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Body Love
The Amazing Career of Bernarr Macfadden
William R. Hunt
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989

Bernarr Macfadden (1868–1955) entertained and instructed Americans for decades. He championed physical exercise, fasting, and diet reform and was the relentless scourge of established doctors. He presented his views in Physical Culture, a popular magazine featuring photographs of strong men and healthy women and articles promoting the healthy life. While some critics derided him as a health nut, no one could dispute his genius as a magazine publisher. He established the world’s greatest magazine publishing empire through the innovation of such popular publications as True Story, the first confession magazine; True Detective; and many others.

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Front-Page Detective
William J. Burns and the Detective Profession, 1880–1930
William R. Hunt
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990
William J. Burns (1880-1930) was the immediate succor of J. Edgar Hoover at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had taken the director's job when Warren Harding was elected and appointed Burns' friend, Harry Daugherty, as Attorney General. Both Daugherty and Burns misused their offices and were forced to resign.
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North of 53°
The Wild Days of the Alaska-Yukon Mining Frontier, 1870-1914
William R. Hunt
University of Alaska Press, 2009

“Saints and sinners, whores and housewives, swindlers and laborers alike attempted a hasty adjustment to novel conditions in a land that seemed strange and forbidding,” writes William R. Hunt in his narrative history of Alaska mining. Hunt offers an exciting anecdotal account that follows hungry prospectors, canny shopkeepers, hopeful hangers-on, and crafty lawyers through the gold mining camps and temporary towns of nineteenth-century Alaska. Hunt has hiked and mined many of the same claims he writes about in the book, and North of 53 offers a rare glimpse into far-flung communities from Skagway to the Yukon to the deep interior of Alaska to the Ididarod and Nome on the Bering Sea.

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The Puritan Moment
The Coming of Revolution in an English County
William Hunt
Harvard University Press, 1983

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The Puritan Moment
The Coming of Revolution in an English County
William Hunt
Harvard University Press

Contemporaries regarded rich, strategic Essex County, located northeast of London, as the “first born of Parliament,” the area from which the rebellious Parliament drew its most decisive support in the Civil War of 1642. Any consideration of the English Civil War can profit from a long look at Essex, which encapsulated so many of the forces that lead to war. William Hunt's analysis of demographic and economic change in this region provides a comprehensive picture of day-to-day life, population growth, the commercialization of agriculture, and the class of men and women rendered socially marginal as a result.

To account for the radicalism of Essex, however, Hunt looks beyond the details of socioeconomic discontent and finds a cultural validation for rebellion in Puritanism. This broad cultural explanation of the factors leading to war provides a fresh interpretation of the Puritan Revolution. The Puritans' desire to impose a strict moral code upon society as a whole, accompanied by an aggressive, imperialistic concept of England's national destiny, eventually came into conflict with national policy and resulted in open rebellion against the Crown.

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Southern Gardens, Southern Gardening
William Lanier Hunt
Duke University Press, 1992
Originally published in 1982, this bestselling collection of gardening writing by William Lanier Hunt--one of the South’s leading gardening writers and horticulturalists--is now available for the first time in paperback. Arranged by months of the year, Southern Gardens, Southern Gardening is filled with useful, commensense instruction, as well as the wisdom and art of gardening.
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