Unruly People shows that in mid-Qing Guangdong banditry occurred mainly in the densely populated core Canton delta where state power was strongest, challenging the conventional wisdom that banditry was most prevalent in peripheral areas. Through extensive archival research, Antony reveals that this is because the local working poor had no other options to ensure their livelihood. In 1780 the Qing government enacted the first of a series of special laws to deal specifically with Guangdong bandits who plundered on land and water. The new law was prompted by what officials described as a spiraling "bandit miasma" in the province that had been simmering for decades. To understand the need for the special laws, Unruly People takes a closer look at the complex relationships and interconnections between bandits, sworn brotherhoods, local communities, and the Qing state in Guangdong from 1760 to 1845. Antony treats collective crime as a symptom of the dysfunction in local society and breakdown of the imperial legal system. He analyzes over 2,300 criminal cases found in palace and routine memorials in the Qing archives, as well as extant Chinese literary and foreign sources and fieldwork in rural Guangdong, to recreate vivid details of late imperial China's underworld of crime and violence.

Describes the twelve campaigns fo r whichthe India General Service Medal 1908-1935 was awarded - North West Frontier1908; Abor 1911-12; Afghanistan North West Frontier 1919; Mahsud 1919-20; Waziristan 1919-21; Malabar 1921-22; Waziristan 1921-24; Waziristan 1925; North West Frontier 1930-31; Burma 1930-32; Mohmand 1933; North West Frontier 1935. Includes the Medal Rolls of the British Army and Royal Air Force are published for all officer entitlements, all multi-clasp recipients, and all personnel of units present in less than battalion strength - in all, a total of more than 14,000 names (civilians included). Recipients of single-clasp medals who served with regiments and units present in full strength are not included, partly because of the sheer volume of names and partly because verification of these medals on the original rolls is not so complex. The many difficulties of using the original rolls and on-line versions are explained in the Introduction. Hence the published rolls in this book make it straightforward for collectors and military historians to check officer, multi-clasp and 'odd men' entitlements to the India General Service Medal 1908-1935. The degree of rarity of medals for any given campaign clasp(s) to individual regiments or units (including the Royal Air Force) is specified. In addition, this volume includes: Rolls of Honour for the British Establishment; Orders of Battle for the British and Indian Establishments with the names of Commanding Officers; and many previously unpublished photographs.

The history of sexuality has progressed from its earlier marginal status to a central place in historiography. Not only are its foci of research intriguing, but the field has initiated important theoretical advances for the discipline as a whole, especially through the work of Michel Foucault. The editors of this new four-volume Routledge collection define sexuality in a broader sense than sexual identity, to include sexual emotions, desires, acts, representations, and relationships. And while the history of sexuality began in the American and European spheres, the volumes also integrate studies of Asian, African, and other sexual cultures. Similarly, the collection integrates studies from early periods (such as classical Greece and Rome and the medieval era) with modern histories of sexuality. The editors of this new four-volume Routledge collection define sexuality in a broader sense than sexual identity, to include sexual emotions, desires, acts, representations, and relationships. And while the history of sexuality began in the American and European spheres, the volumes also integrate studies of Asian, African, and other sexual cultures. Similarly, the collection integrates studies from early periods (such as classical Greece and Rome and the medieval era) with modern histories of sexuality.

The revolutions in the England, North America, and France ushered in the modern political age. Cultural Revolutions analyzes the place of material culture, ritual, and everyday life during these revolutions, providing a fresh and engaging interpretation of the strategies used to transform people from monarchists into republicans.The author shows how, faced with the challenge of persuading large populations to alter their previous convictions and loyalties, revolutionaries in all three countries turned to the power of aesthetics. From the banning of dancing in Cromwell's England, to the 'homespun' clothing of Revolutionary America, to France's new calendar and naming systems, Auslander assesses how daily habits and tastes were altered in the interests of political change.

