Awesome Aristocratic Album and Music Offers

The Millionaires' Unit is the story of a gilded generation of young men from the zenith of privilege: a Rockefeller, a Taft, and several who counted friends and relatives among presidents and statesmen of the day. Driven by the belief that their membership in the American elite required certain sacrifices, they were determined to be first into the conflict, leading the way ahead of America's declaration that it would join the Great War in Europe.

At the heart of the group was the Yale flying club. They would share rivalries over girlfriends, jealousies over membership in Skull & Bones, and fierce ambition to be the most daring young man over the battlefields of France. The members of the Millionaires' Unit shared a stirring, romantic adventure--putting their lives on the line because they believed in the cause and in the idea that it was their duty to do so..
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The Titled Americans is a family saga spanning three generations, chronicling the glamorous lives of Leonard Jerome, his daughters, and their children Raven-haired Jennie ("the beautiful') married Randolph Churchill, younger son of the Duke of Marlborough and was Winston's mother. Dreamy, blonde Clara ("the good") was romanced by the dashing Moreton Frewen, a penniless younger son who unsuccessfully but relentlessly tried to parlay his immense charm into a fortune even though, one after the other, all his speculations failed, while quiet Leonie ("the witty") married into the Leslies, a distinguished Irish family who were disappointed by their son's bride. Although full of princely lovers, balls, and diamond broaches, the story's heart is the intensely supportive and laughter-filled relationship between the sisters. Waves of grave financial hardship afflicted them all, but they always rallied to rescue one another. Beginning in 1840s America and ending in the middle of World War II when Britain was under the leadership of Jennie's son, Winston Churchill, The Titled Americans is an epic story of family and fortune encompassing both the apogee and the twilight of the British Empire..
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"The Magnificent Ambersons" is a 1918 novel by Booth Tarkington which won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. The novel and trilogy traces the growth of the United States through the declining fortunes of three generations of the aristocratic Amberson family in a fictional Mid-Western town, between the end of the Civil War and the early part of the 20th century, a period of rapid industrialization and socio-economic change in America. The decline of the Ambersons is contrasted with the rising fortunes of industrial tycoons and other new-money families, which did not derive power from family names but by "doing things". As George Amberson's friend says, "don't you think being things is 'rahthuh bettuh' than doing things?".
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In this groundbreaking work, social anthropologist David Sneath aggressively dispels the myths surrounding the history of steppe societies and proposes a new understanding of the nature and formation of the state. Since the colonial era, representations of Inner Asia have been dominated by images of fierce nomads organized into clans and tribes-but as Sneath reveals, these representations have no sound basis in historical fact. Rather, they are the product of nineteenth-century evolutionist social theory, which saw kinship as the organizing principle in a nonstate society.

Sneath argues that aristocratic power and statelike processes of administration were the true organizers of life on the steppe. Rethinking the traditional dichotomy between state and nonstate societies, Sneath conceives of a "headless state" in which a configuration of statelike power was formed by the horizontal relations among power holders and was reproduced with or without an overarching ruler or central "head." In other words, almost all of the operations of state power existed at the local level, virtually independent of central bureaucratic authority.

Sneath's research gives rise to an alternative picture of steppe life in which aristocrats determined the size, scale, and degree of centralization of political power. His history of the region shows no clear distinction between a highly centralized, stratified "state" society and an egalitarian, kin-based "tribal" society. Drawing on his extensive anthropological fieldwork in the region, Sneath persuasively challenges the legitimacy of the tribal model, which continues to distort scholarship on the history of Inner Asia.

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"The Age of Innocence" (1920) is a novel by Edith Wharton, which won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize. The story occurs among New York City's upper class in the 1870s, before electricity, telephone, and automobiles; when there was a small cluster of old, "aristocratic" Revolutionary War-stock families who ruled New York's social life; when being was better than doing; when occupation and abilities were secondary to blood connections (heredity and family); when reputation and appearances excluded everything and everyone not of one's caste; and when Fifth Avenue was so deserted by nightfall that it was possible to follow Society's comings and goings, by spying who went to what house..
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Since the work of Butterfield and Namier in the 1930s, it has commonly been said that eighteenth-century England appears atomised, left with no overall interpretation. Subsequent work on religious differences and on party strife served to reinforce the image of a divided society, and in the last ten years historians of the poor and unprivileged have suggested that beneath the surface lurked substantial popular discontent. Professor Cannon uses his 1982 Wiles Lecture to offer a different interpretation - that the widespread acceptance of aristocratic values and aristocratic leadership gave a remarkable intellectual, political and social coherence to the century. He traces the recovery made by the aristocracy from its decade in 1649 when the House of Lords was abolished as useless and dangerous. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the peerage re-established its hold on government and society. Professor Cannon is forced to challenge some of the most cherished beliefs of English historiography - that Hanoverian society, at its top level, was an open elite, continually replenished by vigorous recruits from other groups and classes. He suggests that, on the contrary, in some respects the English peerage was more exclusive than many of its continental counterparts and that the openness was a myth which itself served a potent political purpose. Of the prospering burgeoisie, he argues that the remarkable thing was not their assertiveness but their long acquiescence in patrician rule, and he poses the paradox of a country increasingly dominated by a landed aristocracy giving birth to the first industrial revolution. His final chapter discusses the ideological under-pinning which made aristocratic supremacy acceptable for so long, and the emergence of those forces and ideals which were ultimately to replace it..
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