On February 17, 2008, Kosovo declared its independence, becoming the seventh state to emerge from the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. A tiny country of just two million people, 90% of whom are ethnic Albanians, Kosovo is central-geographically, historically, and politically-to the future of the Western Balkans and, in turn, its potential future within the European Union. But the fate of both…
Colombia's recent past has been characterized by what its Nobel laureate Gabriel García Marquez once called "a biblical holocaust" of human savagery. Along with the scourge of drug-related massacres facing the country, politically-motivated assassinations (averaging 30 per day in the 1990s), widespread disappearances, rapes, and kidnappings have run rampant through the country for decades. For…
This is a book about the Irish Question, or more specifically about Irish Questions. The term has become something of a catch-all, a convenient way to encompass numerous issues and developments which pertain to the political, social, and economic history of modern Ireland.The Irish Question has of course changed: one of the main aims of this book is to explore the complicated and shifting natur…
In this Very Short Introduction, Vanessa Schwartz argues that modern France, as both a world stage and a global crossroads, is an essential actor in the development of contemporary culture. Indeed, French is the only language other than English spoken on five continents, and more people still visit France than anywhere else in the world. French fashion continues to dominate haute couture and, a…
In the late fifth century, a girl whose name has been forgotten by history was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In this book, Stephanie Balkwill documents the Empre…
By late 1922, Germany and the Allies had entered into a stand-off over the issue of reparation repayments. Germany had defaulted on its reparations payments to such an extent that the governments of France and Belgium ordered troops to occupy the Ruhr, a major industrial region in western Germany. The French and Belgian governments intended that their troops would supervise the extraction and c…
Before the twentieth century was even half over Germany had led Europe and the world into two wars of mass destruction in which over seventy million people died. By 1945 its neighbours were not inclined to trust a country that had visited such a degree of death and destruction on them. The reconstruction of Europe was a mammoth undertaking, as was also the rebuilding and recivilising of Germany…
This open access book explores how medieval societies conversed about the city and citizen in texts, visual imagery and material culture. It adopts a long-term, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural perspective, bringing together contributions on the early, high, and later Middle Ages, covering both the medieval East and West, and representing a wide variety of disciplinary angles and sources. …
This upsetting experience caused us to consider a problem often discussed: how lighting can completely change the viewer’s perception of a painting. Even if Tintoretto knew exactly what type of (natural) light there would be in the Scuola, and kept it in mind as he was painting his great teleri, his paintings nonetheless underwent some transformations over time — for example his c…
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…
For the past two decades, the Field Museum of Natural History has been a leader in the analysis, conservation, and preservation of archaeological and museum collections. There are an immeasurable number of researchers who have walked the museum’s halls, collaborated with museum scientists and curators, and advanced our understanding o…
The traditional long-form novel, as devel-oped in late Ming China, could be endlessly reshaped and repackaged. Its text could be freely altered. Commentaries could be added to its chapters, whether at their beginnings, at their ends, or even interpo-lated into the text itself, in order to assist less-experienced readers or to provide interpretations. Prefaces could be…
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 …
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…
Although they constantly shape behavior and nudge people to act in certain ways, norms tend to be taken for granted. Taking off shoes or removing a hat when entering a sacred space are not merely the result of individual decisions made upon crossing the threshold of a temple; they are appropriate ways of acting in that specific context and they signal conformity with a norm. This can also be no…
Globalization may be considered a process in which the network of human interaction gradually widens and takes on new and more complex forms. We would venture to say that each step of these deeper and more inclusive interconnections has unique characteristics. For instance, during the time of the great empires at the beginning of the Common Era (CE), the flow of materials and intellectual influ…
By the end of the first millennium CE, a vast portion of Central Eurasia was con-trolled by nomadic powers: the Sinicized Khitans (907–1125), who were later replaced by the Jurchens (1115–1234) and the Tanguts (1038–1227) in North and Northwest China; and the Turko-Islamic dynasties such as the Qarakhanids (840–1212), the Ghaznavids (977–1163) and the Saljuqs (1037–1194, and 1077–…
e migration of the Normans across Europe is a well-known and much written about subject. Originating in the principality of Normandy that took its name from the ‘men of the north’ who came from Scandinavia to settle on the French coast from the ninth century onwards, the Normans then established themselves during the eleventh century in two main areas some , mil…
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, three mysterious texts stirredup much debate in the intellectual world: TheFama Fraternitatis(Fame ofthe Fraternity, 1614), theConfessioFraternitatis(Confession of the Fraternity,1615),and,differentfrombutrelatedtoboth,theChymischeHochzeit:ChristianiRosencreutz(Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, 1616).2 While theChemicalWeddingpresents a fict…
f a poll were carried out to establish which form of manuscript, the codex or the roll, the public associated more with the Middle Ages, the result would probably see the codex taking most votes. A monk handling a codex is a stereotypical image of and for the Middle Ages promoted by medieval evidence as much as by modern movie productions such as the film adaptation…
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…
A contemporary, the literary critic Pavel Annenkov, points out that Kovalevsky’s generation was the first in Russia for which a university education was practically obligatory for a civil service career.2 The de-cade after the Napoleonic Wars was also a time of considerable intel-lectual turmoil among Russian students, who were well acquainted with the ideas that had led to revolution in Fran…
A company formed by the young, avowed British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes and his business partner Charles Dunell Rudd, with interests in the diamond mines of the Kimberley and gold mining in the Witwatersrand, became one of the foremost British mining-finance companies in the twentieth century. Emanating from South Africa, the company that Rhodes and Rudd founded, The …
