmiki’s Epic – Ami Ganatra

No epic has moved the consciousness of millions like the Ramayana. The appeal of the story of Rama is such that it has inspired the imagination of countless storytellers over the centuries, across the length and breadth of the subcontinent. From Jain poets to Bhavabhuti, from Kamban to Goswami Tulsidas, many have retold the Ramayana in their own language, infusing their own unique flavour.

Though the story of Rama is much loved and well-known, questions prevail. Ramayana Unravelled attempts to address some key concerns: How did his childhood and youth shape Rama? Why did Rama agree to go on vanvas – was it only to obey his father or was there more to it? How was the relationship of Rama and Seeta? Is the Ramayana inherently misogynist, considering the characterisation of Seeta, Shurpanakha, Kaikeyi and Tara? What led to the downfall of Ravan?

Ami Ganatra takes the reader through the events of the Ramayana, resolving conundrums and underlining the reasons the epic continues to be cherished to this day.
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The Mughal Throne – Abraham Eraly

A history of the great Mughal rulers of India, one of the world’s greatest empires.

In December 1525 Babur, the great grandson of the Mongol conqueror Tamberlaine, crossed the Indus river into the Punjab with a modest army and some cannon. At the battle of Panipat five months later he routed the mammoth army of the Afghan ruler of Hindustan. Mughal rule in India had begun. It was to continue for over three centuries, shaping India for all time.

Full of dramatic episodes and colourful detail, THE MUGHAL EMPIRE tells the story of one of the world’s great empires.

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Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women – Vanda Krefft

A fun and fascinating social history of the famed Katharine Gibbs School, which from the 1910s to the 1960s, trained women for executive secretary positions but surreptitiously was instilling the self-confidence and strategic know-how necessary for them to claim equality, power, and authority in the wider world.

It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 120 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool to assume positions of power on the other side of the desk. And Gibbs graduates did just that, paving the way for 21st-century women to succeed in any profession they choose.

Katharine Gibbs was one her own success stories. She started her school when, as a 46-year-old widow, she was left near-broke with two young sons. The school taught typing and stenography but Gibbs also hired accomplished professors from elite colleges to teach academic subjects—it was a well-rounded education that produced early feminists ready to tackle the sexism of their era. “Expect great things!” was her motto and her philosophy. Within a decade she’d opened schools in three elegant locations. With nostalgic period photographs throughout, Expect Great Things! takes us back to Katie Gibbs’s life and tells the stories of the women she influenced. We meet Gibbs graduates who worked for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe. Others forged pathfinding roles as an Emmy-winning television star, a women’s rights advisor to four U.S. presidents, a writer of Wonder Woman comic books, the head of the Women’s Marines, a best-selling young adult author, and a U.S. Ambassador.

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I Seek a Kind Person: My Father, Seven Children and the Adverts that Helped Them Escape the Holocaust – Julian Borger

In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out adverts offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death. Eighty-three years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the advert that saved his father, Robert, from the Nazis. Robert had kept this a secret, like almost everything else about his traumatic Viennese childhood, until he took his own life.

Drawn to the shadows of his family’s past and starting with nothing but a page of newspaper adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families, each thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, the deep forests and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, Borger unearths the astonishing journeys of the children at the hands of fate, their stories of trauma and the kindness of strangers.

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Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen – Hallie Rubenhold

This is the story of a murder, not a murderer . . .

In Story of a Murder, bestselling author of The Five and celebrated historian Hallie Rubenhold reexamines the events leading up to the infamous Crippen murder from the perspectives of the three women at the center of it all.

When Belle Elmore’s remains were discovered in the basement of London’s 39 Hilldrop Crescent in July 1910, the larger-than-life vaudevillian performer was launched into stardom she never achieved on the stage.

Story of a Murder provides an intricately plotted, intimate look into the lives of three multifaceted women living during a time of electric progress and stifling Crippen’s first wife, Charlotte, who died under mysterious circumstances; his mistress, Ethel, who claimed ignorance of his crime even as she escaped with Crippen disguised as his son; and Belle, the woman whose life Crippen took.

Throughout the twentieth century, the infamous Crippen murder was told in such a way as to cast doubt on Crippen’s guilt and to victim-blame his wife Cora for her own murder. It also astonishingly depicted Crippen’s younger mistress, Ethel, as innocent of any involvement in the killing of her love rival.

But new evidence unearthed by Rubenhold completely subverts this famous history, unravelling assumptions about the crime and deconstructing Edwardian beliefs about women, class aspiration, and the transatlantic world, ultimately proving that Charlotte, Belle, and Ethel were so much more than the passive victims history has portrayed them as.