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Books > History > European history
Migration is a problem of highest importance today, and likewise is
its history. Italian migrants who had to leave the peninsula in the
long sixteenth century because of their heterodox Protestant faith
is a topic that has its deep roots in Italian Renaissance
scholarship since Delio Cantimori: It became a part of a twentieth
century form of Italian leyenda negra in liberal historiography.
But its international dimension and Central Europe (not only
Germany) as destination of that movement has often been neglected.
Three different levels of connectivity are addressed: the
materiality of communication (travel, printing, the diffusion of
books and manuscripts); individual migrants and their biographies
and networks; and the cultural transfers, discourses, and ideas
migrating in one or in both directions.
This is Pompeii, as you've never seen it before.
In this revelatory history, Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the new secrets of Pompeii. Over the last few years, a vast stretch of the city has been excavated for the first time. Now, drawing on these astonishing discoveries, The Buried City reveals the untold human stories that are at last emerging.
Pompeii is a world frozen in time. There are unmade beds, dishes left drying, tools abandoned by workmen, bodies embracing with love and fear. And alongside the remnants of everyday life, there are captivating works of art: lifelike portraits, exquisite frescos and mosaics, and the extraordinary sculpture of a sleeping boy, curled up under a blanket that's too small.
The Buried City reconstructs the catastrophe that destroyed Pompeii on 24 August 79 CE, but it also offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the city as it was before: who lived here, what mattered to them, and what happened in their final hours. It offers us a vivid sense of Pompeii's continuing relevance, and proves that ancient history is much closer to us than we think.
The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism challenges our most basic
assumptions about the history of an ideal at the heart of
modernity. Beginning in antiquity and continuing through to today,
Leigh T.I. Penman examines how European thinkers have understood
words like 'kosmopolites', 'cosmopolite', 'cosmopolitan' and its
cognates. The debates over their meanings show that there has never
been a single, stable cosmopolitan concept, but rather a range of
concepts-sacred and secular, inclusive and exclusive-all described
with the cosmopolitan vocabulary. While most scholarly attention in
the history of cosmopolitanism has focussed on Greek and Roman
antiquity or the Enlightenments of the 18th century, this book
shows that the crucial period in the evolution of modern
cosmopolitanism was early modernity. Between 1500 and 1800
philosophers, theologians, cartographers, jurists, politicians,
alchemists and heretics all used this vocabulary, shedding ancient
associations, and adding new ones at will. The chaos of discourses
prompted thinkers to reflect on the nature of the cosmopolitan
ideal, and to conceive of an abstract 'cosmopolitanism' for the
first time. This meticulously researched book provides the first
intellectual history of an overlooked period in the evolution of a
core ideal. As such, The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism is an
essential work for anyone seeking a contextualised understanding of
cosmopolitanism today.
In the wake of the 1688 revolution, England's transition to
financial capitalism accelerated dramatically. Londoners witnessed
the rise of credit-based currencies, securities markets,
speculative bubbles, insurance schemes, and lotteries. Many
understood these phenomena in terms shaped by their experience with
another risky venture at the heart of London life: the public
theater. Speculative Enterprise traces the links these observers
drew between the operations of Drury Lane and Exchange Alley,
including their hypercommercialism, dependence on collective
opinion, and accessibility to people of different classes and
genders.Mattie Burkert identifies a discursive ""theater-finance
nexus"" at work in plays by Colley Cibber, Richard Steele, and
Susanna Centlivre as well as in the vibrant eighteenth-century
media landscape. As Burkert demonstrates, the stock market and the
entertainment industry were recognized as deeply interconnected
institutions that, when considered together, illuminated the nature
of the public more broadly and gave rise to new modes of publicity
and resistance. In telling this story, Speculative Enterprise
combines methods from literary studies, theater and performance
history, media theory, and work on print and material culture to
provide a fresh understanding of the centrality of theater to
public life in eighteenth-century London.
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