Blom's hypothesis is forceful, and has the potential to be both frightening and, if you hold it up to the light at just the right angle, a little optimistic. The idea can be put like this: climate change changes everything' John Lanchester, New Yorker In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe. While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and 'frost fairs' were erected on a frozen Thames - with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city. Recounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this 'Little Ice Age', acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, Blom brilliantly shows how they also gave rise to the growth of European cities, the appearance of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment. A sweeping examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature's Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.

The Zambezi is the fourth-longest river in Africa, and one of the continent's principal arteries of movement, migration, conquest and commerce. In this book, historian Malyn Newitt quotes rarely used Portuguese sources that throw vivid light on the culture of the river peoples and their relations with the Portuguese creole society of the prazos. Hitherto unused manuscript material illustrates Portuguese and British colonial rule over the people of the long-lived Lunda kingdoms, and the Lozi of the Barotse Floodplain. The Zambezi became a war zone during the 'Scramble for Africa', the struggle for independence and the civil wars that followed the departure of colonial powers. Recent history has also seen the river's wild nature tamed by the introduction of steamers and the building of bridges and dams. These developments have changed the character of the waterway, and impacted--often drastically--the ecological systems of the valley and those settled along its course. 'The Zambezi' traces the history of the communities that have lived along this great river; their relationship with the states formed on the high veldt; and the ways they have adapted to the vagaries of the Zambezi itself, with its annual floods, turbulent rapids and dramatic gorges.

A peril-packed, crocodile-crammed, fun-filled adventure through ancient Egypt! Being whisked back to 1300 BC certainly wasn't on Henry's to-do list. Can he make his way through a new school, odd sports, unexpected friends and deadly pets, Egyptian style? And will he ever find his way back to the present day? Laugh-out-loud pictures on every page, a riotously funny story Cool hieroglyphics to crack from talented author-illustrator Thiago de Moraes From the creator of Myth Atlas and History Atlas

'Stunning...divine' Stephen Fry 'A fabulous book, good enough to eat with a spoon! Marvellous' John Lloyd, creator of QI 'Perfect for the armchair adventurer historian, this is a rich visual exploration of some of the most beautiful charts ever created' National Geographic 'Introduces us to a whole different way of looking at maps. Great illustrations, most engaging - the author is just a mine of information' Simon Mayo's Books of the Year The Golden Atlas is a spectacular visual history of exploration and cartography, a treasure chest of adventures from the chronicles of global discovery, illustrated with a selection of the most beautiful maps ever created. The book reveals how the world came to be known, featuring a magnificent gallery of exceptionally rare hand-coloured antique maps, paintings and engravings, many of which can only be found in the author's collection. Arranged chronologically, the reader is taken on a breathtaking expedition through Ancient Babylonian geography and Marco Polo's journey to the Mongol Khan on to buccaneers ransacking the Caribbean and the voyages of seafarers such as Captain Cook and fearless African pathfinders. Their stories are told in an engaging and compelling style, bringing vividly to life a motley collection of heroic explorers, treasure-hunters and death-dealing villains - all of them accompanied by eye-grabbing illustrations from rare maps, charts and manuscripts. The Golden Atlas takes you back to a world of darkness and peril, placing you on storm-lashed ships, frozen wastelands and the shores of hostile territories to see how the lines were drawn to form the shape of the modern world. The author's previous book, The Phantom Atlas, was a critically acclaimed international bestseller, described by Jonathan Ross as 'a spectacular, enjoyable and eye-opening read' and this new book is sure to follow suit.

The sea has been the site of radical changes in human lives and national histories. It has been an agent of colonial oppression but also of indigenous resistance, a site of loss, dispersal and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship. "Sea Changes "re-evaluates the view that history happens mainly on dry land and makes the case for a creative reinterpretation of the role of the sea: not merely as a passage from one country to the next, but a historical site deserving close study.