Americans love to hate their government, and a long tradition of anti-government suspicion reaches back to debates among the founders of the nation. But the election of Barack Obama has created a backlash rivaled only by the anti-government hysteria that preceded the Civil War.
Lost in all the Tea Party rage and rhetoric is this simple fact: the federal government plays a central role in making our society function, and it always has. Edited by Steven Conn and written by some of America's leading scholars, the essays in To Promote the General Welfare explore the many ways government programs have improved the quality of life in America. The essays cover everything from education, communication, and transportation to arts and culture, housing, finance, and public health. They explore how and why government programs originated, how they have worked and changed--and been challenged--since their inception, and why many of them are important to preserve.
The book shows how the WPA provided vital, in some cases career-saving, assistance to artists and writers like Jackson Pollock, Dorothea Lange, Richard Wright, John Cheever, and scores of others; how millions of students from diverse backgrounds have benefited and continue to benefit from the G.I. Bill, Fulbright scholarships, and federally insured student loans; and how the federal government created an Interstate highway system unparalleled in the world, linking the entire nation. These are just a few examples of highly successful programs the book celebrates--and that anti-government critics typically ignore.
For anyone wishing to explore the flip side of today's vehement attacks on American government, To Promote the General Welfare is the best place to start.

This book chronicles the development of Greenbank House from its origins in a rural Toxteth Park in the mid 18th century to the present day. Home to the prominent merchant Rathbone family from 1788 until it was donated by them in 1944 to the University of Liverpool, successive heads and other family members played significant roles in advocacy of the abolition of the slave trade, parliamentary and municipal reform, nurse education and district nursing, higher education, and women's rights. Copiously illustrated with plans, engravings, photographs, and a Rathbone family tree, this fascinating book draws on the archives of the Rathbone family to observe the wider political, social, religious and literary relationships they enjoyed, as well as taking into account the observations of visitors, including John Dalton, the eminent chemist, and John James Audubon, the American naturalist and painter. Recollections of alumni and former University staff contribute to the account of Greenbank's service as an Annex of Derby Hall of Residence, 1947-63, and then as a popular staff-student club, 1963-88. A grade 2* property, over the last five years Greenbank has undergone a major programme of repair and restoration of its distinctive 18th century, Gothic, and Victorian wings, to provide conference, corporate, and student social use accommodation.

In the past sixty years, oral history has moved from the periphery to the mainstream of academic studies and is now employed as a research tool by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, medical therapists, documentary film makers, and educators at all levels. The Oxford Handbook of Oral History brings together forty authors on five continents to address the evolution of oral history, the impact of digital technology, the most recent methodological and archival issues, and the application of oral history to both scholarly research and public presentations. The volume is addressed to seasoned practitioners as well as to newcomers, offering diverse perspectives on the current state of the field and its likely future developments. Some of its chapters survey large areas of oral history research and examine how they developed; others offer case studies that deal with specific projects, issues, and applications of oral history. From the Holocaust, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, the Falklands War in Argentina, the Velvet Revolution in Eastern Europe, to memories of September 11, 2001 and of Hurricane Katrina, the creative and essential efforts of oral historians worldwide are examined and explained in this multipurpose handbook.

Many would be surprised to learn that the preferred method of birth control in the United States today is actually surgical sterilization. This book takes an historical look at the sterilization movement in post-World War II America, a revolution in modern contraceptive behaviour. Focusing on leaders of the sterilization movement from the 1930's through the turn of the century, this book explores the historic linkages between environment, civil liberties, eugenics, population control, sex education, marriage counselling, and birth control movements in the 20th-century United States. Sterilization has been variously advocated as a medical procedure for defusing the "population bomb," expanding individual rights, liberating women from the fear of pregnancy, strengthening marriage, improving the quality of life of the mentally disabled, or reducing the incidence of hereditary disorders. From an historical standpoint, support for free and unfettered access to sterilization services has aroused opposition in some circles, and was considered a "liberal cause" in post-World War II America. This story demonstrates how a small group of reformers helped to alter traditional notions of gender and sexuality.

