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Books > Humanities > History > World history
The diary of Antera Duke is one of the earliest and most extensive
surviving documents written by an African residing in coastal West
Africa predating the arrival of British missionaries and officials
in the mid-19th century. Antera Duke (ca.1735-ca.1809) was a leader
and merchant in late eighteenth-century Old Calabar, a cluster of
Efik-speaking communities in the Cross River region. He resided in
Duke Town, forty miles from the Atlantic Ocean in modern-day
southeast Nigeria. His diary, written in trade English from 18
January 1785 to 31 January 1788, is a candid account of daily life
in an African community during a period of great historical
interest. Written by a major African merchant at the height of
Calabar's overseas commerce, it provides valuable information on
Old Calabar's economic activity both with other African businessmen
and with European ship captains who arrived to trade for slaves,
produce and provisions. It is also unique in chronicling the
day-to-day social and cultural life of a vibrant African community.
Antera Duke's diary is much more than a historical curiosity; it is
the voice of a leading African-Atlantic merchant who lived during
an age of expanding cross-cultural trade. The book reproduces the
original diary of Antera Duke, as transcribed by a Scottish
missionary, Arthur W. Wilkie, ca. 1907 and published by OUP in
1956. A new rendering of the diary into standard English appears on
facing pages, and the editors have advanced the annotation
completed by anthropologist Donald Simmons in 1954 by editing 71
and adding 158 footnotes. The updated reference information
incorporates new primary and secondary source material on Old
Calabar, and notes where their editorial decisions differ from
those made by Wilkie and Simmons. Chapters 1 and 2 detail the
eighteenth-century Calabar slave and produce trades, emphasizing
how personal relationships between British and Efik merchants
formed the nexus of trade at Old Calabar. To build a picture of Old
Calabar's regional trading networks, Chapter 3 draws upon
information contained in Antera Duke's diary, other contemporary
sources, and shipping records from the 1820s. Chapter 4 places
information in Antera Duke's diary in the context of
eighteenth-century Old Calabar political, social and religious
history, charting how Duke Town eclipsed Old Town and Creek Town
through military power, lineage strength and commercial acumen.
Future History traces the ways that English and American writers
oriented themselves along an East-West axis to fantasize their
place in the world. The book builds on new transoceanic scholarship
and recent calls to approach early American studies from a global
perspective. Such scholarship has largely focused on the early
national period; Bross's work begins earlier and considers the
intertwined identities of America, other English colonial sites and
metropolitan England during a period before nation-state identities
were hardened into the forms we know them today, when an English
empire was nascent, not realized, and when a global perspective
such as we might recognize it was just coming into focus for early
modern Europeans. The author examines works that imagine England on
a global stage in the Americas and East Indies just as-and in some
cases even before-England occupied such spaces in force. Future
History considers works written from the 1620s to the 1670s, but
the center of gravity of Future History is writing at the
mid-century, that is, writings coincident with the Interregnum, a
time when England plotted and launched ambitious, often violent
schemes to conquer, colonize or otherwise appropriate other lands,
driven by both mercantile and religious desires.
Ibn Saud grew to manhood first through living the harsh traditional
life of the desert nomad, a life that had changed little since the
days of Abraham, and then, through a careful study during his
adolescence in Kuwait, of the ways of the great imperial powers
such as Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire. Thus equipped, and
endowed with immense physical courage, between 1902 and 1930 he
fought and won, often with weapons and tactics not unlike those
employed by the ancient Assyrians, a series of astonishing military
victories over a succession of enemies much more powerful than
himself. Over the same period, he transformed himself from a minor
sheikh into a revered king and elder statesman, courted by world
leaders such as Churchill and Roosevelt.
In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the Weimar Republic was all but reduced to a barter economy. Expensive cigars, artworks and jewels were routine...
The United Africa Company (UAC), formed in 1929 by the fusion of
the Niger Company and the African and Eastern Corporation, was by
far the largest single commercial organization in West and
Equatorial Africa, and thus central to modern African economic
history. This is the first detailed account to be published and one
which fills a serious gap in the literature. It was not
commissioned by the company (now reabsorbed into Unilever) but the
author had full access to all confidential material in the UAC and
Unilever archives and complete freedom in what he wrote. The book
is not intended to be primarily a company history but uses the UAC
as a focal point for detailed study of how the role of foreign
merchant capital changed in response to economic and political
developments in Black Africa during this critical half century.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia is a unique blend of
comprehensive overviews on archaeological, philological,
linguistic, and historical issues at the forefront of Anatolian
scholarship in the 21st century. Anatolia is home to early complex
societies and great empires, and was the destination of many
migrants, visitors, and invaders. The offerings in this volume
bring this reality to life as the chapters unfold nearly ten
thousand years (ca. 10,000-323 B.C.E.) of peoples, languages, and
diverse cultures who lived in or traversed Anatolia over these
millennia. The contributors combine descriptions of current
scholarship on important discussion and debates in Anatolian
studies with new and cutting edge research for future directions of
study. The fifty-four chapters are presented in five separate
sections that range in topic from chronological and geographical
overviews to anthropologically based issues of culture contact and
imperial structures, and from historical settings of entire
millennia to crucial data from key sites across the region. The
contributors to the volume represent the best scholars in the field
from North America, Europe, Turkey, and Asia. The appearance of
this volume offers the very latest collection of studies on the
fascinating peninsula known as Anatolia.
