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Books > Humanities > History
Sixties British rock and pop changed music history. While American
popular music dominated the record industry in the late fifties and
early sixties, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who,
and numerous other groups soon invaded the world at large and put
Britain at the center of the modern musical map. Please Please Me
offers an insider's view of the British pop-music recording
industry during the seminal period of 1956 to 1968, based on
personal recollections, contemporary accounts, and all relevant
data that situate this scene in the economic, political, and social
context of postwar Britain. Author Gordon Thompson weaves issues of
class, age, professional status, gender, and ethnicity into his
narrative, beginning with the rise of British beat groups and the
emergence of teenagers as consumers in postwar Britain, and moving
into the competition between performers and the recording industry
for control over the music. He interviews session musicians who
recorded anonymously with the Beatles, Hermans Hermits, and the
Kinks, professional musicians who toured with British bands
promoting records or providing dance music, songwriters, music
directors, and producers and engineers who worked with the
best-known performers of the era. The consequences of World War Two
for pop music in the late fifties and early sixties form the
backdrop for discussion of recording equipment, musical
instruments, and new jet-age transportation, all contributors to
the rise of British pop-music alongside the personalities that more
famously made entertainment news. And these famous personalities
traverse the pages of Please Please Me as well: performing
songwriters John Carter and Ken Lewis, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger
and Richards, Ray Davies, and Pete Townshend took center stage
while the production teams and session musicians created the art of
recording behind the doors of Londons studios. Drawing his
interpretation of the processes at work during this musical
revolution into a wider context, Thompson unravels the musical
change and innovation of the time with an eye on understanding what
traces individuals leave in the musical and recording process.
Opening up important new historical and musical understandings in a
repertoire that is at the core of rock music's history, Please
Please Me will appeal to all students, scholars, and fans of
popular music.
Iranian history has long been a source of fascination for European
and American observers. The country's ancient past preoccupied
nineteenth-century historians and archaeologists as they attempted
to construct a unified understanding of the ancient world. Iran's
medieval history has likewise preoccupied scholars who have long
recognized the Iranian plateau as a cultural crossroad of the
world's great civilizations. In more recent times, Iran has
continued to demand the attention of observers when, for example,
the revolution of 1978-79 dramatically burst onto the world stage,
or more recently, when the Iranian democracy movement has come to
once again challenge the status quo of the clerical regime. Iran's
dominance in the Middle East has brought it into conflict with the
United States and so it is the subject of almost daily coverage
from reporters. Sympathetic observers of Iran-students, scholars,
policy makers, journalists, and the educated public-tend to be
perplexed and confused by this tangled web of historical
development. Iran, as it appears to most observers, is a
foreboding, menacing, and far away land with a history that is
simply too difficult to fathom.
The Handbook is a guide to Iran's complex history. The book
emphasizes the large-scale continuities of Iranian history while
also describing the important patterns of transformation that have
characterized Iran's past. Each of the chapters focuses on a
specific epoch of Iranian history and surveys the general
political, social, cultural, and economic issues of that era. The
ancient period begins with chapters considering the anthropological
evidence of the prehistoric era, through to the early settled
civilizations of the Iranian plateau, and continuing to the rise of
the ancient Persian empires. The medieval section first considers
the Arab-Muslim conquest of the seventh century, and then moves on
to discuss the growing Turkish influence filtering in from Central
Asia beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The last third
of the book covers Iran in the modern era by considering the rise
of the Safavid state and its accompanying policy of centralization
and the introduction of Shi'ism, followed by essays on the problems
of reform and modernization in the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, and
finally with a chapter on the revolution of 1978-79 and its
aftermath.
The book is a collaborative exercise among scholars specializing in
a variety of sub-fields, and across a number of disciplines,
including history, art history, classics, literature, politics, and
linguistics. Here, readers can find a reliable and accessible
narrative that can serve as an introduction to the field of Iranian
studies. While the number of monographs published within
specialized subfields of Iranian history continues to proliferate,
there have been, to date, no books that attempt to produce a
comprehensive single-volume history of Iranian civilization.
Does history matter? Is it anything more than entertainment? And if
so, what practical relevance does it have? In this fully revised
second edition of a seminal text, John Tosh persuasively argues
that history is central to an informed and critical understanding
of topical issues in the present. Including a range of contemporary
examples from Brexit to child sexual abuse to the impact of the
internet, this is an important and practical introduction for all
students of history. Inspiring and empowering, this book provides
both students and general readers with a stimulating and practical
rationale for the study of history. It is essential reading for all
undergraduate students of history who require an engaging
introduction to the subject. New to this Edition: - Illustrative
examples and case studies are fully updated - Features a postscript
on British historians and Brexit - Bibliography is heavily revised
Chapters 22 and 23 of 2 Kings tell the story of the religious
reforms of the Judean King Josiah, who systematically destroyed the
cult places and installations where his own people worshipped in
order to purify Israelite religion and consolidate religious
authority in the hands of the Jerusalem temple priests. This
violent assertion of Israelite identity is portrayed as a pivotal
moment in the development of monotheistic Judaism. Monroe argues
that the use of cultic and ritual language in the account of the
reform is key to understanding the history of the text's
composition, and illuminates the essential, interrelated processes
of textual growth and identity construction in ancient Israel.
