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…
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 …
hroughout his adult life, Alabaster kept diaries. In 1987, they were donated to the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.2 For much of his career, the diaries list his daily appointments and meetings with only brief notices of personal events; for this he used Letts’s brand diaries, one day for each page. However, the first four volume…
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…
The year Louis the Pious was born – 778 – was the year Charlemagne had to acknowledge that his realm had become too big for one person to handle. With the Saxons stirring up trouble in the north-east, and the Basques having destroyed a sizable Carolingian army as it crossed the Pyrenees, Charlemagne set about organizing his realm and making sure it was in order.1 One of the most immediate r…
Graduate students have traditionally learned a good part ofwhat they know about sources and research aids on modern Chinathrough hearsay and serendipity, in unsystematic and unreliable bitsand pieces. The field has now developed to the point where thisneed not and ought not to be so. It is now possible for beginningresearcher…
Dynasty Divided uses the story of a prominent Kievan family of journalists, scholars, and politicians to analyze the emergence of rivaling nationalisms in nineteenth-century Ukraine, the most pivotal borderland of the Russian Empire. The Shul'gins identified as Russians and defended the tsarist autocracy; the Shul'hyns identified as Ukrainians and supported peasant-oriented socialism. Fabian Ba…