In May 1951, Francisco Franco attended an international social security congressin Madrid. In the audience were experts and officials from across Spain, LatinAmerica, and western Europe, including ministers from various foreign govern-ments and representatives from international bodies such as the InternationalLabour Organization (ILO). Addressing the conference, Franco told delegates thattwo f…
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 …
In popular myth Nansen is the archetypal Scandinavian polar explorer – a manly, no- nonsense hero with little time for the sentimentality or plodding amateurism of his British contemporaries.1 However, Nansen’s account of this expedition, Farthest North (1897), reveals someone with a deeply romantic outlook whose musings on the Arctic ‘dreamland’ have much in common with the…
We believe that by joining forces and harmonizing diverse theories, sources and methods of different academic traditions like those from China and Japan, the field of global history receives a new impulse through diverse case studies. The constant participation of special-ists in this field is crucial, as they share their experiences and new …
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 …
Anyone undertaking a long-term historical study of any particular field of human activity is confronted with the difficulty that the contents and boundaries of that field are inevitably fluid and change over time. The historical study of science is no exception to this. Is it possible to conceptualize science broadly enough to include what has traditionally been considered sci…
The Magna Carta is arguably the greatest constitutional document in recorded history, yet few people today understand either its contents or its context. This Very Short Introduction, which includes a full English translation of the 1215 Magna Carta, introduces the document to a modern audience, explaining its origins in the troubled reign of King John, and tracing the significant role that it …
More than ever before, the Renaissance stands out as one of the defining moments in world history. Between 1400 and 1600, European perceptions of society, culture, politics and even humanity itself emerged in ways that continue to affect not only Europe but the entire world. In this wide-ranging exploration of the Renaissance, Jerry Brotton shows the period as a time of unprecedented intellect…
After surviving the fifth century fall of the Western European Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire flourished as one of the most powerful economic, cultural, and military forces in Europe for a thousand years. In this Very Short Introduction Peter Sarris introduces the reader to the unique fusion of Roman political culture, Greek intellectual tradition and Christian faith that took place in t…
Opening with a lucid overview of the rise and spread of Islam, from the seventh to the twenty-first century, this Very Short Introduction introduces the story of Islamic history, charting the evolution of what was originally a small, localized community of believers into an international religion with over a billion adherents. The book examines how Islam rose from the obscurity of seventh-centu…
There are many stories we can tell about the past, and we are not, perhaps, as free as we might imagine in our choice of which stories to tell, or where those stories end. John Arnold's addition to Oxford's popular Very Short Introductions series is a stimulating essay about how people study and understand history. The book begins by inviting us to think about various questions provoked by our …
How have the Jews survived? For millennia, they have defied odds by overcoming the travails of exile, persecution, and recurring plans for their annihilation. Many have attempted to explain this singular success as a result of divine intervention. In this engaging book, David N. Myers charts the long journey of the Jews through history. At the same time, it points to two unlikely-and decidedly …
Japan is arguably today's most successful industrial economy, combining almost unprecedented affluence with social stability and apparent harmony. Japanese goods and cultural products--from animated movies and computer games to cars, semiconductors, and management techniques--are consumed around the world. In many ways, Japan is an icon of the modern world, and yet it remains something of an en…
This Very Short Introduction looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented, both in Africa and beyond. The author illustrates important aspects of Africa's history with a range of fascinating historical examples, drawn from over 5 millennia across this vast continent. The multitude of topics that the reader will learn about in this succinct work i…
The ancient Egyptians are an enduring source of fascination--mummies and pyramids, curses and rituals have captured our imaginations for generations. We all have a mental picture of ancient Egypt, but is it the right one? How much do we really know about this once great civilization? In this absorbing introduction, Ian Shaw, one of the foremost authorities on Ancient Egypt, describes how our c…
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…
Addressing a field that has been dominated by astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, the contributors to this collection raise questions that may have been overlooked by physical scientists about the ease of establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence. These scholars are grappling with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity …
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…
Western Xia (1038–1227) was a dynastic empire in medieval China, based in the city of Xingqing, later Zhongxing (modern-day Yinchuan of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region). At its height, the Tangut imperium encompassed most of Ningxia, Gansu, northern Shaanxi, western Inner Mongolia, as well as parts of today’s Qinghai and Xinjiang.In the eyes of a historian, one of the m…
The recipes that form the subject of this edition have been taken from four manuscripts: British Library Additional 14912 (BLAdd), Cardiff 3.242 (Hafod 16, Card), Oxford Bodleian Rawlinson B467 (Rawl), and Oxford Jesus College 111 (the Red Book of Hergest, RBH). All four manuscripts are roughly contemporary, all dating from the end of the fourteenth century or the beginning of the fifteenth.1 I…
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…
From the 1890s on, the ground for the reception of the medieval tale Our Lady’s Tumblerin the United States was readied among the elite. Yet the individuals and media involved in the projection of the story in the New World before the cultured public are only loosely comparable to those who from the 1870s on motivated the success of the medieval poem and the fin-de-siècle …
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 …
Io, come sapete, sono stato Soprintendente di Firenze per poco meno di venti anni, dal 1988 al 2006; e in un periodo così lungo ho avuto rapporti frequenti di amicizia e di collaborazione con Detlef Heikamp, questo tedesco di Bre-ma, cittadino del mondo, che ha scelto Firenze come città della vita e degli studi. Essendo per lui la vita e gli studi una unità inscindibile.Ricordo il 1994, il 2…