Until now, however, none of the scholarship on 2 Kings 22-23 has
explicitly addressed the ritual dimensions of the text. By
attending to the specific acts of defilement attributed to Josiah
as they resonate within the larger framework of Israelite ritual,
Monroe's work illuminates aspects of the text's language and
fundamental interests that have their closest parallels in the
priestly legal corpus known as the Holiness Code (Leviticus 17-26),
as well as in other priestly texts that describe methods of
eliminating contamination. She argues that these priestly-holiness
elements reflect an early literary substratum that was generated
close in time to the reign of Josiah, from within the same priestly
circles that produced the Holiness Code. The priestly composition
was reshaped in the hands of a post-Josianic, exilic or post-exilic
Deuteronomistic historian who transformed his source material to
suit his own ideological interests. The account of Josiah's reform
is thus imprinted with the cultural and religious attitudes of two
different sets of authors. Teasing these apart reveals a dialogue
on sacred space, sanctified violence and the nature of Israelite
religion that was formative in the development not only of 2 Kings
23, but of the historical books of the Bible more broadly.
Stonehenge is the world's most famous pre-historic monument and,
since the middle of the 19th century, probably the most
photographed. Using images from English Heritage's unique
photgraphic archive (the National Monuments Record), Stonehenge: A
History in Photographs charts the last 150 years in the life of
this extraordinary and iconic site. These largely unseen images
touch on various moments in Stonehenge's history, from the
leiusrely tourism in the last years of Victoria's reign to the
monument of today, a site visited each year by more than one
million people from all over the world. This book is a celebration
of Stonehenge, in fascinating and often very human images. The text
is written by archaeologist and television presenter Julian
Richards, someone with a genuine love of Stonehenge. This is a book
for all who share a fascination with this magical monument.
It's time to meet the real Vikings.
A comb, preserved in a bog, engraved with the earliest traces of a new writing system. A pagan shrine deep beneath a lava field. A note from an angry wife to a husband too long at the tavern. Doodles on birch-bark, made by an imaginative child.
From these tiny embers, Eleanor Barraclough blows back to life the vast, rich and complex world of the Vikings. These are not just the stories of kings, raiders and saga heroes. Here are the lives of ordinary people: the merchants, children, artisans, enslaved people, seers, travellers and storytellers who shaped the medieval Nordic world.
Immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary culture that spanned centuries and spread from its Scandinavian heartlands to the remote fjords of Greenland, the Arctic wastelands, the waterways and steppes of Eurasia, all the way to the Byzantine Empire and Islamic Caliphate.
Voices of Liberation: Archie Mafeje should be understood as an
attempt to contextualise Mafeje's work and thinking and adds to
gripping intellectual biographies of African intellectuals by
African researchers. Mafeje's scholarship can be categorised into
three broad areas: a critique of epistemological and methodological
issues in the social sciences; the land and agrarian question in
sub-Saharan Africa; and revolutionary theory and politics
(including questions of development and democracy). Noted for his
academic prowess, genius mind, incomparable wit and endless
struggle for his nation and greater Africa, Mafeje was also hailed
by his daughter, Dana El-Baz, as a 'giant' not only in the
intellectual sense but as a human being. Part I discusses Mafeje's
intellectual and political influences. Part II consists of seven of
Mafeje's original articles and seeks to contextualise his writings.
Part III reflects on Mafeje's intellectual legacy.
This is the first full scholarly study of British anticolonialism,
an offshoot of a massive global upsurge of sentiment which has
dominated much of the history of this century. In this wide-ranging
and important book, Stephen Howe surveys the attitudes and
activities relating to colonial issues of British critics of Empire
during the years of decolonisation. He also evaluates the changing
ways in which, arising out of the experience of Empire and
decolonisation, more general ideas about imperialism, nationalism,
and underdevelopment were developed during these years. His
discussion encompasses both the left wing of the Labour Party and
groups outside it: in the Communist Party, other independent
left-wing groups, and single-issue campaigns. The book has
considerable contemporary relevance, for British reactions to more
recent events - the Falklands and Gulf Wars, race relations, South
African apartheid - cannot fully be understood except in the
context of the experience of decolonisation and the legacy of
Empire.
This book is the never-before-told story of the dream to set up camp in a vast African wasteland and return it to its former glory as one of the world’s premier wildlands.
Outdoor writer Mike Arnold takes us on an impressionistic journey through Coutada 11, a once again magnificent natural area in Mozambique’s Zambeze Delta. Mike leads us from its poached-out days as a source of bush meat for starving villagers and civil war military troops to the arrival in the early ‘90s of hunting outfitter Mark Haldane and his partners, on their often perilous, sometimes hilarious, travails to take the defiled and uninhabitable place and make it whole again.
