This book represents an attempt to capture different links between modern literature and music. The author examines strict intertextual correlations, the phenomena of musicality and musicality of literary works, the musical structure in literature, so-called musical literary texts. He focuses on the novel Le Cœur absolu by Philippe Sollers, the poem Todesfuge by Paul Celan, the Preludio e Fugh…
This volume is one in a continuing series of books now being prepared by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress under the Country Studies—Area Handbook Program. The last page of this book lists the other published studies. Most books in the series deal with a particular foreign country, describing and analyzing its political, economic, social, and national security systems a…
In the course of the eighteenth century, Newton's ideas (in different guises and interpretations) became a veritable hype in Dutch society. In Newton & the Netherlands Newton's sudden success is analyzed in great depth and put into a new perspective. URI
Digital Art History has often aligned itself with the practical concerns of digital technology and the responsibilities of art institutions and associated institutional roles such as collection managers, information specialists, curators, and conservators. This emphasis on practicalities and implementation, while undeniably important, has often meant that there is little room for critical exami…
What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching in a present-day schoolroom? Rather than regarding such anachronisms as errors, Samurai with Telephones develops a theory of how texts can use different types of anachronisms to challenge or rewrite history, play with history, or open history up to…
This book is the first comprehensive introduction to the comics culture of Taiwan. Under martial law (1949–87), Taiwan’s comics culture was shaped by an intriguing mix: mainland Chinese traditions of political cartoons (manhua) and popular “picture books” (lianhuanhua) existed side by side with pirated and often obscured Japanese manga. Triangulating the sociology of culture, media hist…
Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River t…
This is the first full-length study of the life and career of Brian Simon (1915-2002), leading Marxist intellectual and historian of education in twentieth-century Britain. Using documentary sources that have only recently become publicly available, it reveals the remarkably broad range of Simon’s life as student, soldier and school teacher, Communist Party activist, and educational academic,…
Once upon a time 'The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century' was an innovative concept that inspired a stimulating narrative of how modern science came into the world. Half a century later, what we now know as 'the master narrative' serves rather as a strait-jacket — so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. No attempt has been made so far to replace the master narrative. H. Flori…
When Townes van Zandt was once asked why most of his songs are so sad, he replied with the telling phrase: ‘Blues is happy music!’ His blues is ‘happy,’ of course, not because it is jolly and there is no sadness in it, but much rather precisely because it affirms and gives form to sadness, thereby enabling us to transform and transcend it. Townes’ point w…
In the aftermath of the 2018 June 12 summit between the US and North Korea, held in Singapore, there was vehement disagreement among experts and commentators over the question as to whether anything sub-stantive had been established by President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un, or whether it was China, North Korea or the US that had emerged as a winner. The only c…
On 1 April 1931, the Lebanese engineer Albert Naccache guided a group of touriststo the Qadisha Valley in Northern Lebanon. Nowadays, the Qadisha Valley figures in the World Heritage List of UNESCO, owing to its age-old cedars and monasteries dating back to the early days of Christianity.1 Naccache, however, drew the atten-tion of his visitors to a mo…
The basic premise of this volume of articles is that there is a need to respond to the challenge issued by Jerry Bentley – one of the pioneers of the now well-established field of ‘World History’ – for historians to attempt both to ‘globalize history’ and to ‘historicize globalization’. Though directed at historians, it is a challenge that raises broader questions about the …
The Mongols arose from obscure origins in the recesses of Inner Asia to unify their immediate nomadic neighbors and then to conquer much of the Eurasian landmass, ruling large parts of it for more than a century. Emerging from a newly consolidated heartland north of the Gobi in the thirteenth century, the Mongols and their armies—made up of conquered peoples—thrust through western Asia, cro…
In 1432, poet John Lydgate was commissioned to commemorate the triumphal entry of Henry VI to London. Setting the scene, Lydgate wrote of ‘this Citee with laude, pris, and glorie/For joye moustred lyke the sonne beem’.1 He described the participants in this civic muster in terms of their clothing: the mayor in red velvet, the sheriffs and aldermen in scarlet furred …
A “Brief History of Italy?” Isn’t that impossible? Well, sort of, so we’ve kept it very general to provide the reader with merely a survey. Though Italy is really a new nation only coming into being in 1861, the geographical area we now refer to as Italy has had a long, rich, and diverse history. This survey will take you through pre-Roman times with the Greeks and Etruscans to the Roma…
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.
