Mostrando resultados por autor "ALANA SANCHEZ" en Todas las categorías

Founded in New York in 1875, the Theosophical Society emerged at a moment of profound intellectual upheaval. Science was challenging scripture, empire was reshaping cultures, and modernity was unsettling inherited certainties. Into this fractured world stepped a movement that claimed to reconcile evolution with spiritual law, religion with reason, and East with West. In The Theosophical Society, Alana Sanchez offers a meticulously researched historical study of one of the most influential—and controversial—spiritual movements of the modern age. Moving beyond caricature and ...

In late-Victorian London, infant death was common enough to pass without question—especially when the child had never been fully recorded as living. Claymore House examines one such arrangement that operated in plain sight. Women seeking discretion paid to give birth and surrender their infants, trusting that the children would be placed elsewhere. Instead, many disappeared. When the practice finally became visible, it did so not through moral reform but through repetition that could no longer be ignored. Drawing solely on court records, inquests, and co

An unflinching examination of trust inside the private household. In the early nineteenth century, Anna Margaretha Zwanziger moved quietly through respectable homes in the German states, working as a housekeeper in a world that relied on discretion, obedience, and trust. When illness and death followed her presence, private fear became public reckoning. The Woman in Service traces Zwanziger’s life from childhood and guardianship through marriage, widowhood, and domestic labour, placing her actions within the fragile systems that shaped women’s lives and work. Rather than ...

Before she became a legend, she was a woman who learned how power looked — and how to wear it. Remembered across the Russian Empire as Sonya Golden Hand, Sofia Ivanovna Blyuvshteyn has long been immortalised as thief, impostor, society woman, escape artist, and criminal queen. In popular memory she glides through hotels, railway carriages, and jewellers’ shops in silks and diamonds, dazzling the wealthy before vanishing with their valuables. But behind the glittering myth stood a far more complex and dangerous woman. Queen of Thieves, strips away the easy romance of criminal legend to ...

In nineteenth-century Edinburgh, bodies disappeared from the city’s poorest streets and reappeared on the dissection tables of its medical schools. History remembers the men who supplied them. This book tells a different story. The Silent Partner examines the Burke and Hare murders through the life and trial of Helen McDougal, the woman who lived inside the household where the killings occurred and who survived when the law demanded a single villain. Acquitted with the verdict Not Proven, McDougal was released into a city that no longer distinguished between suspicion and guilt. Drawing ...

A nun who fled enclosure. A soldier who crossed oceans. A case that forced power to decide. Born in early seventeenth-century Spain and raised within convent walls, Catalina de Erauso escaped a life of enclosure and moved through the Spanish Empire under a male identity. She worked, travelled, fought, and survived in worlds governed by violence, honour, and rigid social control—until repeated conflict and custody brought her life under institutional scrutiny. The Lieutenant Nun reconstructs Catalina’s life as a historical case, following the points where private survival collided with ...

In 1895, Bridget Cleary was killed by those closest to her. Convicted she had been taken by fairies and replaced by a changeling, her death has long been misremembered as folklore. In truth, it was the result of sustained domestic violence, collective belief, and a legal system that failed to protect her. Drawing on contemporary trial records, newspaper accounts, and social history, The Burning of Bridget Cleary strips away myth to examine how power, belief, and authority converged to erase a woman who resisted submission. This is not a story about superstition. It is a true-crime ...

She called herself a countess. Europe believed her. In the grand hotels of the Belle Époque, a woman known as the Comtesse de Monteil drifted through the Riviera’s glittering corridors—charming the elite, earning their trust, and leaving behind empty jewel cases and unanswered questions. Police traced her across Brussels, London, Nice, and beyond, but her disguise held until one night in 1908, when she was finally caught in the act. The Comtesse of Crime is a glam-noir true crime story of deception, luxury, and the dangerous power of belonging—told through verified contemporary ...

Paris. The late reign of Louis XIV. A death that should have been ordinary. On 31 July 1672, a man is found dead in his Paris rooms—and an inventory opens a locked cassette that should never have been opened. Inside: “diverse vials” and nine letters linked to Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers. In the official account, those letters point to an unthinkable claim: that a noblewoman poisoned her own father (1666) and two brothers (1670). And the vials? “Virulent poisons” said to leave little trace—perfect for a world where illness already looked like death. What ...

When Care Decides is a meticulously researched true-crime narrative that examines how trust, authority, and institutional silence enabled one of history’s most disturbing medical crimes. Through the life of Jane Toppan, a nurse who killed her patients while acting in the name of care, this book exposes the systems that failed to see — and the quiet decisions that proved fatal. Written with restraint and insight, When Care Decides is not a story about madness, but about what happens when care is given the power to choose.