Through Mike’s encounters with Haldane and his crew of scientists, guides, and motor-cycle-riding poacher patrols; with local villagers who were an integral part from the beginning; and, of course, with the apex predators, birds, and game animals that 30 years ago no one could have imagined thriving in this locale, this book serves as proof that a small group of dedicated people can make all the difference, and dreams can come true.
At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney Jr. was
escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no
shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under
his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame
into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix
the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly
too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the
switch. That day, George Stinney became, and today remains, the
youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth
century.How was it possible, even in Jim Crow South Carolina, for a
child to be convicted, sentenced to death, and executed based on
circumstantial evidence in a trial that lasted only a few hours?
Through extensive archival research and interviews with Stinney's
contemporaries-men and women alive today who still carry
distinctive memories of the events that rocked the small town of
Alcolu and the entire state-Eli Faber pieces together the chain of
events that led to this tragic injustice. The first book to fully
explore the events leading to Stinney's death, The Child in the
Electric Chair offers a compelling narrative with a meticulously
researched analysis of the world in which Stinney lived-the era of
lynching, segregation, and racist assumptions about Black
Americans. Faber explains how a systemically racist system, paired
with the personal ambitions of powerful individuals, turned a blind
eye to human decency and one of the basic tenets of the American
legal system that individuals are innocent until proven guilty. As
society continues to grapple with the legacies of racial injustice,
the story of George Stinney remains one that can teach us lessons
about our collective past and present. By ably placing the Stinney
case into a larger context, Faber reveals how this case is not just
a travesty of justice locked in the era of the Jim Crow South but
rather one that continues to resonate in our own time. A foreword
is provided by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History
Emerita at Baruch College at the City University of New York and
author of several books including Civil War Wives: The Lives and
Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent
Grant.
This leatherbound collection of classic works traces the founding
of America, from the birth of the nation in the late 1760s to the
creation of a more perfect union at the end of the early 1800s. It
celebrates the pursuit of life, liberty and justice and the
freedoms that define America through notable documents as well as
significant pieces, writings and speeches by famous figures and the
founding fathers commenting on historic events. This volume
includes the full texts of "On Civil War" by Benjamin Franklin,
"Common Sense" by Thomas Paine, "The Declaration of Independence"
and many more. A beautiful addition to any home library, the
bonded-leather edition also features a satin-ribbon bookmark,
distinctive stained edging, and decorative endpapers.
The study of emotions and emotional displays has achieved a
deserved prominence in recent classical scholarship. The emotions
of the classical world can be plumbed to provide a valuable
heuristic tool. Emotions can help us understand key issues of
ancient ethics, ideological assumptions, and normative behaviors,
but, more frequently than not, classical scholars have turned their
attention to "social emotions" requiring practical decisions and
ethical judgments in public and private gatherings. The emotion of
disgust has been unwarrantedly neglected, even though it figures
saliently in many literary genres, such as iambic poetry and
comedy, historiography, and even tragedy and philosophy. This
collection of seventeen essays by fifteen authors features the
emotion of disgust as one cutting edge of the study of Greek and
Roman antiquity. Individual contributions explore a wide range of
topics. These include the semantics of the emotion both in Greek
and Latin literature, its social uses as a means of marginalizing
individuals or groups of individuals, such as politicians judged
deviant or witches, its role in determining aesthetic judgments,
and its potentialities as an elicitor of aesthetic pleasure. The
papers also discuss the vocabulary and uses of disgust in life
(Galli, actors, witches, homosexuals) and in many literary genres:
ancient theater, oratory, satire, poetry, medicine, historiography,
Hellenistic didactic and fable, and the Roman novel. The
Introduction addresses key methodological issues concerning the
nature of the emotion, its cognitive structure, and modern
approaches to it. It also outlines the differences between ancient
and modern disgust and emphasizes the appropriateness of
"projective or second-level disgust" (vilification) as a means of
marginalizing unwanted types of behavior and stigmatizing morally
condemnable categories of individuals. The volume is addressed
first to scholars who work in the field of classics, but, since
texts involving disgust also exhibit significant cultural
variation, the essays will attract the attention of scholars who
work in a wide spectrum of disciplines, including history, social
psychology, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, and
cross-cultural studies.
A full colour map showing London in about 1520 - its many churches,
monasteries, legal inns, guild halls, and a large number of
substantial private houses, in the context of the streets and
alleyways that survived the Great Fire and can still be discovered.
Dominating the city are the Tower of London in the east, the old St
Paul's Cathedral in the west and London Bridge in the south. The
city was largely contained within its medieval walls and ditches
but shows signs of spilling out into the great metropolis it was
destined to be. This is a second edition of a map first published
in 2018, incorporating changes to the map as new information has
become available. The map has been the Historic Towns Trust's
number one best seller since publication and has been very well
received. The new edition has a revised cover and illustrations.
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