The first study of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman canals and waterways, this book is based on new evidence surrounding the nature of water transport in the period. England is naturally well-endowed with a network of navigable rivers, especially the easterly systems draining into the Thames, Wash and Humber. The central middle ages saw innovative and extensive development of this network, including the digging of canals bypassing difficult stretches of rivers, or linking rivers to important production centres. The eleventh and twelfth centuries seem to have been the high point for this dynamic approach to water-transport: after 1200, the improvement of roads and bridges increasingly diverted resources away from the canals, many of which stagnated with the reassertion of natural drainage patterns.
The new perspective presented in this study has an important bearing on the economy, landscape, settlement patterns and inter-regional contacts of medieval England. Essays from economic historians, geographers, geomorphologists, archaeologists, and place-name scholars unearth this neglected but important aspect of medieval engineering and economic growth.

In 1937 the British Royal Commission headed by Lord Peel proposed solving the Arab-Jewish conflict by partitioning Palestine into two nation-states. The concept of partition in exchange for a state was acceptable to the Jewish Agency Executive, but not the details set out by the Royal Commission, and thus in 1937-38 the Agency formulated an alternative plan for consideration by the British authorities.
At the core of the proposal was the issue of borders - a key factor in every partition plan - but the Agency's suggestions and preparations for a Jewish state addressed additional elements including the question of Jerusalem; population transfer; the status of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state; stages in the establishment; and plans covering governance, foreign policy, immigration and development, religion and state, finance and security.
In this work Yossi Katz shows that the Jewish Agency Executive's partition plan, though never implemented, was not an isolated episode, but had short- and long-term implications from the Jewish perspective - that as well as having an impact on the immediate settlement policies, it also had significant effect on the partition of Palestine in the late 1940s, and on shaping the state-in-formation.

The book reveals the mysteries of civilizations concealed in proper and personal names in ancient Indian texts. In a nutshell, using numerous examples of similar names and events, the author establishes that the geographical background and historical contexts of the ancient Indian texts such as the Rig and Atharva Vedas, Samhitas, Brahmanas, Puranas, and even the later two Epics were in the Ancient Near East. The proper names that often indicate the geographical regions are well connected with Asia, Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and particularly, with the territory called Canaan. Canaan's location in between Mesopotamia and Egypt makes it possible to speculate the Near Eastern geographical background and historical context of the ancient Indian texts. Dr. Liny Srinivasan traces these connections with the help of historical linguistics tools such as systematic changes that may have taken place during history of languages like Sanskrit, Greek and hieroglyphic Egyptian. The toponymic names indicate some of the geographical regions that cover a large area from ancient Syria-Palestine to the coasts of Asia Minor, Egypt and even to Ethiopia. That makes it possible to think of the time of the Hyksos rule of an Empire extending from Egypt to Asia. The Rigveda authors may have been in Egypt during the rules of the Hyksos foreign kings of Egypt. The book will open up some different ways of explorations in history, language, archaeology, and culture. The scholars interested in culture and history of the entire region mentioned above will find the book exciting as this change in concepts has the potential not just to shed some light on the missing links in ancient Indian texts, it could also fill the gaps in the ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern history.

Originally published between 1920-70, the "History of Civilization" was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of historical discovery. The aim of the general editor, C.K. Ogden, was to summarize the most up to date findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. This reprinted material is available as a set or in the following groupings: "Prehistory and Historical Ethnography" set of 12 (0-415-15611-4, u800); "Greek Civilization" set of 7 (0-415-15612-2, u450); "Roman Civilization" set of 6 (0-415-15613-0, u400); "Eastern Civilizations" set of 10 (0-415-15614-9, u650); "Judaeo-Christian Civilization" set of 4 (0-415-15615-7, u250); "European Civilization" set of 11 (0-415-15616-5, u700).

