This is Pompeii, as you've never seen it before.

In this revelatory history, Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the new secrets of Pompeii. Over the last few years, a vast stretch of the city has been excavated for the first time. Now, drawing on these astonishing discoveries, The Buried City reveals the untold human stories that are at last emerging.

Pompeii is a world frozen in time. There are unmade beds, dishes left drying, tools abandoned by workmen, bodies embracing with love and fear. And alongside the remnants of everyday life, there are captivating works of art: lifelike portraits, exquisite frescos and mosaics, and the extraordinary sculpture of a sleeping boy, curled up under a blanket that's too small.

The Buried City reconstructs the catastrophe that destroyed Pompeii on 24 August 79 CE, but it also offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the city as it was before: who lived here, what mattered to them, and what happened in their final hours. It offers us a vivid sense of Pompeii's continuing relevance, and proves that ancient history is much closer to us than we think.

At 8:15 a.m. on August 6th, 1945, the Japanese port city of Hiroshima was struck by the world's first atomic bomb. Built in the US by the top-secret Manhattan Project and delivered by a B-29 Superfortress, a revolutionary long-range bomber, the weapon destroyed large swaths of the city, instantly killing tens of thousands. The world would never be the same again.

The Hiroshima Men's unique narrative recounts the decade-long journey towards this first atomic attack. It charts the race for nuclear technology before, and during the Second World War, as the allies fought the axis powers in Europe, North Africa, China, and across the vastness of the Pacific, and is seen through the experiences of several key characters: General Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project alongside Robert Oppenheimer; pioneering Army Air Force bomber pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets II; the mayor of Hiroshima, Senkichi Awaya, who would die alongside over eighty-thousand of his fellow citizens; and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Hersey, who travelled to post-war Japan to expose the devastation the bomb had inflicted upon the city, and in a historic New Yorker article, described in unflinching detail the dangers posed by its deadly after-effect, radiation poisoning.

This thrilling account takes the reader from the corridors of the White House to the laboratories and test sites of New Mexico; from the air war above Nazi Germany and the savage reconquest of the Pacific to the deadly firebombing air raids across the Japanese Home Islands. The Hiroshima Men also includes Japanese perspectives - a vital aspect often missing from Western narratives - to complete MacGregor's nuanced, deeply human account of the bombing's meaning and aftermath.

A magisterial history of South Africa, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present.

Leonard Thompson, a leading scholar in southern African history and politics, provides a fresh and penetrating exploration of the country's history, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present, focusing primarily on experiences of its black inhabitants.

The Fourth Edition of this classic text brings South Africa's history up to date with a new chapter chronicling the first presidential term of Mbeki and ending with the funeral of Nelson Mandela.

This book translates and contextualizes the recollections of men and women who built, lived, and worked in some of the factory compounds relocated from China's most cosmopolitan city-Shanghai. Small Third Line factories became oases of relatively prosperous urban life among more impoverished agricultural communities. These accounts, plus the guiding questions, contextual notes, and further readings accompanying them, show how everyday lives fit into the sweeping geopolitical changes in China and the world during the Cold War era. Furthermore, they reveal how the Chinese Communist Party's military-industrial strategies have shaped China's economy and society in the post-Mao era. The approachable translations and insight into areas of life rarely covered by political or diplomatic histories like sexuality and popular culture make this book highly accessible for classroom use and the general-interest reader.

In 1884 begin Hendrik Witbooi en sy Namavolk met 'n profetiese trek na die vrugbare noorde om aan die droogte van die Kalahariwoestyn te ontsnap. Terselfdertyd stap die keiserlike afgevaardigde dr. Göring sowat 'n honderd kilometer daarvandaan aan land in die nuwe Duitse kolonie Suidwes-Afrika - die huidige Namibië.

Daarop volg 'n stryd om lewe en dood tussen die Duitse Schutztruppe en die Afrikane wat vir hul onafhanklikheid veg.

Die honderde briewe wat deur Hendrik Witbooi aan Duitse goewerneurs, Engelse magistrate en Afrikaleiers geskryf is, het aan Conny Braam unieke insig gegee in die wêreld van Witbooi: sy liefde vir die ou volk van die Khoisan, die leringe van sendeling Olpp, sy verontrusting oor die Westerse kredietstelsel wat van sy volk slawe sou maak en sy intense verdriet toe hy besef dat keiser Wilhelm II die totale vernietiging van die opstandige inheemse bevolking eis.

