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 …
This informative but concise history of China and Southeast Asia is perfect for travelers, students, teachers, and businesspeople. Portable and attractively designed, it includes color illustrations, maps, and a brief history of the region. Explored are relations between China and Southeast Asia across two millennia; patterns of diplomacy, commercial networks, and migration; and how these have …
In 221 B.C. the First Emperor of Qin unified what would become the heart of a Chinese empire whose major features would endure for two millennia. In the first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, Lewis highlights the key challenges facing the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity.
"The Mongol takeover in the 1270s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empire—a millennium and a half in the making—was suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave of steppe invaders would replace the Ming dynasty with yet an…
In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. The Great Qing was the second major Chinese empire ruled by foreigners. Three strong Manchu emperors worked diligently to secure an alliance with the conquered Ming gentry, though many of their social edicts—especial…
The Great Wall of China is a wonder of the world. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists take the five-mile journey from Beijing to climb its battlements. While myriad photographs have made this extraordinary landmark familiar to millions more, its story remains mysterious and steeped in myth. In this riveting account, John Man travels the entire length of the Great Wall and across two m…
How Divine Images Became Art tells the story of the parallel ‘discovery’ of Russian medieval art and of the Italian ‘primitives’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. While these two developments are well-known, they are usually studied in isolation. Tarasov’s study has the great merit of showing the connection between the art world in Russia and the West, and its impact in the c…
This book presents a detailed analysis of the translation of the Qur’an in Saudi Arabia, the most important global actor in the promotion, production and dissemination of Qur’an translations. From the first attempts at translation in the mid-twentieth century to more recent state-driven efforts concerned with international impact, The Kingdom and the Qur’an adeptly elucidates the link bet…
For his fifteenth-century followers, Jesus was everywhere – from baptism to bloodcults to bowling. This sweeping and unconventional investigation looks at Jesus across one hundred forty years of social, cultural, and intellectual history. Mystics married him, Renaissance artists painted him in three dimensions, Muslim poets praised his life-giving breath, and Christopher (“Christ-bearing”…
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…
Nativism is the idea that a certain group of people can be identied as original to, or the rightful heirs to, a geopolitical territory; consequently, “natives” claim the privilege of deciding who belongs and who counts as an “outsider” based on supposed foreign connections. The case could be made that nativism in this sense is universal. Nativist movements stress the …
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…
Schools of art represent one of the building blocks of art history. The notion of a school of art emerged in artistic discourse and disseminated across various countries in Europe during the early modern period. Whilst a school of art essentially denotes a group of artists or artworks, it came to be configured in multiple ways, encompassing different meanings of learning, origin, style, or nati…
To tease out the evolution of institutions, organisations and transport requires a broad search of historical accounts written both in English and in Japanese. Published in English, there is scholarship rich in details of ancient and modern aspects of Japan, its politics and economy. Computer search engines and the website Academia allow access to data bases th…
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…
Lynda Mugglestone's hugely popular The Oxford History of English is now updated and entirely reset in a new edition featuring David Crystal's new take on the future of English in the wider world. In accounts made vivid with examples from a vast range of documentary evidence that includes letters, diaries, and private records, fifteen scholars trace the history of English from its ancient Ind…
This book takes as its object of investigation an array of traumatic heritage sites and spaces of memory, including museums, former detention camps, and sites of commemoration, in Europe, Argentina, and Colombia, to investigate how various traumatic pasts can be preserved and transmitted through space, and which kind of actions might be taken both to improve knowledge of the past and to serve a…
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 …
Ghosts ‘are a haunting reminder of an ignored past’, Banu Subramaniam, professor and chair of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, asserts in her exploration of the politics of science. It is our duty as historians to render these ghosts visible by ‘confront[ing] the past, or [else] the dead never go away, history never slee…
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 …
Using long-ignored constitutions of various Jewish organizations, this unique book uncovers the political history of Canadian Jewry since its beginning during the 1700s. Building on the premise that Jews, since time immemorial, have written down their values and ideologies, this study effectively demonstrates how these writings record the principles and values that motivated a community.
