After Empires describes how the end of colonial empires and the changes in international politics and economies after decolonization affected the European integration process. Until now, studies on European integration have often focussed on the search for peaceful relations among the European nations, particularly between Germany and France, or examined it as an offspring of the Cold War, moving together with the ups and downs of transatlantic relations. But these two factors alone are not enough to explain the rise of the European Community and its more recent transformation into the European Union. Giuliano Garavini focuses instead on the emergence of the Third World as an international actor, starting from its initial economic cooperation with the creation of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964 up to the end of unity among the countries of the Global South after the second oil shock in 1979-80. Offering a new - less myopic - way to conceptualise European history more globally, the study is based on a variety of international archives (government archives in Europe, the US, Algeria, Venezuela; international organizations such as the EC, UNCTAD, and the World Bank; political and social organizations such as the Socialist International, labour archives and the papers of oil companies) and traces the reactions and the initiatives of the countries of the European Community, but also of the European political parties and public opinion, to the rise and fall of the Third World on the international stage.

The decades since the 1980s have witnessed an unprecedented surge in research about Latin American history. This much-needed volume brings together original essays by renowned scholars to provide the first comprehensive assessment of this burgeoning literature.
The seventeen original essays in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History survey the recent historiography of the colonial era, independence movements, and postcolonial periods and span Mexico, Spanish South America, and Brazil. They begin by questioning the limitations and meaning of Latin America as a conceptual organization of space within the Americas and how the region became excluded from broader studies of the Western hemisphere. Subsequent essays address indigenous peoples of the region, rural and urban history, slavery and race, African, European and Asian immigration, labor, gender and sexuality, religion, family and childhood, economics, politics, and disease and medicine. In so doing, they bring together traditional approaches to politics and power, while examining the quotidian concerns of workers, women and children, peasants, and racial and ethnic minorities.
This volume provides the most complete state of the field and is an indispensible resource for scholars and students of Latin America.

Protracted occupation has become a rare phenomenon in the 21st century. One notable exception is Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which began over four decades ago after the Six-Day War in 1967. While many studies have examined the effects of occupation on the occupied society, which bears most of the burdens of occupation, this book directs its attention to the occupiers. The effects of occupation on the occupying society are not always easily observed, and are therefore difficult to study. Yet through their analysis, the authors of this volume show how occupation has detrimental effects on the occupiers. The effects of occupation do not stop in the occupied territories, but penetrate deeply into the fabric of the occupying society. The Impacts of Lasting Occupation examines the effects that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories have had on Israeli society. The consequences of occupation are evident in all aspects of Israeli life, including its political, social, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological spheres. Occupation has shaped Israel's national identity as a whole, in addition to the day-to-day lives of Israeli citizens. Daniel Bar-Tal and Izhak Schnell have brought together a wide range of academic experts to show how occupation has led to the deterioration of democracy and moral codes, threatened personal security, and limited economic growth in Israel.

Birmingham is a city with an extraordinarily diverse achievement in fields as varied as science, industry, politics, education, medicine, printing and the arts. Labels such as the 'first industrial city', 'city of a thousand trades', 'the best-governed city in the world' and 'the youngest city in Europe' have been applied to the town. This new publication, the first major history of Birmingham since the 1970s, is published to commemorate the 850th anniversary of Birmingham's market charter in 1166, an event which marked the first step in the rise of Birmingham as a commercial and industrial powerhouse. Authored by scholars, but written for a general readership, this detailed, accessible and richly illustrated book is both a definitive reference work and a readable account of a diverse, culturally rich and high-achieving city. Many aspects of the history of Birmingham are presented for the first time outside academic publications: its diverse people's history, a rich prehistoric and Roman past, the rise of Birmingham in medieval and early modern times, the evolution of an innovative system of education, a varied experience in art and design and an extraordinary printing history. The book covers economic and political themes and new approaches to the history of society and culture. It is illustrated with many images which have never before been published either in books or on the web. The result is a visually stunning and factually illuminating book which will appeal to many kinds of people.

At once disturbing and perversely comforting, the crime novel has historically been used to curtail social anxieties through the ‘open and shut case’ of its narrative form. But what happens to that form in a world where guilt and innocence cannot be so easily assigned?

Return to the Scene of the Crime takes on the trope of the investigator who returns to the postcolony on a quest for knowledge. In tandem with solving the case, they must also grapple with the complexities of their own origins. Kamil Naicker shows how five authors defy generic expectation in order to illustrate the complexity of personal identity, transitional justice and civil violence in the postcolonial world.

Bringing together novels set in South Africa, China, Guatemala, Sri Lanka and Somalia, this book makes a marked intervention in the field of literary studies, by both bringing to light the trend of the returnee figure and exploring the possibilities of world-making through the explosion of a familiar form.

