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Books > History
This edition of the writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98),
barrister, United Irishman, agent of the Catholic Committee and
later an officer in the French revolutionary army, is intended to
comprehend all his writings and largely to supersede the two-volume
Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone. ..written by himself that was edited
by his son William, and published at Washington in 1826. It
consists mainly of Tone's correspondence, diaries, autobiography,
pamphlets, public addresses, and miscellaneous memoranda (both
personal and public); it is based on the original MSS if extant or
the most reliable printed sources.
Tone's participation in Irish politics in the early 1790s and his
presence on the periphery of the ruling circle in revolutionary
France from February 1796 to September 1798 would be sufficient to
make his writings a major historical source. The literary quality
of his writings, diaries, and autobiography enhances their
importance. The unique quality of Tone's writings is that they are
the production of a gifted and convivial young Irishman who moved
widely in intellectual and political circles.
This volume - France, the Rhine, Lough Swilly, and the Death of
Tone - completes the edition, following the last part of Tone's
life, until his death following the abortive Irish uprising of
1798. It includes addenda, corrigenda, an iconography, a
bibliography, and a complete index to all three volumes.
The astonishing, true story of a group of Jewish children who
managed to escape from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and survive in the
Aryan section of the Nazi-occupied city. Sentenced to death,
hounded at every step, they kept themselves alive by peddling
cigarettes in Warsaws Three Crosses Square - where the author, a
member of the Jewish Underground in Poland, met and helped them and
recorded their story. Several of the children were finally caught
and killed, but most survived and are alive today. The story of the
cigarette sellers has been published in Polish, Romanian, Hebrew
and Yiddish, and a dramatised version has been broadcast in Israel.
The book was awarded a literary prize by the World Jewish Congress
in New York.
Here is a fascinating compact history of Chinese political,
economic, and cultural life, ranging from the origins of
civilization in China to the beginning of the 21st century.
Historian Paul Ropp combines vivid story-telling with astute
analysis to shed light on some of the larger questions of Chinese
history. What is distinctive about China in comparison with other
civilizations? What have been the major changes and continuities in
Chinese life over the past four millennia? Offering a global
perspective, the book shows how China's nomadic neighbors to the
north and west influenced much of the political, military, and even
cultural history of China. Ropp also examines Sino-Indian
relations, highlighting the impact of the thriving trade between
India and China as well as the profound effect of Indian Buddhism
on Chinese life. Finally, the author discusses the humiliation of
China at the hands of Western powers and Japan, explaining how
these recent events have shaped China's quest for wealth, power and
respect today, and have colored China's perception of its own place
in world history.
Eva Tichauer was born in Berlin at the end of the First World War
into a socialist Jewish family. After a happy childhood in a
well-off intellectual milieu, the destiny of her family was turned
upside-down by the rise of Hitler in 1933. They emigrated to Paris
in July of that year, and life started to become difficult. Eva was
in her second year of medical studies in 1939 when war was
declared, with fatal consequences for her and her family: they sere
forced to the Spanish frontier, then returned to Paris to a flat
which had been searched by the Gestapo. Eva was then compelled to
break off her studies due to a quota system being imposed on Jewish
students.
Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence, written in
1780-2, is the continuation of An Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation, and thus part of the introduction to the
projected penal code on which Bentham worked in the late 1770s and
early 1780s. The work emerged from Bentham's attempt to distinguish
between civil and penal law, which led him into an exposition of
the nature and scope of an individual law and an analysis of such
key legal terms as power, duty, right, property, contract, and
conveyance. Bentham addresses the relationship between different
'aspects' of the legislator's will, such as command, prohibition,
and permission, and in so doing develops a 'logic of the will'
which anticipates modern deontic logic. He explains that the
disposition of the people to obey constitutes the basis of
political and legal power, and distinguishes between law addressed
to the sovereign and law addressed to the people. Dealing with some
of the most fundamental problems in jurisprudence and the theory of
human action, Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence is
a work of outstanding originality and seminal importance in the
field of legal philosophy. The volume contains an Editorial
Introduction which explains the provenance of the text, and the
method of presentation. The text is fully annotated with textual
and historical notes, and the volume is completed with detailed
subject and name indices. This edition of Of the Limits of the
Penal Branch of Jurisprudence supersedes Of Laws in General, edited
by H.L.A. Hart and published by the Athlone Press in 1970, as a
volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham.