A Spectator Book of the Year 2020 A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020 A Mail on Sunday Book of the Year 2020 'Inspired ... Lowe's sensitive, disturbing book should be compulsory reading for both statue builders and statue topplers' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES What happens when our values change, but what we have set in stone does not? Humankind has always had the urge to memorialise, to make physical testaments to the past. There's just one problem: when we carve a statue or put up a monument, it can wind up holding us hostage to bad history. In this extraordinary history book, Keith Lowe uses monuments from around the world to show how different countries have attempted to sculpt their history in the wake of the Second World War, and what these memorials reveal about their politics and national identity today. Amongst many questions, the book asks: What does Germany signal to today's far right by choosing not to disclose the exact resting place of Hitler? How can a bronze statue of a young girl in Seoul cause mass controversy? What is Russia trying to prove and hide, still building victory monuments at a prolific rate for a war now seventy years over? As many around the world are questioning who and what we memorialise, Prisoners of History challenges our idea of national memory, history, and the enormous power of symbols in society today.

"Will delight the visual learner. ... For the college student, the general reader, and the merely curious". -- American Reference Book Annual

"Schmidt has filled a large gap. ... Superior quality, wide coverage, and considerable excellence". -- Journal of World History

The British Isles have been continually settled since 12500 years ago when hunter-gatherer bands returned in the wake of the retreating ice sheets. For 7000 years, until the introduction of farming, people subsisted by hunting wild game and gathering the fruits of the forest and foreshore. In archaeolgical terms they belonged to the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, and have hitherto, been studied mainly in terms of their stone tools. Today, in an age when there is growing concern over the relationship between human beings and a rapidly changing environment, an earlier period when this relationship was both intimate and immediate is of considerable interest. "Late Stone Age Hunters of the British Isles" places the archaeological evidence - mainly stone tools and animal bones - within a wider, ecological context. The book examines aspects of the hunter-gatherer way of life and how it can be studied from archaeological evidence. There follows a review of environmental change in the period covered and three chapters of case studies in which different examples of hunter-gatherer activity are examined within their ecological context. This book should be of interest to students a

This volume provides a global treatment of historical and regional geomorphic work as it developed from the end of the 19th century - which saw the burgeoning of the eustatic theory, the concepts of isostasy and epeirogeny, and the first complete statements of the cycle of erosion and of polycyclic denudation chronology - to the hiatus of World War 2. The book is subdivided into global and Davisian influences and historical and regional geomorphology. It sets out to describe and analyze many of the developments which have given rise to the rich and varied subject-matter of contemporary geomorphology. This book is the third volume in the definitive series "The History of the Study of Landforms or the Development of Geomorphology". Volume 1 (1964) dealt with contributions to the field up to 1890. Volume 2 (1973) dealt with the concepts and contributions of William Morris Davis. Volume 3 treats historical and regional themes during the "classic" period of geomorphology, between 1890 and 1950. Volume 4, currently being prepared, will concentrate on studies of geomorphic processes and of quarternary geomorphology, carrying these thems on into the second half of the 20th century, which h

A century before Columbus arrived in America, two brothers from Venice are said to have explored parts of the New World. They became legends during the Renaissance, and then the source of a great scandal that would discredit their story. Today, they have been largely forgotten.
In this very original work--part history, part travelogue--Andrea di Robilant chronicles his discovery of a travel narrative published in 1558 by the Venetian statesman Nicolo Zen. The text and its fascinating nautical map re-created the travels of two of the author's ancestors, brothers who claimed to have explored the North Atlantic in the 1380s and 1390s. Di Robilant sets out to discover why the Zens' account later came under attack as one of the greatest frauds in geographical history. Was their map--and even their journey--partially or perhaps entirely faked?

The definitive history of the Vikings -- from arts and culture to politics and cosmology -- by a distinguished archaeologist with decades of expertise The Viking Age -- from 750 to 1050 -- saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture. Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and in the process were themselves changed. From Eirik Bloodaxe, who fought his way to a kingdom, to Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, the most traveled woman in the world, Children of Ash and Elm is the definitive history of the Vikings and their time.

