A culture, centered in what is today Eastern Europe, begins to use gold to fashion decorative objects. The gold was probably mined in the Transylvanian Alps or the Mount Pangaion area in Thrace.
Right after the 2010 earthquake that rocked the Port-au-Prince region and killed many people, a big data competition began between states and in-ternational organizations involved in the relief eff ort. The journalists Rob-ert Muggah and Athena Kolbe, a year and half after the disaster, wrote that “in Haiti, fewer than 46,000 people were killed in the January 2010ear…
From the Wright brothers' first flight and the First Russian Revolution to the horrors of war, to the development of motor and air travel and the birth of the digital revolution, the changes seen in the twentieth century were global in scope and monumental in terms of impact. Modern History in Pictures: A Visual Guide to the Events that Shaped Our World explores these earth-shattering events as…
Writing equipment is key for the comprehensive study of Roman handwriting, non-monumental inscriptions and literacy. Cost, material and design of the equipment and how it was used had an impact on many aspects of writing such as letter shapes, document layout and who was writing. Im-portantly, the equipment also has an impact on what kinds of ancient handwritten texts have survived and therefor…
In 1922 an in terest ing exchange took place in Moscow’s Botkin hospital concerning a “delicate and even shy” patient who had just had a bullet extracted from his neck and was recovering in ward no. 44.1The patient wanted to know all about his nurse, the other patients, and the medical personnel. He even asked the nurse why she looked so “bad” and ques-tioned the professor tending to …
Some people are one-book people; their lives and their workare dominated, usually with conscious complicity, by a single book.William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham (1708-78), seems to have found a"politician's vade-mecum" in Spenser's Faerie Queene.1 Umberto Eco,despite the vast range of reference apparent in all that he writes, in-sists that the guiding star of it all is…
In an era of extractivist economies, climate change, and forced mobil-ity, who and what belongs? Who and what does not? What can be learned from sitting with a plant you germinated from seed? One of the most significant voices to emerge in recent years, Brazil-born Maria 'lhereza Alves has focused precisely on such questions in her twenty-year art project Seeds o/Change that has spanned contine…
A second reason to study work is that it is inherently social: it necessarily involves relations between people that are arguably more fundamental than their ideological relationships. Since work must go on, while ideology may be ignored or even f louted, it is a good place to start trying to understand society. Applebaum argued that the study of work is even more important for studying societi…
The term shie-tzyy was appropriated from the Chinese car-penter, to whom it denoted a small wedge-shaped cut of wood usedto fill a crack or cleavage in an article of furniture. With similarprecision, the Yuarn dramatist could always turn to the demi-actfor a flexible alternative to the simple four-act format of the stan-dard music drama.…
his exhibition, Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies, has been conceived as an introduction in four parts that will help visitors to the museum and scholars of the university understand key elements of both traditional and current Northeastern Asian native and migrant cultures. The first three parts of the exhibition introduce fundamen-tal concepts inherent in Daoism, Confucian…
This volume introduces a new publication series and a new emphasis in memory studies. The title of the series is Entangled Memories in the Global South. The term “mnemonic solidarity” which gives this book its title signals one response to the observation that historical memories have become entangled. It proposes that that entanglement invites us to rethink memory stu…
This monograph approaches ancient medicine through the study of a single individual who practiced magico-medical healing in ancient Mesopotamia. The healer’s name was Ki?ir-Aššur and he was the grandson of B?ba-šuma-ibni, the patronymic ancestor of a family of exorcists. We know nothing about Ki?ir-Aššur’s birth and death, except that he lived arou…
This volume breaks new ground in applying Benson’s second per-spective to medical history: ‘to explore the history of nonhuman ani-mals as subjects in their own right and for their own sakes’.5 Humans remain important, of course, for ultimately we can only know about animals from the records that humans have created, and which reflect …
Today, images of fetuses and pregnant bodies are ubiquitous. We encoun-ter them everywhere—from ultrasound pictures of expected babies in family albums to childbirth scenes in reality television shows or on social media platforms. Images of fetal bodies are also frequently seen in antiabortion campaigns. The capacity of fetal photographs and ultrasound images …
In a blog post on a recent trip to a Peruvia n monastery, Sa ra Salem recounts the moment she recognized Andalusia n tiles da ting from the era of Spa nish coloniza tion. Reflecting on this encounter with the lasting ma terial legacy of imperial expa nsion, she concludes tha t “[w]e could tell a nice story ... a bout how a rt travels a nd spreads a nd crosses bo…
For the next twenty-five years, the justifiability of opening the abdo-men to treat ovarian disease would remain contested, causing deep schisms in the profession, through which reputations were lost and careers ruined just as often as fortunes were gained and lives were saved. It was an operation that thrilled and horrified in equal measure with its d…
