Margaret Crawford – författare

This book traces the history of food and famine in Ireland from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. It looks at what people ate and drank, and how this changed over time. The authors explore the economic and social forces which lay behind these changes as well as the more personal motives of taste, preference, and acceptability. They analyze the reasons why the potato became a major component of the diet for so many people during the eighteenth century as well as the diets of the middling and upper classes. This is not, however, simply a social history of food but it is a nutritional one as well, and the authors go on to explore the connection between eating, health, and disease. They look at the relationship between the supply of food and the growth of the population and then finally, and unavoidably in any history of the Irish and food, the issue of famine, examining first its likelihood and then its dreadful reality when it actually occurred.

Since the "Opening Up" period of 1978-80, China has urbanized with unprecedented speed. The construction of completely new cities and the dramatic redevelopment of existing urban centers have completely transformed the Chinese landscape. This urban revolution has generated an astonishing number and size of cities, undertaken with little thought for environmental and social consequences. Scholars striving to understand and analyze these remarkable and often contradictory urban phenomena have contributed to a large English language literature in multiple disciplines (geography, sociology, political science, urban planning, architecture, anthropology, and history). Since 1980, this literature has evolved alongside changes in the Chinese city, charting alterations in central government policies, municipal decision-making, and development practices along with their spatial outcomes. A key issue has been obsolescence. Keeping up with these transformations requires continuous research and revision, producing a literature rich in detailed studies of specific cities and regions but with few comprehensive works. Thus, the collection format is ideally suited for this body of scholarly research. This collection, organized chronologically and thematically, will allow students, professors and scholars easy access to key works on Chinese urbanization covering a range of topics across three decades of research. This will clarify the shifting and often confusing terrain of urban scholarship on China. We will survey leading authorities in the field to identify the most significant and relevant contributions to the scholarly literature.

This innovative and absorbing book surveys a little known chapter in the story of American urbanism-the history of communities built and owned by single companies seeking to bring their workers' homes and place of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers' efforts to control and direct these forces.