This book explores how state power was defined in Late Antiquity and Medieval forms of state in Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe. Providing a range of geographic examples for researchers and postgraduate students to expand beyond their own area of specialisation. The authors offer answers to what exactly was a "statehood without a state" when it came to semi-peripheral and peripheral areas that were also perceived through the prism of the idea of a world system, network theory, or the concept of so-called negotiating borderlands. Providing new research in the field of networks and early medieval power. These questions are answered by established scholars from different countries and perspectives, providing a range of case studies for researchers and postgraduate students to further their own understanding of the topic.

THE TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff. This is the forgotten history of Britain's lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages: our shadowlands. 'A beautiful book, truly original . . . It is a marvellous achievement.' IAN MORTIMER, author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England 'Well researched, beautifully written and packed with interesting detail.' CLAIRE TOMALIN 'An exquisitely written, moving and elegiac exploration.' SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB 'Consistently interesting . . . Green's passion and historical vision bursts from the page, summoning up the past in surround sound and sensual prose.' CAL FLYN, THE TIMES (author of Islands of Abandonment) Historian Matthew Green travels across Britain to tell the forgotten history of our lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages. Revealing the extraordinary stories of how these places met their fate - and exploring how they have left their mark on our landscape and our imagination - Shadowlands is a deeply evocative and dazzlingly original account of Britain's past. 'An eloquent tour of lost communities.' PD SMITH, GUARDIAN 'A haunting, lyrical tour around the lost places of Britain.' CHARLOTTE HIGGINS, author of Under Another Sky 'A miraculous work of resurrection, stinging in a perpetual present'. IAIN SINCLAIR, author of The Gold Machine 'Beautifully written.' SUNDAY TIMES 'Startling.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Splendid.' THE HERALD 'Compelling.' HISTORY TODAY 'Excellent.' THE SPECTATOR 'Fascinating.' DAILY MAIL 'Accomplished.' CAUGHT BY THE RIVER 'Outstanding.' MIRROR

Following the continued success of the 2021 Scottish Maps Calendar, Birlinn is once again proud to collaborate with the National Library of Scotland. This new calendar features more of the most beautiful maps of Scotland ever made. From the very earliest representations of Scotland in the second century AD, through the first printed maps of the 16th century and the achievement of the Ordnance Survey in the 1920s and 1930s to the most recent satellite imagery, these images tell the story of a nation.

In our modern day and age, when satellite imagery and GPS services like Google Maps, offer strikingly accurate images of the world, we can easily forget that for most of human history the world was an unknown tabula rasa on which cartographers, scientists, men of god, and kings imprinted their own dreams and ideals. This new extended edition, with the addition of about 15 maps, explores changing perceptions of the world map through the centuries and across multiple vastly different cultures. We will juxtapose 18th century Buddhist cartography in Japan with European mercantile maps of the same period. We will travel with speculative cartographers and they argue in the scientific academies of Paris, London, and St. Petersburg over theories about what `must' fill the great unknown. We will observe the emergence of the modern world view through the cartographic lens. We will see how, much like reading a long lost childhood diary, old maps are touching earnest reminders that our former selves' knowledge and perception of the world are rich and limited at the same time.

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.

Over the past two thousand years London has developed from a small town, fitting snugly within its walls, into one of the world's largest and most dynamic cities. This beautifully illustrated book charts that growth and the city's transformation through hundreds of maps culled from the collection of the British Library's Map Library. These visual records range from sweeping images of the entire city to nuanced studies of its elements and neighborhoods. Including official documents, individual endeavors, hand-drawn renditions, and technologically advanced replicas, these maps represent a variety of perspectives. Utilitarian maps show the city as it is and serve to elucidate its inner workings, while carefully wrought plans show the city as it was envisioned--whether those plans were executed or not. The maps and panoramas collected here are more than topographical records. They all convey unique insight into the concerns, assumptions, ambitions, and prejudices of Londoners at the time the maps were created. In addition to offering readers a tour of London past and present, this book reveals the inside story of the creation, growth, and change of one of the world's greatest cities.