This unique and true story of a young boy, skillfully describes the
small Jewish agricultural village of Dowgalishok in eastern Poland
(modern-day Belarus) and its neighboring towns of Radun and
Eishishok. With a loving eye for detail the Jewish atmosphere is
brought to life along with the village inhabitants, from the
pastoral days before the Second World War to its sudden destruction
by the Nazi regime. The first part of the book is a vivid
description of Yiddish-kite that has vanished forever. The second
part is a bleak testimony of a survivor of the ghetto and the
slaughter beside the terrible death pit outside Radun. The third
and last part of the book is the story of twenty-six months of
escape and struggle for life, first in the woods among farmers and
later on as a partisan in the nearby ancient forest. The author
tells his story in a simple and fluent style, creating both a
personal testimony and a historical document. The Hebrew edition of
the book was well received by many critics, both in Israel and
around the world, for its deeply moving quality as well as for its
documental value as a record of one of the darkest chapters of
mankind.
Xenophon's Anabasis, or The Expedition of Cyrus, is one of the most
exciting historical narratives-as well as the most important
autobiographical work-to have survived from ancient Greece. It
tells the story of Cyrus, a young and charismatic Persian prince,
who in 401 BC enlisted more than ten thousand Greek mercenaries in
an attempt to seize the vast Persian empire for himself. Cyrus was
killed in a great battle, most of the Greek commanders subsequently
fell victim to treachery, and an Athenian aristocrat by the name of
Xenophon found himself in the unexpected position of taking charge
and leading the Greeks from the vicinity of Babylon in modern Iraq
back to the Greek cities in Turkey. This book both places the
Anabasis in its historical and literary context and, by employing a
variety of critical methods, opens up for the reader different ways
of interpreting its major themes. Interrelated chapters investigate
Xenophon's self-representation as a model leader, his possible
didactic and apologetic purposes for writing, the generic
expectations of his contemporary audience, the factual accuracy of
the Anabasis, and the ways in which the gods are depicted as
intervening in human affairs. This book unveils the literary
artistry and narrative strategies that have gone into shaping one
of the greatest survival stories of all time.
Perhaps no other single Roman speech exemplifies the connection
between oratory, politics and imperialism better than Cicero's De
Provinciis Consularibus, pronounced to the senate in 56 BC. Cicero
puts his talents at the service of the powerful "triumviri"
(Caesar, Crassus and Pompey), whose aims he advances by appealing
to the senators' imperialistic and chauvinistic ideology. This
oration, then, yields precious insights into several areas of late
republican life: international relations between Rome and the
provinces (Gaul, Macedonia and Judaea); the senators' view on
governors, publicani (tax-farmers) and foreigners; the dirty
mechanics of high politics in the 50s, driven by lust for
domination and money; and Cicero's own role in that political
choreography. This speech also exemplifies the exceptional range of
Cicero's oratory: the invective against Piso and Gabinius calls for
biting irony, the praise of Caesar displays high rhetoric, the
rejection of other senators' recommendations is a tour de force of
logical and sophisticated argument, and Cicero's justification for
his own conduct is embedded in the self-fashioning narrative which
is typical of his post reditum speeches. This new commentary
includes an updated introduction, which provides the readers with a
historical, rhetorical and stylistic background to appreciate the
complexities of Cicero's oration, as well as indexes and maps.
Jacob Arminius (1559-1609) is one of the few theologians in the
history of Christianity who has lent his name to a significant
theological movement. The dissemination of his thought throughout
Europe, Great Britain, and North America, along with the appeal of
his ideas in current Protestant evangelical spheres (whether
rightly understood or misunderstood), continue to attract both
scholarly and popular attention. Keith Stanglin and Thomas McCall's
Jacob Arminius offers a constructive synthesis of the current state
of Arminius studies. There is a chasm separating technical,
scholarly discussions of Arminius and popular-level appeals to his
thought. The authors seek to bridge the scholarly and general
discussions, providing an account based on interaction with all the
primary sources and latest secondary research that will be helpful
to the scholar as well as comprehensible and relevant to the
undergraduate student. The authors describe key elements of
Arminius' theology with careful attention to its proper context;
they also explore the broader theological implications of his
views.
This volume illuminates and critically assesses Paul A. Samuelson's
voluminous and groundbreaking contributions to the field of
economics. The volume includes contributions from eminent scholars,
including six Nobel Laureates, covering the extraordinary depth and
breadth of Samuelson's contributions.
