Sharon McGriff-Payne has spent the past three years of this first decade of the 21st Century mesmerized by African Americans from the 19th Century, especially the insistent voice of John Grider. Grider captured McGriff-Payne's imagination and guided her to mine largely neglected archives to unearth and compile the stories of African Americans in California's North Bay counties of Solano, Napa, and Sonoma from the 1840s through the 1920s.

Grider, a former slave, Bear Flag veteran, and hardworking everyman has inspired McGriff-Payne's research. The indomitable Miss Delilah L. Beasley has also inspired the author. Her 1919 book, The Negro Trail Blazers of California, preserved the names and deeds of many of the North Bay's African American pioneers. John Grider's Century seeks to add those black voices to California's larger historical narrative, with the message, "We were here "

"Tell my story," Grider prompted. McGriff-Payne has attempted to fulfill that command and dedicates this volume to him and the other pioneers who founded schools, formed churches and civic organizations, advocated policy, built businesses, raised families and triumphed over daunting odds.

Award-winning classicist, ancient historian and author Emily Hauser takes readers on an epic journey through the latest archaeological discoveries and DNA secrets of the Aegean Bronze Age, as she uncovers the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece’s greatest legends – and the real heroes of those ancient epics, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Did you ever wonder who the real women behind the myths of the Trojan War were? Because, contrary to perceptions built up over three millennia, ancient history is not all about men – and it's not only men's stories that deserve to be told . . .

In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world’s greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer’s epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women – queens, mothers, warriors, slaves – were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not – until now) remembered them.

A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer’s epics charted entirely by women – from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope – Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologized women of Greece’s greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it.

This is a story of human survival over the last one million years in the Namib Desert – one of the most hostile environments on Earth.

The resilience and ingenuity of desert communities provides a vivid picture of our species’ response to climate change, and ancient strategies to counter ever-present risk. Dusty fragments of stone, pottery and bone tell a history of perpetual transition, of shifting and temporary states of balance.

Namib digs beneath the usual evidence of archaeology to uncover a world of arcane rituals, of travelling rain-makers, and of intricate social networks which maintained vital systems of negotiated access to scarce resources. It covers a million years of human history in the Namib Desert, including the Earlier, Middle and Later Stone Ages, colonial occupation and genocide, to the invasion of the desert by South African troops during World War I.

This is more than a work of scientific research; it is a love-song to the desert and its people.

The work will appeal to history enthusiasts and to a broad audience for information about 'manifest destiny' and the roots of modern California. If a reader's background rests on the general literature there may be many surprises. For example, the initiative to bring Federal peace and a measure of justice to the warring Indians came from Burnett.Burnett was raised in a family with slaves but he was one of the earliest to call for an end to the 'peculiar institution, ' and his Archy decision essentially reversed California's slide to being a de facto slave state

This book is devoted to the analysis of borders of the Aramaean polities and territories during the 10th-8th centuries B.C.E. Specialists dealing with various types of documents (Neo-Assyrian, Aramaic, Phoenician, Neo-Hittite and Hebrew texts), invited by Jan Dusek and Jana Mynarova, addressed the topic of the borders of the Aramaean territories in the context of the history of three geographical areas during the first three centuries of the 1st millennium B.C.E.: northern Mesopotamia and the Assyrian space, northern Levant, and southern Levant. The book is particularly relevant to those interested in the history and historical geography of the Levant during the Iron Age. "Studies directly relevant to ancient Israel and others demonstrating historical geography's limitations make an instructive volume." -Alan Millard, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44.5 (2020)