In the Autumn of 1854 Dr John Rae of the Hudson's Bay Company astonished the world with the first news of the fate of the Franklin expedition, missing in the Arctic since 1845, on the basis of stories, rather vague as to time and place, which he had heard from Inuit in the vicinity of Pelly Bay. The response of the Admiralty was to ask the Hudson's Bay Company to mount an overland expedition to attempt to confirm the Inuit reports. For this task Sir George Simpson, the company's Governor in North America, selected James Anderson and James Stewart, veteran employees of the company, and directed them to descend the Black River by canoe to the area which the Inuit reports seemed to identify as the site of the demise of the Franklin expedition. Having assembled the necessary men, supplies and equipment in an amazingly short time, Anderson and Stewart left their base at Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake on 24 June 1855. They reached the sea at the mouth of the Black River on 30 July and here encountered a group of Inuit who possessed a variety of articles which could only have come from Franklin's ships. Solid sea ice halted their search of the coast at Point Ogle and they were forced to start back south on 9 August. They were back at Fort Resolution by 16 September, having completed an impressive trip in a staggeringly short time. History has tended to judge Anderson and Stewart rather harshly, despite the speed and efficiency of their journey. In fact their real contribution was to pinpoint the site of the tragedy (on King William Island), which the Inuit stories had identified only very vaguely. Their efforts allowed Captain Leopold McClintock to proceed directly to the correct area in 1859 and solve most aspects of the puzzle of what happened to the Franklin expedition.

This alternative guidebook for one of the world's most popular tourist destinations explores all five boroughs to reveal a people's New York City. The sites and stories of A People's Guide to New York City shift our perception of what defines New York, placing the passion, determination, defeats, and victories of its people at the core. Delving into the histories of New York's five boroughs, you will encounter enslaved Africans in revolt, women marching for equality, workers on strike, musicians and performers claiming streets for their art, and neighbors organizing against landfills and industrial toxins and in support of affordable housing and public schools. The streetscapes that emerge from these groups' struggles bear the traces, and this book shows you where to look to find them. New York City is a preeminent global city, serving as the headquarters for hundreds of multinational firms and a world-renowned cultural hub for fashion, art, and music. It is among the most multicultural cities in the world and also one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The people that make this global city function-immigrants, people of color, and the working classes-reside largely in the so-called outer boroughs, outside the corporations, neon, and skyscrapers of Manhattan. A People's Guide to New York City expands the scope and scale of traditional guidebooks, providing an equitable exploration of the diverse communities throughout the city. Through the stories of over 150 sites across the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as thematic tours and contemporary and archival photographs, a people's New York emerges, one in which collective struggles for justice and freedom have shaped the very landscape of the city.

Growing directly out of the experiences of a team of historians at Washington State University who designed a new foundational course for WSU's common requirements, the Roots of Contemporary Issues series is built on the premise that students will be better at facing current and future challenges, no matter their major or career path, if they are capable of addressing controversial and pressing issues in mature, reasoned ways using evidence, critical thinking, and clear written and oral communication skills. To help students achieve these goals, each title in the Roots of Contemporary Issues series argues that we need both a historical understanding and an appreciation of the ways in which humans have been interconnected with places around the world for decades and even centuries. Much of the world's politics revolves around questions about refugees and other migrating peoples, including debating the scope and limits of humanitarianism; the relevance of national borders in a globalized world; racist rhetoric and policies; global economic inequalities; and worldwide environmental disasters. There are no easy answers to these questions, but the decisions that all of us make about them will have tremendous consequences for individuals and for the planet in the future. Ruptured Lives works from the premise that studying the history of refugee crises can help us make those decisions more responsibly. Examining conflicts-in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa-that have produced migrations of people fleeing dangers or persecution, it aims to provide an intellectual framework for understanding how to think about the conflicts that produce refugees and the effects that refugee crises have on individuals and societies.

Mappa mundi texts and images present a panorama of the medieval world-view, c.1300; the Hereford map studied in close detail. Filled with information and lore, mappae mundi present an encyclopaedic panorama of the conceptual "landscape" of the middle ages. Previously objects of study for cartographers and geographers, the value of medieval maps to scholars in other fields is now recognised and this book, written from an art historical perspective, illuminates the medieval view of the world represented in a group of maps of c.1300. Naomi Kline's detailed examination of the literary, visual, oral and textual evidence of the Hereford mappa mundi and others like it, such as the Psalter Maps, the '"Sawley Map", and the Ebstorf Map, places them within the larger context of medieval art and intellectual history. The mappa mundi in Hereford cathedral is at the heart of this study: it has more than one thousand texts and images of geographical subjects, monuments, animals, plants, peoples, biblical sites and incidents, legendary material, historical information and much more; distinctions between "real" and "fantastic" are fluid; time and space are telescoped, presenting past, present, and future. Naomi Kline provides, for the first time, a full and detailed analysis of the images and texts of the Hereford map which, thus deciphered, allow comparison with related mappae mundi as well as with other texts and images. NAOMI REED KLINE is Professor of Art History at Plymouth State College.

