Iranian history has long been a source of fascination for European and American observers. The country's ancient past preoccupied nineteenth-century historians and archaeologists as they attempted to construct a unified understanding of the ancient world. Iran's medieval history has likewise preoccupied scholars who have long recognized the Iranian plateau as a cultural crossroad of the world's great civilizations. In more recent times, Iran has continued to demand the attention of observers when, for example, the revolution of 1978-79 dramatically burst onto the world stage, or more recently, when the Iranian democracy movement has come to once again challenge the status quo of the clerical regime. Iran's dominance in the Middle East has brought it into conflict with the United States and so it is the subject of almost daily coverage from reporters. Sympathetic observers of Iran-students, scholars, policy makers, journalists, and the educated public-tend to be perplexed and confused by this tangled web of historical development. Iran, as it appears to most observers, is a foreboding, menacing, and far away land with a history that is simply too difficult to fathom.
The Handbook is a guide to Iran's complex history. The book emphasizes the large-scale continuities of Iranian history while also describing the important patterns of transformation that have characterized Iran's past. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific epoch of Iranian history and surveys the general political, social, cultural, and economic issues of that era. The ancient period begins with chapters considering the anthropological evidence of the prehistoric era, through to the early settled civilizations of the Iranian plateau, and continuing to the rise of the ancient Persian empires. The medieval section first considers the Arab-Muslim conquest of the seventh century, and then moves on to discuss the growing Turkish influence filtering in from Central Asia beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The last third of the book covers Iran in the modern era by considering the rise of the Safavid state and its accompanying policy of centralization and the introduction of Shi'ism, followed by essays on the problems of reform and modernization in the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, and finally with a chapter on the revolution of 1978-79 and its aftermath.
The book is a collaborative exercise among scholars specializing in a variety of sub-fields, and across a number of disciplines, including history, art history, classics, literature, politics, and linguistics. Here, readers can find a reliable and accessible narrative that can serve as an introduction to the field of Iranian studies. While the number of monographs published within specialized subfields of Iranian history continues to proliferate, there have been, to date, no books that attempt to produce a comprehensive single-volume history of Iranian civilization.

This Handbook explores the history of mathematics under a series of themes which raise new questions about what mathematics has been and what it has meant to practice it. It addresses questions of who creates mathematics, who uses it, and how. A broader understanding of mathematical practitioners naturally leads to a new appreciation of what counts as a historical source. Material and oral evidence is drawn upon as well as an unusual array of textual sources. Further, the ways in which people have chosen to express themselves are as historically meaningful as the contents of the mathematics they have produced. Mathematics is not a fixed and unchanging entity. New questions, contexts, and applications all influence what counts as productive ways of thinking. Because the history of mathematics should interact constructively with other ways of studying the past, the contributors to this book come from a diverse range of intellectual backgrounds in anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and literature, as well as history of mathematics more traditionally understood.
The thirty-six self-contained, multifaceted chapters, each written by a specialist, are arranged under three main headings: 'Geographies and Cultures', 'Peoples and Practices', and 'Interactions and Interpretations'. Together they deal with the mathematics of 5000 years, but without privileging the past three centuries, and an impressive range of periods and places with many points of cross-reference between chapters. The key mathematical cultures of North America, Europe, the Middle East, India, and China are all represented here as well as areas which are not often treated in mainstream history of mathematics, such as Russia, the Balkans, Vietnam, and South America. This Handbook will be a vital reference for graduates and researchers in mathematics, historians of science, and general historians.

a In late 2019 early 2020 word was coming out of Wuhan, China of a highly infectious virus being detected in the population, which sparked concern for what was about to become a global pandemic. Meanwhile in typically British fashion the general public started stockpiling pasta and toilet rollsa |why I have no idea! But it did prompt me to pick up my drawing pencil and sketch the first Corona cartoon of 2 dinosaurs stockpiling loo rolls while the meteorite plummeted to earth! Since that first toon I have drawn (and am still drawing) an account of a |.all the stupidity, heroics, tragedy, political and medical successes and failures, and the ludicrous nature, at times, of the human conditiona |..and a |.era |.Trump and Boris! A diary, a record, a chronicle, if you like, of what we all went through on our continuing quest to defeat the virus and get back to relative normalitya |a |with shelves full of pasta and toilet rolla |. Sometimes brutal sometimes thought provoking but, I hope, always amusing this is a book to keep and look back ona |. and perhaps to let your children and grandchildren read as one persona s view of life in the times of Covid. It was my way of keeping myself sane and as it turned out it helped many of my friends who in turn supported the daily Facebook toons. Read a The Corona Chroniclesa and think of those who surviveda |.and sadly those who didna ta |a |this book and ita s story belongs to all of us and serves as cautionary tale for the futurea