This book: covers the essential content in the new specifications
in a rigorous and engaging way, using detailed narrative, sources,
timelines, key words, helpful activities and extension material
helps develop conceptual understanding of areas such as evidence,
interpretations, causation and change, through targeted activities
provides assessment support for A level with sample answers,
sources, practice questions and guidance to help you tackle the
new-style exam questions. It also comes with three years' access to
ActiveBook, an online, digital version of your textbook to help you
personalise your learning as you go through the course - perfect
for revision.
Since the early 20th century the scholarly study of Anglo-Saxon
texts has been augmented by systematic excavation and analysis of
physical evidence - settlements, cemeteries, artefacts,
environmental data, and standing buildings. This evidence has
confirmed some readings of the Anglo-Saxon literary and documentary
sources and challenged others. More recently, large-scale
excavations both in towns and in the countryside, the application
of computer methods to large bodies of data, new techniques for
site identification such as remote sensing, and new dating methods
have put archaeology at the forefront of Anglo-Saxon studies. The
Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, written by a team of experts
and presenting the results of the most up-to-date research, will
both stimulate and support further investigation into those aspects
of Anglo-Saxon life and culture which archaeology has fundamentally
illuminated. It will prove an essential resourse for our
understanding of a society poised at the interface between
prehistory and history.
In 1899, Carrie Chapman Catt, who succeeded Susan B. Anthony as
head of the National American Women Suffrage Association, argued
that it was the "duty" of U.S. women to help lift the inhabitants
of its new island possessions up from "barbarism" to
"civilization," a project that would presumably demonstrate the
capacity of U.S. women for full citizenship and political rights.
Catt, like many suffragists in her day, was well-versed in the
language of empire, and infused the cause of suffrage with
imperialist zeal in public debate. Unlike their predecessors, who
were working for votes for women within the context of slavery and
abolition, the next generation of suffragists argued their case
against the backdrop of the U.S. expansionism into Indian and
Mormon territory at home as well as overseas in the Philippines,
Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. In this book, Allison L. Sneider carefully
examines these simultaneous political movements--woman suffrage and
American imperialism--as inextricably intertwined phenomena,
instructively complicating the histories of both.
Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors challenges readers to
reconsider China's relations with the rest of Eurasia.
Investigating interstate competition and cooperation between the
successive Sui and Tang dynasties and Turkic states of Mongolia
from 580 to 800, Jonathan Skaff upends the notion that inhabitants
of China and Mongolia were irreconcilably different and hostile to
each other. Rulers on both sides deployed strikingly similar
diplomacy, warfare, ideologies of rulership, and patrimonial
political networking to seek hegemony over each other and the
peoples living in the pastoral borderlands between them. The book
particularly disputes the supposed uniqueness of imperial China's
tributary diplomacy by demonstrating that similar customary norms
of interstate relations existed in a wide sphere in Eurasia as far
west as Byzantium, India, and Iran. These previously unrecognized
cultural connections, therefore, were arguably as much the work of
Turko-Mongol pastoral nomads traversing the Eurasian steppe as the
more commonly recognized Silk Road monks and merchants. This
interdisciplinary and multi-perspective study will appeal to
readers of comparative and world history, especially those
interested in medieval warfare, diplomacy, and cultural studies.
This authentic account is a tribute to the courage and resolve with
which soldiers and their loved ones confront uncertainty, fear,
hardship and the loss of their comrades. Subjected to continual
changes of affiliation as the Falklands campaign unfolds, 2 Troop
has to create its own identity and sense of belonging drawing on
its professional belief, strength of leadership, and intrinsic
camaraderie. This is the story of how they did it, and the
contribution they made, in one of the toughest campaigns since
World War 2. A 'must read' for aspiring junior commanders and
students of the realities of war. -- General Sir Peter Wall GCB,
CBE, DL, FREng
Born out of a desire to commemorate those men from King's Road, St
Albans, who lost their lives in the Great War, the road's current
residents suggested the idea of a lasting memorial. Then came the
task of researching the lives and the families of those men. It
involved many hours of leafing through old newspapers and archives,
obtaining advice from local and national bodies and seeking help
from relatives of the deceased. A further memorial - this book,
which includes a brief history of this street - is the result. The
book was compiled by Compiled by Judy Sutton & Helen Little
with help and support from many others.
This authentic account is a tribute to the courage and resolve with
which soldiers and their loved ones confront uncertainty, fear,
hardship and the loss of their comrades. Subjected to continual
changes of affiliation as the Falklands campaign unfolds, 2 Troop
has to create its own identity and sense of belonging drawing on
its professional belief, strength of leadership, and intrinsic
camaraderie. This is the story of how they did it, and the
contribution they made, in one of the toughest campaigns since
World War 2. A 'must read' for aspiring junior commanders and
students of the realities of war. -- General Sir Peter Wall GCB,
CBE, DL, FREng
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