Winner of an Award of Merit in the Christianity Today Book Awards, History/Biography category
On January 17, 1776, one week after Thomas Paine published his incendiary pamphlet Common Sense, Connecticut minister Samuel Sherwood preached an equally patriotic sermon. "God Almighty, with all the powers of heaven, are on our side," Sherwood said, voicing a sacred justification for war that Americans would invoke repeatedly throughout the struggle for independence.
In Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, James Byrd offers the first comprehensive analysis of how American revolutionaries defended their patriotic convictions through scripture. Byrd shows that the Bible was a key text of the American Revolution. Indeed, many colonists saw the Bible as primarily a book about war. They viewed God as not merely sanctioning violence but actively participating in combat, playing a decisive role on the battlefield. When war came, preachers and patriots alike turned to scripture not only for solace but for exhortations to fight. Such scripture helped amateur soldiers overcome their natural aversion to killing, conferred on those who died for the Revolution the halo of martyrdom, and gave Americans a sense of the divine providence of their cause. Many histories of the Revolution have noted the connection between religion and war, but Sacred Scripture, Sacred War is the first to provide a detailed analysis of specific biblical texts and how they were used, especially in making the patriotic case for war. Combing through more than 500 wartime sources, which include more than 17,000 biblical citations, Byrd shows precisely how the Bible shaped American war, and how war in turn shaped Americans' view of the Bible.
Brilliantly researched and cogently argued, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War sheds new light on the American Revolution.

Copywriter: include this in European/French History rather than British This is a comparative study of national labour movements in France and Britain during the First World War. Historians of labour in this period have concentrated on pacifism, and on the post-war radicalism and emergent communism to which that contributed. John N. Horne focuses instead on the majorities in both the French and the British labour movements which continued to support the war to its end. He examines the terms of their support, and the broader working-class experience which this reflected, showing how a critical programme of socialist reforms was gradually developed. Labour at War is a genuinely comparative analysis, based on intensive primary research in both countries. It is an important contribution both to labour history, and to the social and political history of the First World War.

It is the most famous speech Lincoln ever gave, and one of the most important orations in the history of the nation. Delivered on November 19, 1863, among the freshly dug graves of the Union dead, the Gettysburg Address defined the central meaning of the Civil War and gave cause for the nation's incredible suffering. The poetic language and moral sentiment inspired listeners at the time, and have continued to resonate powerfully with groups and individuals up to the present day. What gives this speech its enduring significance? This collection of essays, from some of the best-known scholars in the field, answers that question. Placing the Address in complete historical and cultural context and approaching it from a number of fresh perspectives, the volume first identifies how Lincoln was influenced by great thinkers on his own path toward literary and oratory genius. Among others, Nicholas P. Cole draws parallels between the Address and classical texts of Antiquity and John Stauffer considers Lincoln's knowledge of the King James Bible and Shakespeare. The second half of the collection then examines the many ways in which the Gettysburg Address has been interpreted, perceived, and utilized in the past 150 years. Since 1863, African Americans, immigrants, women, gay rights activists, and international figures have invoked the speech's language and righteous sentiments on their respective paths toward freedom and equality. Essays include Louis P. Masur on the role the Address played in eventual emancipation; Jean H. Baker on the speech's importance to the women's rights movement; and Don H. Doyle on the Address's international legacy. Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg in a defining moment for America, but as the essays in this collection attest, his message is universal and timeless. This work brings together the foremost experts in the field to illuminate the many ways in which that message continues to endure.