The objectives of the textbook are fourfold. The first priority is to familiarize university students of English language and literature with British history from the Ice Age to the twenty first century. The second purpose of the book is to provide information about British geography, holidays, sports, and customs. Also, at the same time, the textbook aims at helping university students deve…
Ancient Greece wasn't one big country like modern Greece is today. Instead, areas of land belonged to ‘city states’ (poleis), which all acted separately from the others. Sometimes they would make alliances with each other to fight enemies like the Persians — sometimes the Greek city states would fight each other.
In early May 1901, the colonial authorities in Kingstown, capital of the island of St Vincent, then a British colony in the Lesser Antilles, were taken by surprise by requests from the Carib populations living on the flanks of Mount La Soufrière to be removed to the south of the island. They were afraid of the increasing frequency of small earthquakes in the area. Stories had bee…
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…
Is there a special role for the Low Countries in art history’s current focus on global mobility? How, and why, should we conceive of the globalization of Netherlandish art? The essays brought together in this volume examine how artworks produced in the wake of European expansion – produced in the Netherlands in reaction to the world outside Euro…
This book is an experiment. Starting in the late 1970s, I began conducting ar-chaeological research in the lower Ulua River valley, a 2400 square kilometer swathe of lowlands that stretches over 70 km inland from the Caribbean coast. One of my earliest and continuing interests has been the pottery of the region, particularly the vessels called Ulua Polychromes. Long collected by museums, Ulua P…
In 1529, Pedro de Cazalla, a scion of a prominent family of Jewish converts to Christianity from Toledo, claimed that no more than “a thread” connected men with God and that any mediation by the Church was unnecessary. This book explores the manyfold ramifications of this idea. It stems from the conviction that during the early modern period, the Iberia…
Co-operation is a complex thing. Whether between individuals, organisations or nation-states an ability to co-operate is a crucial part of any successful relation-ship. An inability to co-operate often leads to a downturn in relationships with potential drastic consequences. Today, the promotion of co-operatives is one of the most effective tools used by international policymakers to stimulate …
When Si Zheng, the Shaanxi regional military commissioner, was a young man, he organized many young men of ill repute into a “righteous brother-hood.” If one member was attacked, they would combine forces and take revenge. Zheng had beaten to death a man at a singing loft in the provincial capital.1 The owner was powerless to apprehend him, and Zheng escaped. They seized a certain Mr. Liu, …
Following a successful period working in the colonial capital of Batavia ( Jakarta), Prawiradinata, a young and ambitious clerk in the indigenous civil service, was transferred to a new post in Purwakarta, a small town in Java’s interior. His enthusiasm about his career advancement quickly evaporated when he discovered that beyond the capital, …
Aphotograph presents the bourgeois family idyll in Léopoldville. The father,sit-ting in an armchair in the foreground, dominates the livingroom scene. He iswearingawhiteshirt and tie, polished leather shoes and trousers withacreasein them. His elbowsresting on the arms of the chair,heisengrossed in theVoixdu Congolais,anewspaper for thevernacular elite published by theBelgian Con-go’sGeneral…
The Japanese occupation of both British Borneo – Brunei, Sarawak and North Borneo – and Dutch Borneo in 1941 to 1945 is a much understudied subject. Of particular interest is the occupation of Dutch Borneo, governed by the Imperial Japanese Navy that had long-term plans for ‘permanent possession’. This book surveys Borneo under Western colonialism, examines pre-war Japanese interests in…
This book has two main aims. First, the book will discuss various modes ofstudying and defining the medieval self. This will encompass a wide range ofsource material from Scandinavia,c. 800–1500, such as archaeological, archi-tectural and artistic, documentary and literary sources, and runic inscriptions.The second main aim of the book will be to discuss what processes and practi-ces the self…
From Book 1: Previously published as Ancient Science, Secret History contains 150 pages of new material. It is the definitive edition in a new format. The Secret History of The World and How To Get Out Alive is the definitive book of the real answers where Truth is more fantastic than fiction. Laura Knight-Jadczyk, wife of internationally known theoretical physicist, Arkadiusz Jadczyk, an exper…
Throughout history, military engagements have altered the course of historical events, causing major changes both on a global scale (the battles of Yarmouk & al-Qadisiyyah in 636 determined the religious/linguistic orientation of the Middle East that persists today) as well as within individual cultures (the 1836 battle of San Jacinto gave the United States nearly one-third of its continental t…
When Raphael Cilento drafted his unpublished autobiography, he called it ‘The World, My Oyster’. Some of the other titles he considered—such as ‘Confessions of an International Character’, ‘20th Century Spotlight’, ‘Mankind in the Raw’ and ‘Tapestry of Humanity’—similarly evoked his international career. Other alternatives—such as ‘Topical Confessions of a Tropical D…