In December 1786, a small Connecticut town gathered behind its meeting house to witness a hanging. The condemned was Hannah Ocuish, twelve years old. Told through the surviving record—especially the execution sermon printed on the day she died— Hannah: The Condemned Child traces the case from a summer morning on the road outside New London to the courtroom, the gaol, the pulpit, and the scaffold. It asks how fear hardens into certainty, how a child’s words are filtered through adult authority, and how print can turn a girl into an “example” for generations to come. Written in a ...

In the 1840s, the workhouse was the centre of Britain’s response to poverty. This book tells the story of one such institution — Southwell Workhouse — during a single Victorian decade, when the New Poor Law was working exactly as intended. Based entirely on contemporary records, this is not a novel and not a work of fiction. It reconstructs daily life inside the workhouse through its own rules, registers, and reports: admission, classification, routine, labour, diet, punishment, illness, authority, and exit. Families were separated, work was enforced, hunger was regulated, and decline...

House of Bourbon is a sweeping, factual narrative of the dynasty that helped shape modern Europe. From Henry IV’s hard-won settlement after the French Wars of Religion to Louis XIV’s Versailles state, from the fall of Louis XVI and the fate of Marie Antoinette and Marie Thérèse Charlotte to the Bourbon transformation of Spain, this book traces how power is claimed, defended, and reinvented across centuries. Moving between Paris and Madrid, revolution and restoration, constitution and dictatorship, it follows the Bourbons as a living case study in legitimacy: how rulers win obedience, ...

They were only children. In 1917, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths produced photographs that appeared to show fairies at Cottingley Beck. The images were declared genuine, published worldwide, and championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Years later, the truth emerged. The Fairy Case examines the photographs, the experts, the silence, and the human need that turned five simple plates into proof.

Darling thought the curse that once claimed her had been broken. She was wrong. Pregnant and newly married, Darling begins to still again — not as a relapse, but as an evolution. As her body slows, the world around her adapts. Mannequins move when necessary. Silence becomes communication. Protection becomes instinct. As external pressure closes in and the past resurfaces, Darling, her husband John, their friend Ben, and the creations she brought into the world must act as a single system — not driven by fear, but by care. Inheritance of Stillness is a quiet, unsettling novel about love ...

In the early twentieth century, Linda Burfield Hazzard claimed she could cure disease through fasting. Patients came to her retreat seeking health, discipline, and certainty. Many left dangerously weakened. Some did not leave at all. The Woman with the Cure examines the rise and fall of Hazzard and her infamous sanitarium, known as Starvation Heights. Through careful historical analysis, this book traces how authority, belief, and isolation combined to turn care into coercion — and why intervention came too late. A sober work of historical true crime, this is not a story of spectacle, but...

Florence Cook was a teenager when her name became evidence. In Victorian England, séances promised proof of life after death. Cabinets were built, conditions negotiated, and belief tested under dim light. At the centre of one of the era’s most disputed cases stood Florence Cook, a young medium whose performances drew the attention of scientist William Crookes—and ignited a controversy that would never fully close. This book examines the Florence Cook case as historical true crime: not as ghost story, and not as spectacle, but as an investigation into procedure, reputation, power, and ...

London, 1886. A husband dies in a rented room in Pimlico. Chloroform is found in his stomach. Adelaide Bartlett was accused of murdering her husband, Thomas Edwin Bartlett, in one of the most perplexing poison cases of the Victorian era. The medical evidence revealed a lethal quantity of chloroform — yet no clear explanation of how it had been administered. At the Old Bailey, expert witnesses clashed. The marriage was dissected. A minister’s involvement deepened suspicion. But suspicion is not proof. Acquitted in April 1886, Adelaide Bartlett walked free. The question of how chloroform ...

In early nineteenth-century Leeds, fear was common and answers were scarce. Mary Bateman sold both. Branded the “Yorkshire Witch”, she promised cures and protection, drawing desperate families into rituals, payments, and obedience. Then a woman died — and the story turned from superstition to murder. The Yorkshire Witch: The Mary Bateman Case is a chronological account grounded in the historical record, separating provable fact from legend while restoring the victims to the centre of the narrative. A true-crime manuscript of fraud, belief, and poison hidden in the domestic world.

Seven Victorian cases. Seven women. One court that turned private life into public evidence. Women of the Old Bailey follows a nurse in the sickroom, a servant inside the house, a respectable wife under scrutiny, a sensational defendant made into warning, a poisoner explained through obsession, a baby-farmer in a hidden economy of shame, and a household where cruelty was made routine. Drawn from the Old Bailey record, this narrative history traces how the Victorian courtroom judged women—by class, by respectability, by domestic role—long before any verdict was spoken.