Z. A. Mudge (1813 88) was an American pastor, author and Arctic exploration enthusiast. After the success of his popular books North Pole Voyages and Arctic Heroes, he wrote this book on the Western Union Telegraph Expedition. In the mid-nineteenth century the Western Union Telegraph Company decided to create a telegraph line that would run from San Francisco, California to Moscow, Russia. The line was to run through Alaska and Siberia, and although the project was abandoned in 1867, a large amount of Arctic exploration had been achieved in the meantime. This book, first published in 1880, is Mudge's compilation of the accounts of some of the explorers who were involved in different stages of the expedition, including the naturalist W. H. Dall during his exploration in Alaska. Mudge goes on to include the Siberian experiences of George Kennan and W. H. Bush (whose own account is also reissued in this series).

In 1873 the Admiralty began planning an expedition to find a route to the North Pole through Smith Sound, the passage between Greenland and Canada. This collection of papers was published in 1875, with the aim of being 'useful to the officers of the [British Arctic] expedition' leaving later that year. The book is divided into two sections: geographical observations by the likes of Admiral Collinson, who led the 1850 expedition in search of John Franklin, and ethnographic observations, including accounts of the Inuit and their language. Unfortunately, it does not include the one piece of information that might have most helped the expedition: they took concentrated lime juice to combat scurvy, but the concentrating process removed the essential Vitamin C. The expedition was ultimately a failure in its aim of reaching the Pole, but this collection is a unique record of the sum of the knowledge accumulated by that time.

Sir Francis Leopold McClintock (1819-1907) established his reputation as an Arctic explorer on voyages with Ross and Belcher, undertaking long and dangerous sledge journeys charting the territory. McClintock's account of his 1857-9 expedition on the yacht Fox through the North-West Passage to discover the fate of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and his ships, the Erebus and Terror, was first published in 1859. The journey was commissioned by Franklin's widow who, unhappy with the Admiralty's reluctance to seek confirmation of the account of her husband's expedition brought back in 1854 by explorer John Rae, commissioned McClintock to seek corroborating evidence. After a punishing voyage, including 250 days beset by ice in Baffin Bay drifting some 1,400 miles, the search continued by sledge. It was William Hobson, McClintock's second-in-command who found the written evidence documenting Franklin's death in 1847. The grim remains of others who had perished were also discovered.

Joseph Ren Bellot (1826 53) was a French naval officer whose travels took him from Africa to the Arctic before his tragic death at the age of 27. In 1851 he joined a British expedition to search for the missing explorer Sir John Franklin (1786 1847), whose expedition to find the North-West Passage was last heard of in July 1845. Although the voyage was unsuccessful in its search, it explored previously unknown areas of the Arctic. Bellot kept extensive notes about his journey in this remote region; they originally appeared in French in 1854 and were translated into English in 1855 and published in two volumes. Volume 1 contains a biography of Bellot, who was regarded as a hero in both France and Britain, and the first part of his journal, which describes the ship's departure from Scotland, their arrival in Greenland, and their encounters with the indigenous people there.

Joseph Ren Bellot (1826 53) was a French naval officer whose travels took him from Africa to the Arctic before his tragic death at the age of 27. In 1851 he joined a British expedition to search for the missing polar explorer Sir John Franklin (1786 1847), whose expedition to find the North-West Passage was last heard of in July 1845. Although the voyage was unsuccessful in its search, it explored previously unknown areas of the Arctic. Bellot kept extensive notes about his journey in this remote region; they originally appeared in French in 1854 and were translated into English in 1855 and published in two volumes. In Volume 2, Bellot, who was regarded as a hero in both France and Britain, describes how the crew survived the harsh climate of the Arctic winter, his exploration by dog-sledge of inland polar regions, and his eventual return to Britain.