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…
Belgium once had an empire in Central Africa. The historical processes inform-ing this imperial presence – the foundation of the Congo Free State (CFS) in 1885, its demise, the emergence of the Belgian Congo in 1908, and the subse-quent absorption of ‘Ruanda-Urundi’ by Belgium under the aegis of the League of Nations in 1922 – are well documented and …
This book examines the ways in which people wrote about and engaged with infertility in the German Middle Ages. Striking differences emerge across the vernacular stories, legends, and romances concerned. For some, childlessness is a huge problem, for others, a high ideal. Regina Toepfer considers the reasons for these differences, and how ideas changed over the period, revealing different narra…
Mexico is a nation undergoing rapid change. Past characterizations of the country as rural, undemocratic, and protectionist have been replaced in the last decades of the twentieth century bydescriptions that refer to Mexico as urban, opening to democracy, and market-oriented. For a country composed mostly of peasants before the Revolution (1910—20), Mexico has undergone broad and rapid urbani…
The Prestes Column is one of the most famous events in modern Brazilian history. What started out as an unsuccessful rebellion soon morphed into a roving expedition that crisscrossed the country for almost three years. From 1924 to 1927, a group of roughly one thousand army officers and soldiers marched fifteen thousand miles through the vast interior regions of Brazil (…
We present, in this book, a transliterated transcription of the Bugis text of the work known as the Chronicle of Bone, together with an English translation and notes. The chronicle deals with the affairs of this traditional kingdom in South Sulawesi—almost exactly in the centre of modern Indonesia—from the fourteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century CE…
This book explores the accounts of commerce and finance developed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historians of England. Writers of the period, I argue, were engaged in a series of long-running and politically charged debates concerning a range of economic issues: the impact of popular and arbitrary forms of government on trade; the political and economic conseque…
okyo Ueno Station: A Novel (JR Uenoeki K?enguchi, 2014) by Y? Miri recounts the heartbreaking life story of an unnamed man, born in the same year as the now Emperor Emeritus Akihito (b. 1933; reigned 1989–2019). The protagonist’s son was born on the same day as Akihito’s eldest son, the present Emperor Naruhito, on 23 February 1960. In more ways than one, the life of the pro…
I have been frequently asked over the years how – from the most unlikely of backgrounds – I became a historian of Brazil and how I came to devote the greater part of my academic career to the promotion and development of Brazilian studies in the UK (and, to a lesser extent, in the US).I was born in Leeds in the north of England in 1937. I spent my entire childhood in Hunsl…
All’inizio degli anni ’90 del ’900, quando la città di Torino pareva interrogarsi, tra circospezione e scoramento, sul proprio futuro postin-dustriale, Carlo Cresto-Dina e Franco Fornaris decisero di dar vita a un documentario costruito attraverso una serie molto ampia di interviste a persone informate dei fatti, “per capire se una citt…
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…
I am very thankful to be here. And there is something more in my heart, something I cannot say.’ Sister Teresa González speaks firmly, with characteristic Spanish emphasis in the English she learnt in Australia 53 years ago. She speaks for us all, and we nod. We have sung an ancient liturgy of psalms to remember the eight Benedictine Missionary Sisters who a…
These verses, extracted from a longer Urdu naz?m or poem, were written by Nazir, a blacksmith and bladesmith based in the North Indian city of Rampur in the mid-twentieth century. I first encountered Nazir and his poetry as part of a collection that the librarians of the renowned Raza Library in Rampur had put together to honor the city’s artisanal and material heritage.2 Nazir’s ve…
I came to realize, after facing several difficulties in the con-struction of libraryofbabel.info, that I was attempting to make a faithful recreation of an impossible dream. The website is an online version of Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” which I hope to show was imagined by its author as self-contradictory in every aspect, from its architecture…
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 …
In nostra terra. From the temple of eternal fire to the Zglenicki platform. Unwritten masterpieces. And this is what Poland is. From Ko?ciuszko’s home-land. Carnival in the colour of blood. The conspirators from the “Hotel pod Luftmaszyn?.” How can we doubt the good results... A manuscript under a lucky star. Studies – the most urgent intention of all. There will be no whit…
Japanese Tattoos explains the imagery featured in Japanese tattoos so that readers can avoid getting ink they don't understand or, worse, that they'll regret. This photo-heavy book also traces the history of Japanese tattooing, putting the iconography and kanji symbols in their proper context so readers will be better informed as to what they mean and have a deeper understanding of irezumi. Fea…