The famed French engineer of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, destroyed his career and the lives of twenty-ve thousand workers by insisting he could excavate across the mountainous Panamanian isthmus in the s. Learning from his mistakes, the Americans succeeded in the early s by taming the tropical insect-borne diseases and building an ingenious …
This book brings together recent research on the end of the Cold War in the Third World and engages with ongoing debates about regional conflicts, the role of great powers in the developing world, and the role of international actors in conflict resolution. Most of the recent scholarship on the end of the Cold War has focused on Europe or bilateral US-Soviet relations. By contrast, relatively l…
This book corrals global scholarship on ancient writing systems from China, Mesopotamia, Central America, the Mediterranean, to more recent newly created scripts such as the Rongorongo from Easter Island, the Caroline Island scripts, as well as the alphabet. The aim is to dig into the foundations of writing and showcase the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the pote…
It was a cold winter evening in 2010, and I had just arrived in Paris for a short research trip. The tiny hotel where I would be staying was on the fifth floor of the ophthalmological wing of the hôtel-Dieu (or hospital) just across from the cathedral of Notre Dame. 1 Given the subject of the book I was in France to research, it seemed appropri-ate that I should s…
“This is the death of the poem as I have faithfully reported it, November 29, 1966, as I have faithfully reported it, this is the death of the poem” in-tones Canadian poet bpNichol one day after the Dominion Day celebrations marking Canada’s centennial year. Addressing a national television audi-ence, Nichol reads these lines with poets bill bissett an…
For almost two decades, historians and academics from a wide- range of sub- disciplinary backgrounds have been situating their research within a global context, crossing boundaries both geographically and methodologically, in such large numbers as to necessitate the emergence of a recognisably new field of enquiry: Global History. From comparative to connective histories, the …
A visit to a town in the north-west of England 200 years ago would have been anassault on the senses. Though some parts of Liverpool, in particular, experiencedwidespread‘improving’measures from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, in themajority of other places (and indeed throughout significant parts of Liverpool too)it was not until the extensive street-widening schemes of the nineteenth …
E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, an engaging and lively book written for readers both young and old, vividly brings the full span of human experience on Earth to life, from the stone age to the atomic age. Gombrich’s text paints a colorful picture of wars and conquests; of grand works of art; of the advances and limitations of science; of remarkable people and remarkable even…
When Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to reach India in 1497–1498, he had not only discovered a new sea route between Europe and Asia but also opened up a new world of commerce that would shape European consumption, manufacturing, and ultimately industrial production over the following centuries. While goods from the East had reached Europe much ear-lier …
The original idea for this volume arose from a conference on entangled East-West histories that was held in February 2019 at the SAGAS Department of the University of Florence. Scholars from Chinese, Korean and Japanese universi-ties participated alongside colleagues from Western universities. To comple-ment the revised versions of some of those conference papers, several chapters explo…