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Books > History > World history
In Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, William Johnson examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses, beginning with the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny's teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan. Johnson then moves on to explore elite reading during the era of the Antonines, including the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto's pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is a rich cultural history of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.
Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory, this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in defining the terms of cultural engagement with other peoples. In chapters offering broad geographic range, the contributors address many of the key themes of recent research on exploration, including exploration's contribution to European imperial expansion, Western scientific knowledge, Enlightenment ideas and practices, and metropolitan print culture. They reassess indigenous peoples' responses upon first contacts with European explorers, their involvement as intermediaries in the operations of expeditions, and the complications that their prior knowledge posed for European claims of discovery. Underscoring that exploration must be seen as a process of mediation between representation and reality, this book provides a fresh and accessible introduction to the ongoing reinterpretation of exploration's role in the making of the modern world.
Migration began with our origin as the human species and continues today. Each chapter of world history features distinct types of migration. The earliest migrations spread humans across the globe. Over the centuries, as our cultures, societies, and technologies evolved in different material environments, migrants conflicted, merged, and cohabited with each other, creating, entering, and leaving various city-states, kingdoms, empires, and nations. During the early modern period, migrations reconnected the continents, including through colonization and forced migrations of subject peoples, while political concepts like "citizen" and "alien" developed. In recent history, migrations changed their character as nation-states and transnational unions sought in new ways to control the peoples who migrated across their borders. This volume will explore the process of migration chronologically and also at several levels, from the illuminating example of the migration of a individual community, to larger patterns of the collective movements of major ethnic groups, to the more abstract study of the processes of emigration, migration, and immigration. This book will concentrate on substantial migrations covering long distances and involving large numbers of people. It will intentionally balance evidence from the now diverse people's of the world, for example, by highlighting an exemplary migration for each of the six chapters that highlights different trajectories and by keeping issues of gender and socio-economic class salient wherever appropriate. Further, as a major theme, the volume will consider how technology, the environment, and various polities have historically shaped human migration. Exciting new scholarship in the several fields inherent in this topic make it a particularly valuable and timely project. Each chapter will contain short individual examples, maps, illustrations, and brief quotations from diverse types of primary documents, all integrated with each other and analyzed engagingly in the text.
Children born out of wedlock were commonly stigmatized as "bastards" in early modern France. Deprived of inheritance, they were said to have neither kin nor kind, neither family nor nation. But why was this the case? Gentler alternatives to "bastard" existed in early modern French discourse, and many natural parents voluntarily recognized and cared for their extramarital offspring. Drawing upon a wide array of archival and published sources, Matthew Gerber has reconstructed numerous disputes over the rights and disabilities of children born out of wedlock in order to illuminate the changing legal condition and practical treatment of extramarital offspring over a period of two and half centuries. His book reveals that the exclusion of extramarital offspring from the family was perpetually contested in early modern France. Legal debate over illegitimacy carried political implications for France's dynastic monarchy. When Louis XIV, the Sun King, created a political firestorm by declaring his own extramarital offspring to be capable of inheriting the French crown, political theorists drew upon precedents of private law to argue for or against the exclusion of children born out of wedlock from the throne. Conversely, lawyers and litigants frequently invoked political interest in the course of private lawsuits involving extramarital offspring. In tracing the evolution of early modern debates over illegitimacy, Bastards offers a political history of the family from the oblique perspective of those who were theoretically excluded from it. With a cast of characters ranging from royal bastards to foundlings, Bastards offers a broad exploration of the relationship between social and political change in the early modern era. It offers new insight into the changing nature of early modern French law, revealing its evolving contribution to the historical construction of both the family and the state.
For introductory World or Global history classes, especially those that cover the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries; upper-division courses on global imperialism in the modern era. Imperialism in the Modern World combines narrative, primary and secondary sources, and visual documents to examine global relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The three co-editors, Professors Bowman, Chiteji, and Greene, have taught for many years global history classes in a variety of institutions. They wrote Imperialism in the Modern World to solve the problem of allowing teachers to combine primary and secondary texts easily and systematically to follow major themes in global history (some readers use primary materials exclusively. Some focus on secondary arguments). This book is more focused than other readers on the markets for those teachers who are offering more specialized world history courses--one important trend in global history is away from simply trying to cover everything to teaching real connections in more chronologically and thematically focused courses. invites students to study seriously world history from a critical framework. Too many readers offer a smorgasbord approach to world history that leaves students dazed and confused. This reader avoids that approach and will therefore solve many problems that teachers have in constructing and teaching world history courses at the introductory or upper-division levels. The reader will allow show students how to read historical documents through a hands-on demonstration in the introduction. The book also incorporates images as visual documents. Finally, the book conceives of global history in the widest possible terms; it contains pieces on political, diplomatic, economic, and military history, to be sure, but it also has selections on technology, medicine, women, the environment, social changes, and cultural patterns. Other readers can not match this text's breadth because they are chronologically and thematically so extended.