This handbook provides an unmatched, comprehensive political history of Ecuador written in English. Ecuador is a nation of over 13 million people, its area between that of the states of Wyoming and Colorado. Like the United States, Ecuador's government features a democratically elected President serving for a four-year term. The Galapagos Islands, well known as the birthplace of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, are part of a province of Ecuador. The History of Ecuador focuses primarily on the political history of Ecuador and how these past events impact the nation today. This text examines the traditions established by Ecuador's great caudillos (strong men) such as Juan Jose Flores, Gabriel Garcia Moreno, and Eloy Alfaro, and documents the attempts of liberal leaders to modernize Ecuador by following the example of the United States. This book also discusses three economic booms in Ecuador's history: the Cacao Boom 1890-1914; the Banana Boom 1948-1960; and the Oil Boom 1972-1992. Presents biographical sketches of prominent figures in Ecuador's history Contains a chronology of the major events in Ecuador's political, economic, social, and cultural history Includes maps showing Ecuador as part of South America and displaying Ecuador's territorial disputes with Peru and Colombia Bibliography includes significant books on Ecuadorian history, economics, and current politics Glossary defines Spanish and Ecuadorian terms

From the beginnings of industrial capitalism to contemporary disputes over evolution, nature has long been part of the public debate over the social good. As such, many natural scientists throughout American history have understood their work as a cultural activity contributing to social stability and their field as a powerful tool for enhancing the quality of American life. In the late Victorian era, interwar period, and post-war decades, massive social change, economic collapse and recovery, and the aftermath of war prompted natural scientists to offer up a civic-minded natural science concerned with the political well-being of American society. In Science and the Social Good, John P. Herron explores the evolving internal and external forces influencing the design and purpose of American natural science, by focusing on three representative scientists-geologist Clarence King, forester Robert Marshall, and biologist Rachel Carson-who purposefully considered the social outcomes of their work.
As comfortable in the royal courts of Europe as the remote field camps of the American West, Clarence King was the founding director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and used his standing to integrate science into late nineteenth century political debates about foreign policy, immigration, and social reform. In the mid-1930s, Robert Marshall founded the environmental advocacy group, The Wilderness Society, which transformed the face of natural preservation in America. Committed to social justice, Marshall blended forest ecology and pragmatic philosophy to craft a natural science ethic that extended the reach of science into political discussions about the restructuring of society prompted by urbanization and economic crisis. Rachel Carson deservedly gets credit for launching the modern environmental movement with her 1962 classic Silent Spring. She made a generation of Americans aware of the social costs inherent in the human manipulation of the natural world and used natural science to critique established institutions and offer an alternative vision of a healthy and diverse society. As King, Marshall, and Carson became increasingly wary of the social costs of industrialization, they used their scientific work to address problems of ecological and social imbalance. Even as science became professionalized and compartmentalized. these scientists worked to keep science relevant to broader intellectual debates.
John Herron offers a new take on King, Marshall, and especially Carson and their significance that emphasizes the importance of their work to environmental, political, and cultural affairs, while illuminating the broader impact of natural science on American culture.

Constructing Neoliberalism presents a rich analysis of the shift to neoliberal economic policies in four Anglo-American democracies - Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand - over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. This period witnessed a dramatic shift away from traditional post-war consensus policies of active state economic intervention, public ownership, and full employment toward those informed by an ideological commitment to deregulation, privatization, entrepreneurialism, and freer trade. Jonathan Swarts argues that this transformation was not simply a marginal adjustment in existing economic policies, but rather the result of political elites seeking to reshape what he calls their societies' "political-economic imaginaries." Swarts demonstrates that this shift cut across traditional party lines, and that in all four cases, the result was a new set of intersubjective norms about appropriate economic policies, the role of the state in the economy, the expectations and aspirations of citizens, and the very nature of an advanced industrial democracy in a globalizing world.