In 1904 lei die tagtigjarige Hendrik nog een keer die opstand teen die Duitse koloniale leër. Hy sou die geskiedenis ingaan as een van die grootste vryheidstryders wat Afrika geken het.

“'n Verhaal wat onder geen omstandighede vergeet mag word nie.” - Trouw

An accessible chronicle of how the Israel-Palestine conflict originated and developed over the past century. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read.

The ongoing struggle between Israel and Palestine is one of the most bitter conflicts in history, with profound global consequences. In this book, Middle East expert Michael Scott-Baumann succinctly describes its origins and charts its evolution from civil war to the present day. Each chapter offers a lucid explanation of the politics and ends with personal testimony from Palestinians and Israelis whose lives have been impacted by the dispute.

While presenting competing interpretations, Scott-Baumann examines the key flash points, including the early role of the British, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Trump administration’s peace plan, pitched as “the deal of the century,” in 2020. He delineates both the nature of Israeli control over the Palestinian territories and Palestinian resistance―going to the heart of the clashes in recent decades. The result is an indispensable history, including a time line, glossary, and analysis of why efforts to restore peace have continually failed and what it will take to succeed. 45 B&W maps and images

A sweeping history of the Mississippi River―and the centuries of human meddling that have transformed both it and America.

The Mississippi River lies at the heart of America, an undeniable life force that is intertwined with the nation’s culture and history. Its watershed spans almost half the country, Mark Twain’s travels on the river inspired our first national literature, and jazz and blues were born in its floodplains and carried upstream.

In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of this wild and unruly river, and the centuries of efforts to control it. Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded “the great river” with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. The river was ever-changing, and Indigenous tribes embraced and even depended on its regular flooding. But the expanse of the watershed and the rich soils of its floodplain lured European settlers and American pioneers, who had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer.

Centuries of human attempts to own, contain, and rework the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson’s expansionist land hunger through today’s era of environmental concern, have now transformed its landscape. Upholt reveals how an ambitious and sometimes contentious program of engineering―government-built levees, jetties, dikes, and dams―has not only damaged once-vibrant ecosystems but may not work much longer. Carrying readers along the river’s last remaining backchannels, he explores how scientists are now hoping to restore what has been lost.

Rich and powerful, The Great River delivers a startling account of what happens when we try to fight against nature instead of acknowledging and embracing its power―a lesson that is all too relevant in our rapidly changing world.

The story of the British Empire at its maximum territorial extent.

On Saturday 29 September 1923, the Palestine Mandate became law and the British Empire now covered a scarcely credible quarter of the world's land mass, containing 460 million people. It was the largest empire the world had ever seen. But it was beset by debt and doubts.

This book is a new way of looking at the British Empire. It immerses the reader in the contemporary moment, focusing on particular people and stories from that day, gleaned from newspapers, letters, diaries, official documents, magazines, films and novels: from a remote Pacific island facing the removal of its entire soil, across Australia, Burma, India and Kenya to London and the West Indies.

In some ways, the issues of a hundred years ago are with us still: debates around cultural and ethnic identity in a globalised world; how to manage multi-ethnic political entities; racism; the divisive co-opting of religion for political purposes; the dangers of ignorance. In others, it is totally alien. What remains extraordinary is the Empire's ability to reveal the most compelling human stories. Never before has there been a book which contains such a wide spread of vivid experiences from both colonised and coloniser: from the grandest governors to the humblest migrants, policemen and nurses.