The role of religion in the founding of America has long been a hotly debated question. Some historians have regarded the faith of a few famous founders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, as evidence that the founders were deists who advocated the strict separation of church and state. Popular Christian polemicists, on the other hand, have attempted to show that virtually all of the founders were orthodox Christians in favor of state support for religion. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, a diverse array of religious traditions informed the political culture of the American founding. Faith and the Founders of the American Republic includes studies both of minority faiths, such as Islam and Judaism, and of major traditions, such as Calvinism. It also includes nuanced analysis of specific founders-Quaker John Dickinson, prominent Baptists Isaac Backus and John Leland, and Federalist Gouverneur Morris, among many others-with attention to their personal histories, faiths, constitutional philosophies, and views on the relationship between religion and the state. This volume will be a crucial resource for anyone interested in the place of faith in the founding of the American constitutional republic, from political, religious, historical, and legal perspectives.
Calvet's Web is a study of a circle of French antiquarians, naturalists, and bibliophiles in the period 1750-1810. By using the surviving correspondence of its members, Laurence Brockliss assembles a vivid picture of the French Republic of Letters in an era of rapid change, showing how the world of scholarship relates to the movement historians call the Enlightenment and how it is torn apart, then reconstructed, in the social and political turmoil of the French Revolution.
First published in 1963, F.F. Bruce's work Israel and the Nations has achieved wide recognition as an excellent introduction to the history of Israel. This new edition, revised by David F. Payne, includes some new material and an updated bibliography.
Jean Desmarets, later Sieur de Saint-Sorlin, was a late Renaissance `universal man': first Chancellor and founder-member of the Academie-francaise, last jester of the French royal court and star performer in ballets, novelist, playwright, poet, architect, inventor, and mystic. He was also the first man to publicize the notion of `a century of Louis XIV'. Hugh Gaston Hall's book examines that notion by looking afresh at Desmarets' vigorous career and relating the `century of Louis XIV' to its origins in the reign of Louis XIII. It questions historical misconceptions about Cardinal Richelieu's cultural policies and demonstrates the importance for the Court ballet of his patronage. Giovanni Bernini's illusionist sets and lighting effects for the Grand'Salle, which later became Moliere's theatre and the Opera, are discussed here in English for the first time. Desmarets' many high-level court offices, his family connections, and works - ballets, plays, poems, and religious and polemical pieces - reveal new and important links with contemporary institutions and preoccupations. In particular Dr Hall considers the plays in the light of exemplary eloquence, and considers the intentions of the Academie-francaise, and the Quarrel of the Imaginaires, in relation to royal policy and the Cartesian revolution.
Progressive unions flourished in the 1930s by working alongside federal agencies created during the New Deal. Yet in 1950, few progressive unions remained. Why? Most scholars point to domestic anti-communism and southern conservatives in Congress as the forces that diminished the New Deal state, eliminated progressive unions, and destroyed the radical potential of American liberalism. Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions argues that anti-communism and Congressional conservatism merely intensified the main reason for the decline of progressive unions: the New Deal state's focus on legal procedure. Initially, progressive unions thrived by embracing the procedural culture of New Deal agencies and the wartime American state. Between 1935 and 1945, unions mastered the complex rules of the NLRB and other federal entities by working with government officials. In 1946 and 1947, however, the emphasis on legal procedure made the federal state too slow to combat potentially illegal cooperation between employers and the Teamsters. Workers who supported progressive unions rallied around procedural language to stop what they considered Teamster collusion, but found themselves dependent on an ineffective federal state. The state became even less able to protect employees belonging to left-led unions after the Taft-Hartley Act's anti-communist provisions-and decisions by union leaders-limited access to the NLRB's procedures. From 1946 until 1950, progressive unions withered and eventually disappeared from the Pacific canneries as the unions failed to pay the cost of legal representation before the NLRB. Workers supporting progressive unions had embraced procedural language to claim their rights, but by 1950, those workers discovered that their rights had vanished in an endless legal discourse.
Making Slavery History focuses on how commemorative practices and
historical arguments about the American Revolution set the course
for antislavery politics in the nineteenth century. The particular
setting is a time and place in which people were hyperconscious of
their roles as historical actors and narrators: Massachusetts in
the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. This book
shows how local abolitionists, both black and white, drew on their
state's Revolutionary heritage to mobilize public opposition to
Southern slavery. When it came to securing the citizenship of free
people of color within the Commonwealth, though, black and white
abolitionists diverged in terms of how they idealized black
historical agency.