For better or worse, Navy captain William S. ""Deak"" Parsons made the atomic bomb happen. As ordnance chief and associate director at Los Alamos, Parsons turned the scientists' nuclear creation into a practical weapon. As weaponeer, he completed the assembly of ""Little Boy"" during the flight to Hiroshima. As bomb commander, he approved the release of the bomb that forever changed the world. Yet over the past fifty years only fragments of his story have appeared, in part because of his own self-effacement and the nation's demand for secrecy. Based on recently declassified Manhattan Project documents, including Parsons's logs and other untapped sources, the book offers an unvarnished account of this unsung hero and his involvement in some of the greatest scientific advances of the twentieth century. Described by the author as a naval officer with the heart of a sailor and the searching mind of a scientist, Parsons was the first officer to recognize radar's full potential, the military's leader in the development of the proximity fuse, and the warrior who took both that fuse and the atom bomb--the two most revolutionary weapons of World War II--into combat. Al Christman credits the success of many programs to Parsons's battles against bureaucratic inertia, his championing of new ideas, and his charismatic but low-key leadership. His influence continued even after the war when the so-called ""Atomic Admiral"" helped establish the Navy's postwar nuclear policies and advance the scientific developments that are at the heart of today's sea service. Filled with human drama set against a background of national peril, this book tells a fascinating story that will draw in even the nontechnical reader.

From the twelve days of Christmas to the Spring traditions of Valentine, Shrovetide, and Easter eggs, through May Day revels and Midsummer fires, and on to the waning of the year, Harvest Home, and Hallowe'en; Ronald Hutton takes us on a fascinating journey through the ritual year in Britain.
His comprehensive study covers all the British Isles and the whole sweep of history from the earliest written records to the present day. Great and lesser, ancient and modern, Christian and pagan, all rituals are treated with the same attention. The result is a colorful and absorbing history in which Ronald Hutton challenges many common assumptions about the customs of the past and the festivals of the present debunking many myths and illuminates the history of the calendar we live by.
Stations of the Sun is the first complete scholarly work to cover the full span of British rituals, challenging the work of specialists from the late Victorian period onwards, reworking our picture of the field thoroughly, and raising issues for historians of every period.

When Ishi, "the last wild Indian," came out of hiding in August of 1911, he was quickly whisked away by train to San Francisco to meet Alfred Kroeber, one of the fathers of American anthropology. When Kroeber and Ishi came face to face, it was a momentous event, not only for each man, but for the cultures they represented. Each stood on the brink: one culture was in danger of losing something vital while the other was in danger of disappearing altogether. Ishi was a survivor, and viewed the bright lights of the big city with a mixture of awe and bemusement. What surprised everyone is how handily he adapted himself to the modern city while maintaining his sense of self and his culture. He and his people had ingeniously used everything they could get their hands on from whites to survive in hiding, and now Ishi was doing the same in San Francisco. The wild man was in fact doubly civilized-he had his own culture, and he opened himself up to that of modern America. Kroeber was professionally trained to document Ishi's culture, his civilization. What he didn't count on was how deeply working with the man would lead him to question his own profession and his civilization-how it would rekindle a wildness of his own. Though Ishi's story has been told before in film and fiction, Wild Men is the first book to focus on the depth of Ishi and Kroeber's friendship and to explore what their intertwined stories tell us about Indian survival in modern America and about America's fascination with the wild even as it was becoming ever-more urban and modern. Wild Men is about two individuals and two worlds intimately brought together in ways that turned out to be at once inspiring and tragic. Each man stood looking at the other from the opposite edge of a chasm: they reached out in the hope of keeping the other from falling in.

In this book, Susan Edmunds explores he relationship between modernist domestic fiction and the rise of the U.S. welfare state. This relationship, which began in the Progressive era, emerged as maternalist reformers developed an inverted discourse of social housekeeping in order to call for state protection and regulation of the home. Modernists followed suit, turning the genre of domestic fiction inside out in order to represent new struggles on the border between home, market and state. Edmunds uses the work of Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Tillie Olsen, Edna Ferber, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor to trace the significance of modernists' radical reconstitution of the genre of domestic fiction. Using a grotesque aesthetic of revolutionary inversion, these writers looped their depictions of the domestic sphere through revolutionary discourses associated with socialism, consumerism and the avant-garde. These authors used their grotesque discourses to deal with issues of social conflict ranging from domestic abuse and racial violence to educational reform, public health care, eugenics, and social security. With the New Deal, the U.S. welfare state realized maternalist ambitions to disseminate a modern sentimental version of the home to all white citizens, successfully translating radical bids for collective social security into a racialized order of selective and detached domestic security. The book argues that modernists engaged and contested this historical trajectory from the start. In the process, they forged an enduring set of terms for understanding and negotiating the systemic forms of ambivalence, alienation and conflict that accompany Americans' contemporary investments in"family values."