The slowing down of international movement caused by the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic clearly reveals the ethical dilemma travel represents. Research shows that travel has demonstrable positive effects on human beings: It brings new per-spectives and knowledge, and gives a sense of freedom and pleasure that enhances the subjective quality of life and well-being.1 However, the sheer volume of tra…
Trees can also be tied to the idea of domination. I have long argued that the process of ecological restoration, in which a kind of environ-mental engineering attempts the re-creation of previously degraded or destroyed natural environments, is an example of the human project to assert our technological mastery over the autonomous processes of the natural world.1 The management of forests for h…
h e war altered the business of fashion on a national and international scale. Th e authors writing in this volume argue that the changes that occurred in the fashionable silhouette, while set in motion in the 1910s, were fi xed into place during the war. Th eir essays highlight how the war restructured the international couture industry—not by decentering the axis away from Paris…
This is how László Cs. Szabó, a leading Hungarian intellectual of the mid- twentieth century,2 starts his article ‘Milton or Czuczor’. Cs. Szabó refused the request to write only of ‘Hungarian things’, but the suggestion that he should give preference to the works of Gergely Czuczor, a Hungarian lexi-cographer and minor poet of the nineteenth century, to those of Milton and ‘the …
atsura no miya monogatari ("The Tale of Matsura," ca. 1190) is a classicalJapanese tale or romance that belongs to the same category of courtly fiction asMurasaki Shikibu's unsurpassed masterpiece, Genji monogatari ("The Tale ofGenji," ca. 1010). When compared with most of the best-known works of itsgenre, however, Matsura no miya monogatari stands o…
The Dutch limes zone roughly comprises a 50 km wide strip in the middle of the Netherlands, stretching from the North Sea until Germany over a distance of approximately 150 km from west to east. To the north, the zone is bordered by the course of the Rhine, which was established as the northern frontier of the Roman Empire around the middle of the first century CE. The Romans never …
Power, transformation, promise, subjugation: terms that might easily be invoked to describe the decades between 1760 and 1840. Together they point toward the multi-faceted developments through which Europe took on its modern character and dominant position in the world – what this volume refers to as ‘compound histories’. Simultaneously …
This book deals with the legacy of Norway’s garden cities. It tracks the origins of the Norwegian garden city movement and discusses the current status of built examples. Through a detailed study of one example, Sinsen Garden City in Oslo, the book links the garden city heritage to a number of ongoing scholarly debates on topics like densification, sustainability, socio-economic conditions, l…
All over the world there are women and men who work and produce for the market within the space of their own homes, or together with neighbours in collective local spaces. They stitch shoes, sew and embellish garments, weave carpets, make baskets, prepare and sell food, assemble electronics and perform computer-based tasks amongst other forms of labour. They pro…
The importance of printed books for the dissemination of knowledge was al-ready acknowledged in the early period of print. A chronicle printed by Jan van Doesborch in Antwerp in 1530 praises ‘the noble art of book printing, through which art the world has now come to be so ingenious and has come to know more than she knew a hundred years ago, when there was no printing.’1 The printing press…
n 2005, YouTube went live as a quick and easy (and apparently free to use) way of sharing video on the Internet, with other video hosting and streaming services like Imeem, Vimeo, and Blip soon to follow. The rise of online distribution kicked off an interest in DIY video and “user-generated content,” itself a phrase that went mainstream in …
Libraries and research institutions around the world hold countless manuscripts and early printed books.1 Some of the most prestigious and beautiful reading rooms are dedicated to these rare materials. Even smaller institutions often have their own division and sometimes a separate reading room or area for these holdings. While these smaller institutions often only have one reading roo…
In 1948 an animated public information film called Your Very Good Health explained the benefits of Britain’s soon-to-be-introduced National Health Service (NHS).1 It portrayed two different categories of hospital patient. The central character, Charley, says he is ‘on the panel’ as he cycles through an optimistic impression of a new town.2The narrator asks him to imagine that he fell off …
he Atlantic, including all the countries touched by the triangular trade and marked by a history of population displacement and cultural mixing inau-gurated through colonialism and slavery, has always been a crucial site for the development of capitalism. Without the free labor generated through slavery, the plantation economy, and the production of sugar and coffee, capita…
With the sun straight overhead, the vacationers point their car toward the town of Barreirinhas, not far from the promised paradise of Brazil’s Lençóis Maranhenses, a national park since 1981. The road is nearly deserted, the land-scape dotted by only a few villages, some scattered adobe houses, and a bar here and there. Large expanses of land have been burned off to give way to…