The book deals with the formative years of Israel's evolving symbolic landscape (1904-1967). It covers the stories of a few dozen Jews who passed away in the Diaspora and later their remains were taken to be buried for the second time (and sometimes for the third) in Israel. These were Zionists and politicians, writers and poets, heroes and public activists whose common denominator was that they all passed away in the Diaspora, far and detached from the national homeland that they fought for before their tragic death. Only later, in an act of repair, their coffins were sent to be buried in the "sacred" Zionist soil, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Dgania. These graves became pilgrimage sites and contributed to the design of Israel's landscape. The book examines how and why such great effort was made to bring their remains to Israel for reinterment, and how the funerals and graves of the public figures became state symbols and national instruments for establishing Israeli sovereignty over the land.

This book explores the stories behind seventy-five extraordinary maps. It includes unique treasures such as the fourteenth-century Gough Map of Great Britain, exquisite portolan charts made in the fifteenth century, the Selden Map of China - the earliest example of Chinese merchant cartography - and an early world map from the medieval Islamic Book of Curiosities, together with more recent examples of fictional places drawn in the twentieth century, such as C.S. Lewis's own map of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien's map of Middle Earth. As well as the works of famous mapmakers Mercator, Ortelius, Blaeu, Saxton and Speed, the book also includes lesser known but historically significant works: early maps of the Moon, of the transit of Venus, hand-drawn estate plans and early European maps of the New World. There are also some surprising examples: escape maps printed on silk and carried by pilots in the Second World War in case of capture on enemy territory; the first geological survey of the British Isles showing what lies beneath our feet; a sixteenth-century woven tapestry map of Worcestershire; a map plotting outbreaks of cholera and a jigsaw map of India from the 1850s. Behind each of these lies a story, of intrepid surveyors, ambitious navigators, chance finds or military victories. Drawing on the unique collection in the Bodleian Library, these stunning maps range from single cities to the solar system, span the thirteenth to the twenty-first century and cover most of the world.

This innovative book explores how the making of Edinburgh as an influential Enlightenment capital depended on a series of spatial processes that extended across urban, regional, national and global scales. Edinburgh was an Enlightenment city of regional, national and global influence. But how did the people of Enlightenment Edinburgh understand and order their world? How did they encounter, compare and produce different kinds of spaces, from the urban to the world scale? And how did this city set the universal standards by which other places should be judged and transformed? The Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh answers these questions by exploring the thousands of urban plans, county surveys, travel accounts and encyclopaedias that passed through a busy Edinburgh bookshop over four decades. It reveals how these geographical publications were produced and shared, and sheds light on the people who bought and used them - including moral philosophers, silk merchants, school teachers, ship's surgeons and slave owners. This is the story of how specific methods of mapping space came ultimately to predict and organize it, creating a new world in Edinburgh's image. By connecting global processes of knowledge production to intimate accounts of its reception in the city, this book deepens our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment and the world it made.

This book examines the relationship between Ukraine's Galician Hutsuls and the Carpathian landscape between 1848 and 1939. The author analyzes the intersections of ecology and culture in the history of the Carpathian Mountains, with a focus on the region's economy and biodiversity.

This sumptuous and comprehensive evaluation showcases Smith's 1815 hand-coloured map, A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with part of Scotland, and illustrates the story of his career, from apprentice to fossil collector and from his 1799 geological map of Bath and table of strata to his detailed stratigraphical county maps. The introduction places Smith's work in the context of earlier, concurrent and subsequent ideas regarding the structure and natural processes of the earth. The book is then organized into four geographical sections, each beginning with four sheets from the 1815 strata map, accompanied by related geological cross sections and county maps (1819-24), and is followed by displays of Sowerby's fossil illustrations (1816-19) organized by strata. Interleaved between the sections are essays by leading academics that explore the aims of Smith's work, its application in the fields of mining, agriculture, cartography, fossil collecting and hydrology, and its influence on biostratigraphical theories and the science of geology. Concluding the volume are reflections on Smith's later work as an itinerant geologist and surveyor, plagiarism by his rival - President of the Geological Society, George Bellas Greenough - receipt of the first Wollaston Medal in 1831 in recognition of his achievements, and the influence of his geological mapping and biostratigraphical theories on the sciences, culminating in the establishment of the modern geological timescale.