Scholars of language ideology have encouraged us to reflect on and explore where social categories come from, how they have been reproduced, and whether and to what extent they are relevant to everyday interactional practices. Taking up on these issues, this book focuses on how ethnicity has been semiotically constructed, valued, and reproduced in Indonesia since Dutch colonial times, and how this category is drawn upon in everyday talk. In doing so, this book also seeks to engage with scholarship on superdiversity while highlighting some points of engagement with work on ideas about community. The book draws upon a broad range of scholarship on Indonesia, recordings of Indonesian television from the mid-1990s onwards, and recordings of the talk of Indonesian students living in Japan. It is argued that some of the main mechanisms for the reproduction and revaluation of ethnicity and its links with linguistic form include waves of technological innovations that bring people into contact (e.g. changes in transportation infrastructure, introduction of print media, television, radio, the internet, etc.), and the increasing use of one-to-many participation frameworks such as school classrooms and the mass media. In examining the talk of sojourning Indonesians the book goes on to explore how ideologies about ethnicity are used to establish and maintain convivial social relations while in Japan. Maintaining such relationships is not a trivial thing and it is argued that the pursuit of conviviality is an important practice because of its relationship with broader concerns about eking out a living.

The Vietnam War, Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine High School shooting, and attacks of 9/11 all shattered myths of national identity. Vietnam was a war the U.S. didn't win on the ground in Asia or politically at home; Oklahoma City revealed domestic terrorism in the heartland; Columbine debunked legends of high school as an idyllic time; and 9/11 demonstrated U.S. vulnerability to international terrorism. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was intended to separate the victims from the war that caused their death. This focus on individuals lost (evident in all the memorials and museums discussed here) conflates the function of cemeteries, where deaths are singular and grieving is personal, with that of memorials - to remember and mourn communal losses and reflect on national events seen in a larger context. Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of this new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of privileged participants in the permanent memorial process. It argues against this practice, suggesting instead that victims' families be charged with determining the nature of an interim memorial, one that addresses their needs in the critical time between the murder of their loved ones and the completion of the permanent memorial. It also charges that the memorials discussed here are variously based on strategies of diversion and denial that direct our attention away from actual events, and reframe tragedy as secular or religious triumph. Thus they basically camouflage history. Seen as an aggregate, they define a nation of victims, exactly the concept they and their accompanying celebratory narratives were apparently created to obscure.

Mark Sanders examines how South Africa’s apartheid-era computerization entrenched racial labour hierarchies and how writers and artists responded to and reimagined the ethics and politics of automation.

In A Will for the Machine, Sanders outlines South Africa’s entry into the computer age in the 1960s and 1970s and explains how it coincided with apartheid’s zenith. The government viewed automation and computerisation as one way of barring black Africans from skilled work and reserving it for whites. Sanders unpacks this peculiar history, relates it to early twentieth-century struggles around mechanisation in local mining and telephony, and analyses responses by the writers Miriam Tlali and J.M. Coetzee, as well as artists William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company.

Showing how the arts realise ideas about the ethics and politics of automation, Sanders contributes to debates about locally divergent understandings of computer technology and human–computer interaction.