Imagination bzw.Einbildungskraft bezeichnetdie Fähigkeit,Ideen und Bildersowohl im Geiste alsauch mit HilfevonMedien zu kreieren.¹Zentral ist dabei diementaleund durch Medien wie z. B. Bilder, Karten undTexte materialisierteVi-sualisierungvonetwas hier und jetzt (noch) nicht Präsentem odervonetwas, dassich möglicherweise niemals realisieren wird. Imaginationen sindkeine irrealenHirngespinst…
In 1887, as a result of the federalization of Buenos Aires carried out at the begin-ning of the decade, the government of the Province of Buenos Aires transferred to the national government additional land to enlarge the capital, from which, a year later, its definitive limits were to be drawn (the current General Paz Avenue).1The municipality had until then a little over 4,000 he…
A white gallery wall is marked out at intervals to a length of twenty-five feet. Stretching out above, black capital letters stamp out the phrase “el cocodrilo de Humboldt no es el cocodrilo de Hegel” (Humboldt’s crocodile is not Hegel’s). Near the end on the left, a crocodile’s eye appears on a monitor; at the right, another shows its tail. José A…
We are inspired by and support UCL’s programme to liberate the curriculum alongside other programmes with similar aims. Women are too often excluded in the history of science, and this book aims to recover the voices, works and experiences of women in the production of knowledge through primary sources. This book offers university lecturers and tutors a diverse range of …
For most of us, most of the time, we take our day-to-day freedom to makedecisions for ourselves for granted. Faced with countless large and small ques-tions about our personal lives and relationships, our finances, our health andmedical care, and our plans for the future, we are constantly making choices.Some of these choices may be very much informed by the expectations,wishes, and …
Is race a biological fact or a fiction? At the beginning of 2018, scientists working with ancient DNA in the UK and the United States offered two very different public responses to this long-asked question. In the UK in February 2018, Channel 4 aired the documentary The First Brit: Secrets of the 10,000 Year Old Man, in which geneticists at the Natural History Museum a…
What remains in the wake of centuries of technological and scientific developments and in the wake of histories of modern progress—which is also to say histories of dispossession, displace-ment, and exploitation? How are remains and remainders, and the process of remaining, to be understood, engaged, and entered into a relationship with? What is the place of remain(s) in a global capitalist, …
A relationship with technology is central to being human, but it is not well understood. Humans create technology and have done since the earliest times, and this is commonly taken as a sign of what distinguishes humanity from the sub-primates. Equally, though, our technologies create us, enabling the activities and experiences and forms of social organization that make us who we are. This in…
The evidence proves that since the remote past religion has been a part of our mental emotional make up. Even non believers usually agree that the term homo religiosus aptly describes the human experience. Men and women by their nature are religious, and efforts to eliminate religion as many social and political movements have done since the eighteenth century, come up short. They ultimately fa…
Golf had been played in North America long before—likely even dur-ing the colonial period, with dilettantes occasionally hitting balls in open fields or parks. It enjoyed a brief period of popularity in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, in the late eighteenth century. The first golf clubs and balls arrived in America from Scotland in a 1743 shipment to Charleston, where a …
According to this report, Ida’s successful treatment of the patient promoted her reputation for “virginal holiness”; that is, her health-giving intervention cinched her fama not as a healthcare practitioner, but as a “virgin of God.” As the citizens of Leuven rendered this healing event into story, they crafted Ida’s image as a holy woman. A Cistercian monk then recorded this…
For a long time, the simplicity of the Physio logus stories impeded any serious attempt to understand its function. They evoke the fables of Aesop and other “sto-ries with a moral” that are often read to children. Such stories seem to have didactic but otherwise no real intellectual value and little historical significance or influence. The editor of the facsimile of the Physio logus in Ber…
From the 15th century onwards, when European mariners, explorers, and settlers started in situ observations and descriptions of tropical marine fauna, they were relying on their own eyes, mental preconceptions, as well as previously acquired knowledge. In fact, they had their own mindsets, belief systems, and understandings of the world to cope with. And the same happened with European naturali…
Both concerns and proposed solutions changed considerably in the course of Ruth Harrison’s life. While the influence of her vegetarian par-ents and Quaker beliefs loomed large over Harrison’s own campaigning, the decades after 1945 saw many older forms of civic activism and think-ing about animals’ place in society change. Economically and intellectu-ally, pre-war welfare arrange…
This open access book studies breath and breathing in literature and culture and provides crucial insights into the history of medicine, health and the emotions, the foundations of beliefs concerning body, spirit and world, the connections between breath and creativity and the phenomenology of breath and breathlessness. Contributions span the classical, medieval, early modern, Romantic, Victori…