As a subculture, cloistered monastic nuns live hidden from public view by choice. Once a woman joins the cloister and makes final vows, she is almost never seen and her voice is not heard; her story is essentially nonexistent in the historical record and collective, public history.
From interviews conducted over six years, Abbie Reese tells the stories of the Poor Clare Colettine Order, a cloistered contemplative order at the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois. Seldom leaving their 25,000-square-foot gated enclosure, members of this community embrace an extreme version of poverty and anonymity - a separation that enables them to withdraw from the world to devote their lives to prayer. This removal, they contend, allows them to have a greater impact on humanity than if they maintained direct contact with loved ones and strangers.
Dedicated to God explores individual and cultural identity through oral history interviews with several generations of nuns, focusing on the origins and life stories of the women who have chosen to become members of one of the strictest religious orders. But the narrative is also one of a collective memory and struggle against extinction and modernity, a determination to create community within the framework of ancient rules.
The author's stunning photographs of their dual worlds, religious and quotidian, add texture to the narrative.
This artistic and ethnographic work highlights the countercultural values and dedication of individuals who, at incredible personal cost, live for love of God and humanity, out of faith in what cannot be seen, and with the belief that they will be rewarded in the afterlife.

Once the Maroons escaped from slavery and established their communities in the remote interior of Suriname, attention shifted from military threat to internal danger. As they faced these dangers in an unknown rainforest, they sought refuge in prophetic movements directed by charismatic religious leaders. This book charts the history of Okanisi religious movements from their escape to the present day. It is based on sixty years of fieldwork by the late Bonno Thoden van Velzen and Ineke van Wetering, archival research and oral histories. Prophets of Doom is a tribute to Okanisi society and reflects decades of research and dedication.

The volume demonstrates the cultural centrality of the oral tradition for Iranian studies. It contains contributions from scholars from various areas of Iranian and comparative studies, among which are the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian tradition with its wide network of influences in late antique Mesopotamia, notably among the Jewish milieu; classical Persian literature in its manifold genres; medieval Persian history; oral history; folklore and more. The essays in this collection embrace both the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods, both verbal and visual media, as well as various language communities (Middle Persian, Persian, Tajik, Dari) and geographical spaces (Greater Iran in pre-Islamic and Islamic medieval periods; Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan of modern times). Taken as a whole, the essays reveal the unique blending of oral and literate poetics in the texts or visual artefacts each author focuses upon, conceptualizing their interrelationship and function.

Discover the reigns of twelve African queens and warriors from across the continent, from pioneering historian and writer, Paula Akpan.

There are women who ruled vast swathes of the African continent. They led, loved and fought for their kingdoms and people and their impact can still be felt today. However, beyond the lands they called home, so few of us have heard their names.

From pre-colonial Nigeria to the rich plains of Rwanda, from Ancient Egypt to apartheid South Africa, historian Akpan writes the stories of these powerful queens and takes you on a spellbinding, enrapturing and immersive journey that is nothing short of revelatory.

Outside the imagination, witches don't exist. But in Poland and in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. For the first time in English, Michael Ostling tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, Ostling also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host-desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of demonic sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self-imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft Ostling explores the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist, and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

Our Lives Are But Stories explores the crucial role of personal storytelling in the lives of a unique generation of women -- Jewish women who left the Muslim country of Tunisia to settle in the newly created Israeli state. To this day, the older generation of Tunisian Israelis continues to rely on storytelling as a form of education, entertainment, and socialization. But for women this art has taken on new dimensions, especially as they seek to impart their values to the young. Here Esther Schely-Newman expertly interweaves the personal accounts of the private lives of four Tunisian-Israeli women to analyze the rich complexities of communication. She considers how various approaches to narration reflect storytelling as a cultural phenomenon and highlights the need to understand stories in the contexts in which they are told.

The four narrators grew up in a culture in which women's stories were confined to the private sphere, were usually told to other women, and were supposedly fiction -- or at least metaphors masking their real lives. Forced migration to farming communities in Israel and the shock of being uprooted created new identities for women and new outlets for storytelling. Women narrators increasingly began to tell more openly of their personal lives. Schely-Newman organizes her narrators' accounts by the themes of childhood, marriage, motherhood, immigration, and old age and considers a wide range of factors that shape the narration, including audience, intent, choice of language, and Jewish-Muslim culture. The result is a fascinating blend of analysis, narration, and history.

