With the precision of a naturalist and the curiosity of a proto-archaeologist, Jeffries Wyman documents the ancient shell-heaps of coastal New England, revealing layered histories of diet, habitation, and human presence long before European contact. The work is as much an anatomical catalog as it is a quiet challenge to the prevailing myths of a blank American past.

In lush, almost mournful detail, Richard Davey reconstructs the ancestral landscape of Lady Jane Grey, where Tudor architecture, dynastic intrigue, and the melancholic ruin of Bradgate Park converge into a portrait of England at its most tragic and picturesque. Beneath the ivy and heraldry lies a meditation on inheritance, fate, and the haunted weight of noble blood.

A fevered tapestry of imperial Rome at its most lavishly unhinged, The Extravagances of the Emperor Elagabalus reads like Suetonius rewritten by Huysmans, exalting in perfumed orgies, edible gold, and theatrical cruelty, all filtered through a strangely sympathetic lens. In J. Stuart Hay’s hands, the boy-emperor becomes both monstrous and magnetic: a vision of youth, decadence, and doomed grandeur that is as unsettling as it is seductively absurd.

A shape-shifting virtuoso of invention and deceit, the so-called German Princess dazzled Restoration England with her improbable lineage, theatrical grifts, and inexhaustible appetite for reinvention. What emerges is less a criminal biography than a carnivalesque satire of gender, class, and credulity, where performance itself becomes the most profitable profession.

Combining clinical detachment with a flair for high tragedy, MacLaurin reexamines Anne Boleyn’s fall not as a political convenience or religious melodrama, but as a case study in hysteria, sexual pathology, and royal syphilis. The result is part forensic reconstruction, part moral autopsy, where Tudor history is scalpelled open to reveal something closer to Greek theater than constitutional crisis.

What begins as a record of courtroom defense becomes, in Mary Stuart’s own words, a final act of sovereign self-fashioning—at once wounded, regal, and devastatingly lucid. These addresses, drawn from the last days of her long captivity, reveal not only the makings of a martyr but the rhetorical precision of a woman who understood the stage upon which she was condemned to die.

With florid admiration and a touch of disbelief, Terhune paints Ninon de l’Enclos as both libertine and philosopher—an ageless enchantress who outlived her lovers, defied convention, and seduced an entire intellectual century. In his telling, she is less a woman than a paradox: virtuous in wit, notorious in reputation, and ever the sovereign of her own myth.

In prose as brisk and unnerving as the institution it exposes, Nellie Bly’s undercover account of life inside Blackwell’s Island asylum remains a landmark of journalistic bravery and feminist indictment. What emerges is not merely a portrait of cruelty, but a razor-sharp study of how poverty, language, and nonconformity were mistaken, often willfully, for madness.

In a breathless catalogue of geological might and national pride, Bombaugh’s “Our Wonderlands” stages a rhetorical duel between the natural marvels of Europe and the sublimities of the American West, where scale, spectacle, and patriotic conviction collide. What results is less a travel essay than a florid act of terrestrial boasting—part gazetteer, part hymn, and unmistakably a product of its imperial century.

An eccentric omnibus of sacred marvels and architectural oddities, Platts’s chapter leaps from Scottish battlements to Spanish palaces, Swiss hermitages, and Chinese fortifications with the gleeful conviction that wonder alone is evidence enough. Less concerned with chronology than spectacle, it captures the 19th-century impulse to collect the world’s grandeur like postcards.

Told in prose equal parts gossip sheet and tragic oratorio, Orr’s portrait of Marie Antoinette and Count Fersen is less a historical account than a romantic fever dream, where doomed grandeur, political inertia, and forbidden devotion converge in a Versailles already teetering toward ruin.

In this richly layered account, Breen traces the psychoactive journeys of 17th-century English merchants and natural philosophers as they encounter cannabis in South Asia, not as a colonial commodity, but as a marvel both alluring and epistemologically unruly. Through Bowrey’s hallucinatory experiments and Hooke’s stilted lectures, we glimpse an early modern world where science, intoxication, and empire all struggled to contain the “occult” logic of the plant.

In this densely embroidered chronicle of midwinter rites, Charles Hardwick traces the roots of Yuletide and New Year custom, from wassail bowls and yule logs to pantomimes and prophetic mists, revealing a layered tapestry where Christian celebration interweaves with pagan fire-worship and Victorian social aspiration.

Clement A. Miles moves fluently between wassail bowls and boar-shaped loaves, herring salads and sacrificial cats, assembling a vivid ethnography of European Christmases where feasting and folk play linger as half-forgotten rites. At once meticulous and mythopoeic, he invites us to taste the sacred in the sugared, and to see in roast pigs and honeyed wafers the ghost of gods once fed.

Alice Morse Earle paints an intricate panorama of early American subsistence, where the woods teemed with deer and turkeys, the seas with cod and lobsters, and the air with the thunder of wildfowl wings. Her chapter on “Food From Forest and Sea” is less a quaint pastoral than a vivid account of ecological abundance, frontier ingenuity, and the uneasy edge between reverence and exploitation.

This work traces the towering figure of collective revolt from Erasmus Darwin’s sleeping giant to Mary Shelley’s electrified monster, assembling a visual and literary genealogy in which revolution, like Frankenstein’s creature, is both miraculous and horrifying. Through poetry, caricature, and political myth, the essay maps how revolutionary embodiment shifts, from sublime symbol to grotesque cautionary tale.

Crabb examines how mass printing and popular paranoia fused in early modern England to produce the enduring image of the witch as crone: a figure born not just from theology or law, but from ink, wood, and gossip. As cheap pamphlets and reused woodcuts spread tales of scandal, sorcery, and satanic mischief, a visual archetype emerged.

Ruth Edna Kelley traces the global echoes of All Hallows' Eve, from the ghost-lit canals of Japan to the flower-strewn graves of Italy, Spain, and Germany. With lore of djinns, dragon gods, mourning bells, and straw boats for spirits, this chapter reveals how cultures across continents mark the season of the dead with reverence, poetry, and enduring superstition.

In Italy on the night of All Souls', the spirits of the dead are thought to be abroad. In Naples the skeletons in the funeral vaults are dressed up, and the place visited on All Souls' Day. In Salerno before the people go to the all-night service at church they set out a banquet for the dead. If any food is left in the morning, evil is in store for the house.

In this bold and unflinching profile, Alfred Payson Terhune paints George Sand as a tempest of intellect, scandal, and unapologetic desire, “the world’s most prolific woman writer” and one of its most notorious lovers. With caustic wit and theatrical flair, he traces Sand’s trail of broken hearts and literary triumphs, from her cigar-smoking salon days to her ruinous romance with Chopin.