In a groundbreaking examination of the antislavery origins of
liberal Protestantism, Molly Oshatz contends that the antebellum
slavery debates forced antislavery Protestants to adopt an
historicist understanding of truth and morality. Unlike earlier
debates over slavery, the antebellum slavery debates revolved
around the question of whether or not slavery was a sin in the
abstract. Unable to use the letter of the Bible to answer the
proslavery claim that slavery was not a sin in and of itself,
antislavery Protestants, including William Ellery Channing, Francis
Wayland, Moses Stuart, Leonard Bacon, and Horace Bushnell, argued
that biblical principles opposed slavery and that God revealed
slavery's sinfulness through the gradual unfolding of these
principles. Although they believed that slavery was a sin,
antislavery Protestants' sympathy for individual slaveholders and
their knowledge of the Bible made them reluctant to denounce all
slaveholders as sinners. In order to reconcile slavery's sinfulness
with their commitments to the Bible and to the Union, antislavery
Protestants defined slavery as a social rather than an individual
sin. Oshatz demonstrates that the antislavery notions of
progressive revelation and social sin had radical implications for
Protestant theology. Oshatz carries her study through the Civil War
to reveal how emancipation confirmed for northern Protestants the
antislavery notion that God revealed His will through history. She
describes how after the war, a new generation of liberal
theologians, including Newman Smyth, Charles Briggs, and George
Harris, drew on the example of antislavery and emancipation to
respond to evolution and historical biblical criticism. The
theological innovations rooted in the slavery debates came to
fruition in liberal Protestantism's acceptance of the historical
and evolutionary nature of religious truth.
Focusing on the key role of the English medieval parliament in
hearing and determining the requests of the king's subjects, this
ground-breaking new study examines the private petition and its
place in the late medieval English parliament (c.1270-1450). Until
now, historians have focussed on the political and financial
significance of the English medieval parliament; this book offers
an important re-evaluation placing the emphasis on parliament as a
crucial element in the provision of royal government and justice.
It looks at the nature of medieval petitioning, how requests were
written and how and why petitioners sought redress specifically in
parliament. It also sheds new light on the concept of royal grace
and its practical application to parliamentary petitions that
required the king's personal intervention.
The book traces the development of private petitioning over a
period of almost two hundred years, from a point when parliament
was essentially an instrument of royal administration, to one where
it was self-consciously dispatching petitions as the highest court
of the land. Gwilym Dodd considers not only the detail of the
petitionary process, but also broader questions about the
government of late medieval England. His conclusions contribute to
our understanding of the nature of medieval monarchy, and its
ability (or willingness) to address local difficulties, as well as
the nature of local society, and the problems that faced
individuals and communities in medieval society.
In The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn looks beyond and
beneath the formal doctrinal and moral demands of the Reformation
in Germany to examine the emotional tenor of the programs that the
emerging creeds-revised Catholicism, Lutheranism, and
Calvinism/Reformed theology-developed for their members. As
revealed by the surviving sermons from this period, preaching
clergy of each faith both explicitly and implicitly provided their
listeners with distinct models of a mood to be cultivated. To
encourage their parishioners to make an emotional investment in
their faith, all three drew upon rhetorical elements that were
already present in late medieval Catholicism and elevated them into
confessional touchstones.
Looking at archival materials containing direct references to
feeling, Karant-Nunn focuses on treatments of death and sermons on
the Passion. She amplifies these sources with considerations of the
decorative, liturgical, musical, and disciplinary changes that
ecclesiastical leaders introduced during the period from the late
fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Within individual
sermons, Karant-Nunn also examines topical elements-including Jews
at the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's voluminous weeping below the
Cross, and struggles against competing denominations-that were
intended to arouse particular kinds of sentiment. Finally, she
discusses surviving testimony from the laity in order to assess at
least some Christians' reception of these lessons on proper
devotional feeling.
This book is exceptional in its presentation of a cultural rather
than theological or behavioral study of the broader movement to
remake Christianity. As Karant-Nunn conclusively demonstrates, in
the eyes of the Reformation's formative personalities strict
adherence to doctrine and upright demeanor did not constitute an
adequate piety. The truly devout had to engage their hearts in
their faith.
The Second World War affected the lives and shaped the experience
of millions of individuals in Germany--soldiers at the front,
women, children and the elderly sheltering in cellars, slave
laborers toiling in factories, and concentration-camp prisoners and
POWs clearing rubble in the Reich's devastated cities.
Taking a "history from below" approach, the volume examines how
the minds and behaviour of individuals were moulded by the Party as
the Reich took the road to Total War. The ever-increasing numbers
of German workers conscripted into the Wehrmacht were replaced with
forced foreign workers and slave labourers and concentration camp
prisoners. The interaction in everyday life between German civilian
society and these coerced groups is explored, as is that society's
relationship to the Holocaust.