"The book is the product of a protracted, laborious and scrupulous research and draws on a most extensive and varied assembly of documents. But the archival evidence, factual accounts and even personal narratives would have remained remote, dry and cold if not for the author's remarkable gift of empathy. Barbara Engelking gives the witnesses of the Holocaust a voice which readers of this book will understand....Under her pen memories come alive again."--from the Foreword by Zygmunt BaumanOriginally published in Polish to great acclaim and based on interviews with survivors of the Holocaust in Poland, Holocaust and Memory provides a moving description of their life during the war and the sense they made of it. The book begins by looking at the differences between the wartime experiences of Jews and Poles in occupied Poland, both in terms of Nazi legislation and individual experiences. On the Aryan side of the ghetto wall, Jews could either be helped or blackmailed by Poles. The largest section of the book reconstructs everyday life in the ghetto. The psychological consequences of wartime experiences are explored, including interviews with survivors who stayed on in Poland after the war and were victims of anti-Semitism again in 1968. These discussions bring into question some of the accepted survivor stereotypes found in Holocaust literature. A final chapter looks at the legacy of the Holocaust, the problems of transmitting experience and of the place of the Holocaust in Polish history and culture.

A vast region stretching roughly from the Volga River to Manchuria and the northern Chinese borderlands, Central Asia has been called the "pivot of history," a land where nomadic invaders and Silk Road traders changed the destinies of states that ringed its borders, including pre-modern Europe, the Middle East, and China. In Central Asia in World History, Peter B. Golden provides an engaging account of this important region, ranging from prehistory to the present, focusing largely on the unique melting pot of cultures that this region has produced over millennia. Golden describes the traders who braved the heat and cold along caravan routes to link East Asia and Europe; the Mongol Empire of Chinggis Khan and his successors, the largest contiguous land empire in history; the invention of gunpowder, which allowed the great sedentary empires to overcome the horse-based nomads; the power struggles of Russia and China, and later Russia and Britain, for control of the area. Finally, he discusses the region today, a key area that neighbors such geopolitical hot spots as Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China.

Derived from the word "to propagate," the idea and practice of propaganda concerns nothing less than the ways in which human beings communicate, particularly with respect to the creation and widespread dissemination of attitudes, images, and beliefs. Much larger than its pejorative connotations suggest, propaganda can more neutrally be understood as a central means of organizing and shaping thought and perception, a practice that has been a pervasive feature of the twentieth century and that touches on many fields. It has been seen as both a positive and negative force, although abuses under the Third Reich and during the Cold War have caused the term to stand in, most recently, as a synonym for untruth and brazen manipulation. Propaganda analysis of the 1950s to 1989 too often took the form of empirical studies about the efficacy of specific methods, with larger questions about the purposes and patterns of mass persuasion remaining unanswered. In the present moment where globalization and transnationality are arguably as important as older nation forms, when media enjoy near ubiquity throughout the globe, when various fundamentalisms are ascendant, and when debates rage about neoliberalism, it is urgent that we have an up-to-date resource that considers propaganda as a force of culture writ large. The handbook will include twenty-two essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, divided into three sections. In addition to dealing with the thorny question of definition, the handbook will take up an expansive set of assumptions and a full range of approaches that move propaganda beyond political campaigns and warfare to examine a wide array of cultural contexts and practices.

An innovative and accessible overview of how ancient Scandinavians understood and made use of their mythological stories. Old Norse Mythology provides a unique survey of the mythology of Scandinavia: the gods THorr (Thor) with his hammer, the wily and duplicitous Odinn (Odin), the sly Loki, and other fascinating figures. They create the world, battle their enemies, and die at the end of the world, which arises anew with a new generation of gods. These stories were the mythology of the Vikings, but they were not written down until long after the conversion to Christianity, mostly in Iceland. In addition to a broad overview of Nordic myths, the book presents a case study of one myth, which tells of how THorr (Thor) fished up the World Serpent, analyzing the myth as a sacred text of the Vikings. Old Norse Mythology also explores the debt we owe to medieval intellectuals, who were able to incorporate the old myths into new paradigms that helped the myths to survive when they were no longer part of a religious system. This superb introduction traces the use of the mythology in ideological contexts, from the Viking Age until the twenty-first century, as well as in entertainment.