Alan Dyer – författare

Fourth revised and expanded edition of the illustrated manual that has been the standard field guide for amateur astronomers for nearly thirty years.

This comprehensive edition makes available two of the most important sources for population studies in the early modern period. The bishops' returns of 1563 and 1603 represent the earliest census-type information that has survived in England and Wales. The 1563 returns, surviving from twelve dioceses, record the number of households; the 1603 documents, from nine dioceses, were intended to survey religious nonconformity and estimate the number of communicants in each parish. A full introductory essay explores the origins of both surveys, and illustrates their significance for local and demographic historians, and those concerned with social and economic history, government and the church.

Famed for his novels of the American frontier (notably the Leatherstocking Tales) and of the sea, and also the author of a large body of social and political writings, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) received mixed reviews from his contemporaries, who generally enjoyed the adventure tales but abhored his social preachings. His posthumous reputation has fluctuated widely. Savagely trashed by, among others, Mark Twain in 1895 for his literary offenses, Cooper was resurrected in 1931 by critic Robert E. Spiller, who viewed him as a profound social critic. By the mid-twentieth century, Cooper was widely praised as a pioneer in the development of the American social and political novel, though his literary qualities remained subject to attack in some quarters. Cooper has continued to be studied from myriad points of views and critical stances both as a writer and as a critic.The immense body of criticism has been carefully channeled in this annotated bibliography of 1,943 reviews, journal articles, newspaper articles and editorials, dissertations, and books. The material is organized in chapters by broad subject category--Bibliography, Biography, General Studies, Frontier and Indian Novels, Literature of the Sea, Social and Political Writings, and Miscellaneous Publications; where appropriate the chapters are subdivided according to individual Cooper publications, with further divisions relatings to materials written before and after Cooper's death. This arrangement, together with a fascinating introductory survey of his critical reception and full author, and editor, and subject indexes, allows the researcher to trace the various topics and themes that have occupied a who's who of literary, intellectual, and social critics from 1820 to the present.

Although historians have always studied towns, widespread interest in urban history as a specialised historical field is relatively recent. This fashion has stimulated the development of a major controversy about the fortunes of towns in England between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some see them as prone to crisis and frequently subject to decay, while others have held that many of them prospered in these centuries. This book guides the reader through the controversy, summarises the opposing arguments, and adds new insights derived from the author's own research. Alan Dyer argues that the problem lay in the rise and decline of regional economies rather than the rise and decline of the towns which lay in those regions. An extensive bibliography with notes helps the reader to come to his or her own conclusions.