This equation suggests that if relationships 1 and 2 are opposedin type, then relationships 3 and 4 will be similarly opposed.A similarity in type between 1 and 2, or 3 and 4, though allowedby the formula, is taken to be a very rare occurrence. IndeedL6vi -Strauss suggests that this latter type of structure couldwell be expected to break down or at lea…
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…
Time and again since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, public discourse in the US has revolved around society’s relationship with its soldiers. Apart from medialized farewell and welcome-home ceremonies, yellow-ribbon campaigns and “I-support-the-troops” bumper stickers, protagonists within this discourse have increasingly expressed concern about how soldiers come …
Reissued with a new introduction by the author, The Paraguayan War is an engrossing and comprehensive account of the origins and early campaigns of the deadliest and most extensive interstate war ever fought in Latin America. One of the first significant investigations of the Paraguayan War available in English, it investigates the complexities of South American nationalism, military developmen…
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…
Desire and Disunity explores the struggles of Christianising late ancient sexuality in the late Roman West. Through an examination of fourth to sixth century sermons, letters, laws, and treatises in Latin-speaking communities, the difficulties of late antique clerics in moving ascetically influenced sexual ideals into wider practice become evident. Western clerics faced challenges on several fr…
"Imperial Genus begins with the turn to world culture and ideas of the generally human in Japan’s cultural policy in Korea in 1919. How were concepts of the human’s genus?being operative in the discourses of the Japanese empire? How did they inform the imagination and representation of modernity in colonial Korea? Travis Workman delves into these questions through texts in philosophy, liter…
In Februruary 1972, Working in the perpetual Drizzle that shrouds the central coast of Vietnam each winter, soldiers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) produced a photographic inventory of two bases newly acquired from the Americans. Just a few weeks before, some thirty thousand US Army and Marine Corps troops removed themselves with thousands of tons of equipment from Ph…
Richtung 2000 heute zu sehen kann aus verschiedenen Gründen spannend sein. Auf den meisten Blogs, die den 2015 von einer Privatperson auf Youtube gestellten2 Film teilten, werden manche der darin aufgestellten Prognosen als visionär bejubelt, besonders jene zu Umweltthemen; Fehleinschätzungen werden hingegen mit gelindem Spott registriert. Interessant scheint für die Kommentierenden vo…
In the eighteenth century Russia was a newcomer to the familiar concert of European nations, an exciting or worrying outsider among the established powers. In 1703 Tsar Peter Alekseevich, Peter I, the Great, founded a new city, St Petersburg, at the eastern end of the Baltic Sea. Thereby, in the famous words of Russia’s national poet Aleksandr Pushkin, he …
The proclamation of Belarusian independence on March 25, 1918, and the rival establishment of the Soviet Belarusian state on January 1, 1919, created two distinct and mutually exclusive national myths, which continue to define contemporary Belarusian society. This book examines the processes that resulted in this dual resolution in the context of World War I and the subsequent Russian Revolutio…
Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters—soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters—who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders. The 14 chapters deal with the diverse enco…
Military and civil spheres are more or less isolated enclaves in our present-day Western world. Soldiers live and operate separate from the rest of the society, and, besides the annual parades and the possible compulsory military service, these two worlds have little contact. Wars are even more remote incidents, as they are mostly fought in far-away countries.In …
Is historical knowledge important for education? How can we build a shared historical knowledge with schools, communities, and education professionals? The book responds to these questions by suggesting the public history approach, as applied in education and, more generally, to all professions that are based on human relations. The public history of education refers directly to North American …
Humans, represented by members of genus Homo, have been living in Europe for around 1.5 million years. But who were they? How did they survive? In short, what kinds of ‘humans’ were these? These are the fundamental questions addressed, though the lens of the changing seasons, in the pages that follow. But why ask these questions and why should we be interested…
What if we were actually able to smell out the mixture of things that composed the olfactory past? What if historians were to bury their noses in the past instead of merely resorting to ocular inspection?This short book provides some answers to these questions. It is an exploration of what it means to study smell in the past, smell and the past and the smell of the pas…
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…
From the mid-nineteenth-century Hui rebellions, which challenged centralised state control, to the early-twentieth-century revolutions, which led to Yunnan’s decades-long independence, local actors shaped the history of Yunnan through their extensive cross-border networks and contradictory roles in the attempted state consolidation of this contested area. Among the local elites, the state age…
Two decades before the war against Ukraine, a “special operation” was launched against Russian historical memory, aggressively reshaping the nation’s understanding of its history and identity. The Kremlin’s militarization of Russia through World War II propaganda is well documented, but the glorification of Russian medieval society and its warlords as a source of support for Putinism ha…
Cities, Monuments and Objects in the Roman and Byzantine Levant celebrates Gabriel Mazor and his lifetime of work at the monumental city of Nysa-Scythopolis, Bet She?an Bays?n. This metropolis, part of the storied Decapolis, or league of ten cities, that flourished during the Hellenistic, Roman-Byzantine and very early Islamic periods until the devastating earthquake of AD 748, has been the sin…
Perhaps unexpectedly, English travel writing during the long eighteenth century reveals a discourse of global civility. By bringing together representations of the then already familiar Ottoman Empire and the largely unknown South Pacific, Sascha Klement adopts a uniquely global perspective and demonstrates how cross-cultural encounters were framed by Enlightenment philosophy, global interconne…
This volume, covering the period 1666–1800, considers the archaeology of the port of London on a wide scale, from the City down the Thames to Deptford. During this period, with the waterfront at its centre, London became the hub of the new British empire, contributing to the exploitation of people from other lands known as slavery.
In 2007, a Smithsonian Magazine article declared, “Singapore Swing: Peaceful and Prosperous, Southeast Asia’s Famously Uptight Nation Has Let Its Hair Down.” Remarking on his return trip to Singapore, David Lamb, former Southeast Asia bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times,marveled, “This tiny nation—whose ascendancy from malariainfested colonial …
The Romanov family ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917. They ascended the throne at the end of one of the most critical periods of Russian history, known as the Time of Troubles (1589 Ü 1613). The last tsar of the previous dynasty, a weak son of Ivan the Terrible, died in 1589.
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne …
In perhaps the most striking passages of The Dominion in 1983, the author writing under the pseudonym Ralph Centennius predicted the use of “light and beautiful rocket cars, which [dart] through the air at the rate of sixty miles in one minute.” Constructed of polished metal, these fifty-seat rocket cars would fly through the sky at heights of up to fifteen hundred feet and land on rails wh…