The United States has never had an officially established church. Since the time of the first British colonists, it has instead developed a strong civil religion that melds national symbols to symbols of God. In a deft exploration of American civil religious symbols ranging from the Liberty Bell and Vietnam Memorial to Mount Rushmore and Disney World, Peter Gardella explains how the places, objects, and symbols that Americans hold sacred came into being and how they have changed over time. In addition to examining revered historical sites and structures, he analyzes such sacred texts as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Kennedy Inaugural, and the speeches of Martin Luther King, and shows how five patriotic songs-''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic'' ''America the Beautiful,'' ''God Bless America,'' and ''This Land Is Your Land''-have been elevated into hymns. Arguing that certain values-personal freedom, political democracy, world peace, and cultural tolerance-have held American civil religion together, this book chronicles the numerous forms those values have taken, from Jamestown and Plymouth to the September 11, 2001, Memorial in New York.

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium, opening these fields for further research. The Handbook is structured into seven sections: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labour, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change throughout the medieval period. This Handbook contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and will not only serve as the major reference text in the area of medieval and gender studies, but will also provide the agenda for future new research.

Since at least 1939, when daily-strip caveman Alley Oop time-traveled to the Trojan War, comics have been drawing (on) material from Greek and Roman myth, literature and history. At times the connection is cosmetic-as perhaps with Wonder Woman's Amazonian heritage-and at times it is almost irrelevant-as with Hercules' starfaring adventures in the 1982 Marvel miniseries. But all of these make implicit or explicit claims about the place of classics in modern literary culture.
Classics and Comics is the first book to explore the engagement of classics with the epitome of modern popular literature, the comic book. This volume collects sixteen articles, all specially commissioned for this volume, that look at how classical content is deployed in comics and reconfigured for a modern audience. It opens with a detailed historical introduction surveying the role of classical material in comics since the 1930s. Subsequent chapters cover a broad range of topics, including the incorporation of modern theories of myth into the creation and interpretation of comic books, the appropriation of characters from classical literature and myth, and the reconfiguration of motif into a modern literary medium. Among the well-known comics considered in the collection are Frank Miller's 300 and Sin City, DC Comics' Wonder Woman, Jack Kirby's The Eternals, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and examples of Japanese manga. The volume also includes an original 12-page "comics-essay," drawn and written by Eisner Award-winning Eric Shanower, creator of the graphic novel series Age of Bronze.

Lord Derby, Lancashire's highest-ranked nobleman and its principal royalist, once offered the opinion that the English civil wars had been a 'general plague of madness'. Complex and bedevilling, the earl defied anyone to tell the complete story of 'so foolish, so wicked, so lasting a war'. Yet attempting to chronicle and to explain the events is both fascinating and hugely important. Nationally and at the county level the impact and significance of the wars can hardly be over-stated: the conflict involved our ancestors fighting one another, on and off, for a period of nine years; almost every part of Lancashire witnessed warfare of some kind at one time or another, and several towns in particular saw bloody sieges and at least one episode characterised as a massacre. Nationally the wars resulted in the execution of the king; in 1651 the Earl of Derby himself was executed in Bolton in large measure because he had taken a leading part in the so-called massacre in that town in 1644.In the early months of the civil wars many could barely distinguish what it was that divided people in 'this war without an enemy', as the royalist William Waller famously wrote; yet by the end of it parliament had abolished monarchy itself and created the only republic in over a millennium of England's history. Over the ensuing centuries this period has been described variously as a rebellion, as a series of civil wars, even as a revolution. Lancashire's role in these momentous events was quite distinctive, and relative to the size of its population particularly important. Lancashire lay right at the centre of the wars, for the conflict did not just encompass England but Ireland and Scotland too, and Lancashire's position on the coast facing Catholic, Royalist Ireland was seen as critical from the very first months.And being on the main route south from Scotland meant that the county witnessed a good deal of marching and marauding armies from the north. In this, the first full history of the Lancashire civil wars for almost a century, Stephen Bull makes extensive use of new discoveries to narrate and explain the exciting, terrible events which our ancestors witnessed in the cause either of king or parliament. From Furness to Liverpool, and from the Wyre estuary to Manchester and Warrington...civil war actions, battles, sieges and skirmishes took place in virtually every corner of Lancashire.

Adored by many, appalling to some, baffling still to others, few authors defy any single critical narrative to the confounding extent that James Baldwin manages. Was he a black or queer writer? Was he a religious or secular writer? Was he a spokesman for the civil rights movement or a champion of the individual? His critics, as disparate as his readership, endlessly wrestle with paradoxes, not just in his work but also in the life of a man who described himself as "all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin" and who declared that "all theories are suspect." Viewing Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach, All Those Strangers examines how his fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Showing how external forces molded Baldwinas personal, political, and psychological development, Douglas Field breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwinas geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin's life and work, including his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing, while also contributing to wider discussions about postwar US culture. Field deftly navigates key twentieth-century themesathe Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalismato bring a number of isolated subjects into dialogue with each other. By exploring the paradoxes in Baldwin's development as a writer, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single framework, All Those Strangers contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin's life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. By studying him as an individual and an artist in flux, Field reveals the manifold ways in which Baldwin's work develops and coheres.