The most captivating and intriguing 19th-century murders from around the world are re-examined in this disquieting volume, which takes readers on a perilous journey around the world's most benighted regions. In each area, murders are charted with increasing specificity: beginning with city- or region-wide overviews, drilling down to street-level diagrams and zooming-in to detailed floor plans. All the elements of each crime are meticulously replotted on archival maps, from the prior movements of both killer and victim to the eventual location of the body. The murders revisited range from the 'French Ripper' Joseph Vacher, who roamed the French countryside brutally murdering and mutilating over twenty shepherds and shepherdesses, to H.H. Holmes, who built a hotel in Chicago to entrap, murder and dispose of its many guests. Crime expert Dr Drew Gray illuminates the details of each case, recounting both the horrifying particulars of the crimes themselves and the ingenious detective work that led to the eventual capture of the murderers. He highlights the development of police methods and technology: from the introduction of the police whistle to the standardization of the mugshot and from the invention of fingerprinting to the use of radio telegraphy to capture criminals. Disturbing crime-scene photographs by pioneers of policework, such as Alphonse Bertillon, and contemporary illustrations from the sensationalist magazines of the day, including the Illustrated Police News and the Petit Journal, complete the macabre picture.

What causes Ice Ages? How did we learn about them? What were their affects on the social history of humanity? Allan Mazur's book tells the appealing history of the scientific 'discovery' of Ice Ages. How we learned that much of the Earth was repeatedly covered by huge ice sheets, why that occurred, and how the waning of the last Ice Age paved the way for agrarian civilization and, ultimately, our present social structures. The book discusses implications for the current 'controversies' over anthropogenic climate change, public understanding of science, and (lack of) 'trust in experts'. In parallel to the history and science of Ice Ages, sociologist Mazur highlights why this is especially relevant right now for humanity. Ice Ages: Their Social and Natural History is an engrossing combination of natural science and social history: glaciology and sociology writ large.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This compilation by R. H. Major of the British Museum (published in 1859) brings together various manuscript and published sources, some of them anonymous, which provide a picture of European exploration in the Southern Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It includes passages from the writings of William Dampier, who not only surveyed part of the coast of Australia ('New Holland'), but also made detailed notes of the fauna and flora he encountered there.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. The two-volume account by Juan Gonz lez de Mendoza of the history and geography of China was translated into English in 1588. It was the first detailed description of China available in English, though the introduction to this 1853 edition reviews several earlier reports by western travellers. Mendoza did not himself visit China; his first volume is derived largely from the papers of Martin de Rada, an Augustinian friar who went to China on a missionary expedition in 1575.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This volume contains two narratives about Russia: Of the Russe Common Wealth by Giles Fletcher, Queen Elizabeth's ambassador to the Russian court in 1588, and a transcription of the manuscript account of the travels of Sir Jerome Horsey, who lived in Russia from 1575 to 1591, firstly as an agent of the English Russia Company, and later as a diplomat. Appendices include Horsey's description of the coronation of Tsar Fyodor I in 1584.

The growing importance of Central and Inner Asia and the Silk Road is much discussed at present. This book compares the nature of present day networks in these regions with the patterns of similar connections which existed at the time of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century and its successor states. It considers settlement patterns, technology and technology transfer, trade, political arrangements, the role of religion and the impact of the powerful states which border the region. Overall, the book demonstrates that the Mongol Empire anticipated many of the networks and connections which exist in the region at present.

With over 180 maps, expert commentaries and an extensive bibliography, this second edition of an essential reference guide to medieval Europe brings the complex and colourful history of the Middle Ages to life.

The Atlas of Medieval Europe covers the period from the fall of the Roman Empire through to the beginnings of the Renaissance, spreading from the Atlantic coast to the Russian steppes. Each map approaches a separate issue or series of events in medieval history, and a commentary locates it in its broader context.

This second edition has over forty new maps covering a variety of topics including:

• the Moravian Empire
• environmental change
• the travels and correspondence of Froissart and travellers in the east
• the layout of great castles and palaces.

Thorough coverage is also given to geographically peripheral areas like Portugal, Poland, Scandinavia and Ireland.

Providing a vivid representation of the development of nations, peoples and social structures, and charting political and military events, the Atlas takes a detailed look at a variety of key areas including language and literature; the development of trade, art and architecture; and the great cities and lives of historical figures.

Every student of medieval European history should own a copy of this book.

In French and in English, one side shows the position of the different armies and the progression of the Battle of Normandy. The other side features a photograph which shows the magnitude of the D-Day landing in Normandy.