From early 1943, the war on the home front was increasingly
dominated by attack from the air. The role of the Party,
administration, police, and courts in providing for the vast
numbers of those rendered homeless, in bolstering civilian morale
with "miracle revenge weapons" propaganda, and in maintaining order
in a society in disintegration is reviewed in detail.
For society in uniform, the war in the east was one of ideology
and annihilation, with intensified indoctrination of the troops
after Stalingrad. The social profile of this army is analysed
through study of a typical infantry division. The volume concludes
with an account of the various forms of resistance to Hitler's
regime, in society and the military, culminating in the failed
attempt on his life in July 1944.
Texas and California are the leaders of Red and Blue America. As
the nation has polarized, its most populous and economically
powerful states have taken charge of the opposing camps. These
states now advance sharply contrasting political and policy agendas
and view themselves as competitors for control of the nation's
future. Kenneth P. Miller provides a detailed account of the
rivalry's emergence, present state, and possible future. First, he
explores why, despite their many similarities, the two states have
become so deeply divided. As he shows, they experienced critical
differences in their origins and in their later demographic,
economic, cultural, and political development. Second, he describes
how Texas and California have constructed opposing, comprehensive
policy models-one conservative, the other progressive. Miller
highlights the states' contrasting policies in five areas-tax,
labor, energy and environment, poverty, and social issues-and also
shows how Texas and California have led the red and blue state
blocs in seeking to influence federal policy in these areas. The
book concludes by assessing two models' strengths, vulnerabilities,
and future prospects. The rivalry between the two states will
likely continue for the foreseeable future, because California will
surely stay blue and Texas will likely remain red. The challenge
for the two states, and for the nation as a whole, is to view the
competition in a positive light and turn it to productive ends.
Exploring one of the primary rifts in American politics, Texas vs.
California sheds light on virtually every aspect of the country's
political system.
This book is the first attempt that has ever been made to give a
comprehensive account of the religious life of ancient Athens. The
city's many festivals are discussed in detail, with attention to
recent anthropological theory; so too, for instance, are the cults
of households and of smaller
groups, the role of religious practice and argumentation in public
life, the authority of priests, the activities of religious
professionals such as seers and priestesses, magic, the place of
theatrical representations of the gods within public attitudes to
the divine. A long final section considers
the sphere of activity of the various gods, and takes Athens as a
uniquely detailed test case for the structuralist approach to
polytheism. The work is a synchronic, thematically organized
complement (though designed to be read independently) to the same
author's Athenian Religion: A History (OUP,
1996).
We love freedom. We hate racism. But what do we do when these
values collide? In this wide-ranging book, Erik Bleich explores
policies that the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and
other liberal democracies have implemented when forced to choose
between preserving freedom and combating racism. Bleich's
comparative historical approach reveals that while most countries
have increased restrictions on racist speech, groups and actions
since the end of World War II, this trend has resembled a slow
creep more than a slippery slope. Each country has struggled to
achieve a balance between protecting freedom and reducing racism,
and the outcomes have been starkly different across time and place.
Building on these observations, Bleich argues that we should pay
close attention to the specific context and to the likely effects
of any policy we implement, and that any response should be
proportionate to the level of harm the racism inflicts. Ultimately,
the best way for societies to preserve freedom while fighting
racism is through processes of public deliberation that involve
citizens in decisions that impact the core values of liberal
democracies.
The importance of the medieval abbot needs no particular emphasis.
The monastic superiors of late medieval England ruled over
thousands of monks and canons, who swore to them vows of obedience;
they were prominent figures in royal and church government; and
collectively they controlled properties worth around double the
Crown's annual ordinary income. Moreover, as guardians of regular
observance and the primary interface between their monastery and
the wider world, abbots and priors were pivotal to the effective
functioning and well-being of the monastic order. The Abbots and
Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England provides the first
detailed study of English male monastic superiors, exploring their
evolving role and reputation between the fourteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Individual chapters examine the election and selection
of late medieval monastic heads; the internal functions of the
superior as the father of the community; the head of house as
administrator; abbatial living standards and modes of display;
monastic superiors' public role in service of the Church and Crown;
their external relations and reputation; the interaction between
monastic heads and the government in Henry VIII's England; the
Dissolution of the monasteries; and the afterlives of abbots and
priors following the suppression of their houses. This study of
monastic leadership sheds much valuable light on the religious
houses of late medieval and early Tudor England, including their
spiritual life, administration, spending priorities, and their
multi-faceted relations with the outside world. The Abbots and
Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England also elucidates the
crucial part played by monastic superiors in the dramatic events of
the 1530s, when many heads surrendered their monasteries into the
hands of Henry VIII.
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