Thousands of texts, written over a period of three thousand years
on papyri and potsherds, in Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Aramaic,
Hebrew, Persian, and other languages, have transformed our
knowledge of many aspects of life in the ancient Mediterranean and
Near Eastern worlds. The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology provides an
introduction to the world of these ancient documents and literary
texts, ranging from the raw materials of writing to the languages
used, from the history of papyrology to its future, and from
practical help in reading papyri to frank opinions about the nature
of the work of papyrologists. This volume, the first major
reference work on papyrology written in English, takes account of
the important changes experienced by the discipline within
especially the last thirty years.
Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku made a vow to smile every day and now believes he is the ‘happiest man on earth’. In his inspirational memoir, he pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story and sharing his wisdom. Life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful. It is up to you. Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. But all of that changed in November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Over the next seven years, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors every day, first in Buchenwald, then in Auschwitz, then on a Nazi death march. He lost family, friends, his country. The Happiest Man on Earth is a powerful, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful memoir of how happiness can be found even in the darkest of times.
With a blend of narrative and analysis, this book explores the extent to which mercenaries have been used, from Sumer to Rome, and the reasons governments hired them when they could conscript native citizens.
First published to wide critical acclaim in 1992, "The Two Cities"
has become an essential text for students of medieval history. For
the second edition, the author has thoroughly revised each chapter,
bringing the material up to date and taking the historiography of
the past decade into account.
The end of the Cold War ushered in a moment of nearly pure American dominance on the world stage, yet that era now seems ages ago. Since 9/11 many informed commentators have focused on the relative decline of American power in the global system. While some have welcomed this as a salutary development, outspoken proponents of American power-particularly neoconservatives-have lamented this turn of events. As Jeanne Morefield argues in Empires Without Imperialism, the defenders of a liberal international order steered by the US have both invoked nostalgia for a golden liberal past and succumbed to amnesia, forgetting the decidedly illiberal trajectory of US continental and global expansion. Yet as she shows, the US is not the first liberal hegemon to experience a wave of misguided nostalgia for a bygone liberal order; England had a remarkably similar experience in the early part of the twentieth century. The empires of the US and the United Kingdom were different in character-the UK's was territorially based while the US relied more on pure economic power-yet both nations mouthed the rhetoric of free markets and political liberty. And elites in both painted pictures of the past in which first England and then the US advanced the cause of economic and political liberty throughout the world. Morefield contends that at the times of their decline, elites in both nations utilized the attributes of an imagined past to essentialize the nature of the liberal state. Working from that framework, they bemoaned the possibility of liberalism's decline and suggested a return to a true liberal order as a solution to current woes. By treating liberalism as fixed through time, however, they actively forgot their illiberal pasts as colonizers and economic imperialists. According to Morefield, these nostalgic narratives generate a cynical 'politics in the passive' where the liberal state gets to have it both ways: it is both compelled to act imperially to save the world from illiberalism and yet is never responsible for the outcome of its own illiberal actions in the world or at home. By comparing the practice and memory of liberalism in early nineteenth century England and the contemporary United States, Empires Without Imperialism addresses a major gap in the literature. While there are many examinations of current neoliberal imperialism by critical theorists as well as analyses of liberal imperialism by scholars of the history of political thought, no one has of yet combined the two approaches. It thus provides a much fuller picture of the rhetorical strategies behind liberal imperialist uses of history. At the same time, the book challenges presentist assumptions about the novelty of our current political moment.
This is the first complete biography of one of the most brilliant fifteenth-century monarchs, Alfonso V of Aragon. Ryder traces Alfonso's life from his childhood in the chivalric world of Castile to the newly-acquired states of Aragon and his subsequent accession to the Aragonese throne. In addition to being a shrewd politician, Alfonso is revealed to have been an accomplished diplomat, acutely aware of the power of commerce, and one of the greatest patrons of the early Renaissance. He brought humanism to life in Southern Italy and made his court the most brilliant in Europe. Offering not only an insightful look at Alfonso's life but a vivid portrait of political and cultural life during his reign, this volume will hold special appeal for scholars and students of early modern European history, fifteenth-century Italian and Spanish history, and Renaissance studies.
In this classic work which analyzes the context in which thirty years of war and revolution wracked the European continent, the great historian Arno Mayer emphasizes the backwardness of the European economies and their political subjugation by aristocratic elites and their allies. Mayer turns upside down the vision of societies marked by modernization and forward-thrusting bourgeois and popular social classes, thereby transforming our understanding of the traumatic crises of the early twentieth century. The Verso World History Series This series provides attractive new editions of classic works of history, making landmark texts available to a new generation of readers. Covering a timespan stretching from Ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth century, and with a global geographical range, the series will also include thematic volumes providing insights into such topics as the spread of print cultures and the history of money.