Incorporating many rare photographs--most never made public before--from the family albums of survivors who tell their stories in this volume, Harvard professor Julie Silver, M.D., and historian Daniel Wilson help readers understand the sheer terror that gripped parents of young children every spring and summer during the first half of the 20th century as polio epidemics ran rampant. Interviewed as part of the Polio Oral History Project directed by Silver and funded by Harvard, foundations, and private donors, the people featured in this book describe what is arguably the most feared scourge of modern times. Polio killed and maimed millions of Americans. Silver, Wilson, and their interviewees take us into homes and across time to understand the disease's effect on the family and the community. Testimonies are included from people who worked in polio wards, as well as from those involved in worldwide eradication efforts. The book also addresses the emergence of the polio and disability rights movement, the challenges of post-polio syndrome, and the state of polio research and developments today. And it explores the concern that polio could return in an even more vicious form as a result of bioterrorism. This work will be of interest to anyone intrigued by health and medical history; infectious disease and other epidemics; the psychological effects of disease on children, adults, and communities; politics in the Roosevelt era; and bioterrorism.

Journey through thousands of years of human history (now with the women put back in).

From the earliest human civilizations through to the present day, the stories of countless influential women – leaders, artists, warriors, scientists and more – have been ignored, forgotten, or actively suppressed. You may not have encountered the likes of Fatima al-Fihri (an Islamic World visionary who founded the world's first university), Ching Shih (the most successful pirate in history), or Huda Sha'arawi (a pioneering Egyptian feminist leader, suffragist, nationalist, and founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union), but that's about to change.

In What’s Her Name: A History of the World in 80 Lost Women, authors – and sisters – Olivia Meikle and Katie Nelson weave together the captivating stories of these fascinating figures to tell an alternative, enthralling and deeply researched historical narrative. A truly global history, What’s Her Name features biographies of incredible women spanning six continents and thousands of years, from Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire to imperial China, the Americas and post-war Europe.

Drawing on years of study and interviews with dozens of experts, this is an entertaining, thought-provoking look at the trailblazing women you may not have heard of (but should have).

Memories of Belonging is a three-generation oral-history study of the offspring of southern Italians who migrated to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1913. Supplemented with the interviewees' private documents and working from U.S. and Italian archives, Christa Wirth documents a century of transatlantic migration, assimilation, and later-generation self-identification. Her research reveals how memories of migration, everyday life, and ethnicity are passed down through the generations, altered, and contested while constituting family identities. The fact that not all descendants of Italian migrants moved into the U.S. middle class, combined with their continued use of hyphenated identities, points to a history of lived ethnicity and societal exclusion. Moreover, this book demonstrates the extent of forgetting that is required in order to construct an ethnic identity.

The stories of Kaua'i's ruling chiefs were passed from generation to generation in songs and narratives recited by trained storytellers either formally at the high chief's court or informally at family gatherings. Their chronology was ordered by a ruler's genealogy, which, in the case of the pua ali'i (flower of royalty), was illustrious and far reaching and could be traced to one of the four great gods of Polynesia - Kane, Ku, Lono, and Kanaloa. In these legends, Hawaiians of old sought answers to the questions "Who are we?" "Who are our ancestors and where do they come from?" "What lessons can be learned from their conduct?" Na Pua Ali'i o Kaua'i presents the stories of the men and women who ruled the island of Kaua'i from its first settlement to the final rebellion against Kamehameha I's forces in 1824. Only fragments remain of the nearly two-thousand-year history of the people who inhabited Kaua'i before the coming of James Cook in 1778. Now scattered in public and private archives and libraries, these pieces of Hawai'i's precontact past were recorded in the nineteenth century by such determined individuals as David Malo, Samuel Kamakau, and Abraham Fornander. All known genealogical references to the Kaua'i ali'i nui (paramount chiefs) have been gathered here and placed in chronological order and are interspersed with legends of great voyages, bitter wars, courageous heroes, and passionate romances that together form a rich and invaluable resource.

Folktales of Mizoram is a translated collection of sixty-six short stories from northeast India taken up for a critical evaluation. The stories depict a typical Mizo culture in spirit and practice. This study focuses on the transformation of oral literature into written narratives. Folk practices, folk medicine, folk narratives, traditional songs, and received wisdom dominate these stories. A more insightful approach into folk narratives and songs emphasizes the world of new hermeneutics. The land, the culture, the language, the traditions have been remarkably explored through an elegant reading and evaluation of this collection. Antiquity speaks through the folk tales. The spirit of folktales becomes one of unique exploration of hermeneutics in the end.