In 1957 the Dodgers broke the hearts of blue-collar Brooklyn for the embrace of booming Los Angeles. Thus began a new era for the fabled Bums, whose exploits inside -- and outside -- the white lines have intrigued generations of baseball fans. Based on scores of fresh and exuberant interviews, True Blue brings you into the dugout and the locker room, capturing the nearly half-century of clutch performances, World Series triumphs, blown pennant races, clubhouse brawls, contract disputes, stunning trades, and turbulent managerial changes -- all with a startling insider's perspective. In their own candid and provocative words, a who's who of Dodger legends and stars such as Duke Snider, Maury Wills, John Roseboro, Don Sutton, Steve Garvey, Ron Cey, Davey Lopes, Reggie Smith, Tommy Lasorda, Bill Russell, Dusty Baker, Kirk Gibson, Steve Sax, and Eric Karros recall their years with the Dodgers. Also providing their unique commentary are a number of noted opponents, writers, and broadcasters, including Willie Mays, Sparky Anderson, Pete Hamill, Roger Kahn, Tim McCarver, and Bob Costas. Their voices, woven into a rich and fast-paced narrative, bring to life the rise and shocking retirement of Sandy Koufax, Kirk Gibson's dramatic 1988 World Series home run, the controversial trade of Mike Piazza, and so much more. It is the vivid story of how the Dodgers became one of the great successes in major league history, winning nine National League pennants and five World Series championships. A fascinating and colorful history of a team, an era, and baseball itself, True Blue is must reading for any baseball fan.
Karl Barth (1886-1968) was a prolific theologian of the 20th century. Dr Gorringe places the theology in its social and political context, from World War I through to the Cold War by following Barth's intellectual development through the years that saw the rise of national socialism and the development of communism. Barth initiated a theological revolution in his two "Commentaries on Romans", begun during World War I. His attempt to deepen this during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic made him a focus of theological resistance to Hitler after the rise to power of the Nazi party. Expelled from Germany, he continued to defy fashionable opinion by refusing to condemn communism after World War II. Drawing on a German debate largely ignored by Anglo-Saxon theology, Dr Gorringe shows that Barth responds to the events of his time not just in his occasional writings, but in his magnum opus, the "Church Dogmatics". In conclusion Dr Gorringe asks what this admittedly patriarchal author still has to contribute to contemporary theology, and in particular human liberation. This book is intended for undergraduate courses in theology and history of doctrine.
The name of Rome excites a picture of power and organisation, as do the widely-spread ruins that Roman civilization left behind. Yet Rome grew out of a collection of small villages and major developments such as the growth of Empire were unplanned and completely unprepared for. Influenced by a small number of self-interested aristocrats who lacked a broader vision, Rome was often threatened by their intrigues. Brought to the ground on a number of occasions, its leaders were able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. How did Rome survive for nearly 1000 years, ruling over millions of people with few instances of internal rebellion? David Shotter argues that the key was the way Rome managed to adapt to new circumstances, without at the same time discarding too many of its cherished traditions.
This all-encompassing guide: * Includes over 600 pages of current political, economic and social affairs of the region * Provides an impartial perspective on all the countries and territories of Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia * Combines detailed analysis by acknowledged experts, the latest statistics and invaluable directory material.
The concept of `economic planning' was a central theme of the popular economic policy debate in the 1930s. Dr Ritschel traces the many interpretations of planning, and examines the process of idealogical construction and dissemination of the new economic ideas. He finishes with an explanation of the planners' retreat, later in the decade, from the economics of planning towards the far less ambitious (but also less contentious) alternative - the `middle way' of Keynesian economics.
This provocative study breaks new ground. It argues that, in a period dominated by the white Australia ideal, the nation's political leaders were content to allow disease and malnutrition, as well as punitive police raids, to ravage the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory, and that for decades there was a failure to provide funding to implement publicly announced policies. Written for a general readership, "Governing Savages" explains how such a state of affairs could arise and be tolerated in a professedly humane society. The result of almost a decade of research by one of the leading scholars in the field of Australian race relations, the book analyzes the attitudes of pastoralists, missionaries, administrators, judges and politicians and of those - including Aboriginal leaders - seeking to awaken the conscience of Australians and bring to an end generations of brutality and callous indifference. Andrew Markus is the editor of journals on Aboriginal history, intercultural studies and labour history, and was a consultant to the Fitzgerald Committee on Australia's immigration policies. The author of "Blood from a Stone", he is currently Senior Lecturer in History at Monash University, Melbourne. This book is intended for general readers, and students and researchers in Australian and Aboriginal studies. |
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