Western and eastern values of society underscore the family as a fundamental social structure and institution.1 The family reveals the most significant sociocultural features of European communi-ties in a given context, and these become central communication channels back to the family. This idea asserts James Casey’s axiom that family and society are part of a single unit.2The family is at t…
Both concerns and proposed solutions changed considerably in the course of Ruth Harrison’s life. While the influence of her vegetarian par-ents and Quaker beliefs loomed large over Harrison’s own campaigning, the decades after 1945 saw many older forms of civic activism and think-ing about animals’ place in society change. Economically and intellectu-ally, pre-war welfare arrange…
The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted to Christianity) in the early 17th century. This volume presents the documentation that has come down to us, accompanied by critical and detailed analyses of the sources written in Arabic, Old Cat…
Ban Wang traces the shifting concept of the Chinese state from the late nineteenth century to the present, showing how the Confucian notion of tianxia—“all under heaven”—influences China’s dedication to contributing to and exchanging with a common world.
Grand, extravagant, magnificent, scandalous, corrupt, political, personal, fractious; these are terms often associated with the medieval and early modern courts. Moreover, the court constituted a forceful nexus in the social world, which was central to the legitimacy and authority of rulership. As such, courts shaped European politics and culture: architecture, art, fashion, patronage, and cult…
he region of Tripolitania is well-known for its spec-tacular Roman-period architecture in both city and country. The enormous and elaborate temples, baths, basilicae and other public buildings of the coastal cit-ies of Lepcis Magna, Sabratha and others, have, not undeservedly, captured the attention and imagina-tion of travellers and scholars alik…
No man ever steps in the same river twice.”¹Heraclitus’ riddling remark about identityalso applies to Roman (dress) culture. Fortunately, the puzzling contradiction dependson words and not on objects. If we define the term ‘Roman dress culture’ in the broadestsense, it includes all the garments which Roman people (if we also allow for a broaddefinition of the term ‘Roman’) wore fro…
The date is 14 October 1066, and the battlefield at Hastings lies bloodied, littered with the remains of Harold II's ruined army, with Harold himself defeated by an arrow to the eye. William the Qongueror has just earned his now-famous title, and more importantly, the crown of England. This is where our story begind - the fascinating tale of Britain's monarchy. In this book you will discover in…
Over the last 220 years, society has evolved a universal belief that electricity is ‘safe’ for humanity and the planet. Scientist and journalist Arthur Firstenberg disrupts this conviction by telling the story of electricity in a way it has never been told before?from an environmental point of view?by detailing the effects that this fundamental societal building block has had on our health …
Edited by Martin Biddle with a catalogue of the known coins of the mint by Yvonne Harvey, this volume records and illustrates the minting of silver pennies in Winchester between the reigns of Alfred the Great and Henry III, a period of three and a half centuries. At the Mint, which was situated in the area of the High Street to the east of where the city’s cross now stands, at least 24 millio…
The spread of Islam is one of the most significant processes of Indonesian history, but also one of the most obscure. Muslim traders had apparently been present in some parts of Indonesia for several centuries before Islam became established within the local communities. When, why and how the conversion of Indonesians began has been debated by several scholars, but no definite conclusions have…
During the first half of the twentieth century Europe suffered a cataclysmic change. The lives of millions were destroyed, millions more lives blighted. What led to such a chain of catastrophes? The fratricidal Great War marks the turning point in the history of Europe. There is no single cause that explains it all, but a multiplicity that need to be untangled. Paradoxically industrial progress…
Risible explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and repro…
With a specific focus on travel narratives, this collection looks at how Islamic and eastern cultural threads were weaved, through travel and trading networks, into Western European/Christian visual culture and discourse and, ultimately, into the artistic explosion which has been labeled the “Renaissance.” Scholars from across humanities disciplines examine Islamic, Jewish, Spanish, Italian…
This book attempts to understand the origins and development of religious belief in Iceland and greater Scandinavia through the lenses of five carefully selected Icelandic folktales collected in Iceland during the nineteenth century. Each of these five stories has a story of its own: a historical and cultural context, a literary legacy, influences from beliefs of all kinds (orthodox and heterod…
This book argues that the impressive range of belongings that can be connected to Duchess Matilda Plantagenet allows us to perceive elite women’s performance of power, even when they are largely absent from the official documentary record.
A million and a half Jews fought in the armed forces of the Allies during the Second World War. They served in the armies, navies, and air forces of their native lands. Many who were forced to flee the Nazis then joined the war effort in the countries that had given them refuge. Between 490,000 and 520,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the Red Army.1Most of them were nat…
“Most things in the history of Greece have become a subject of dispute” is how Pausanias, the second-century a.d. author of a famous guide to sites throughout Greece, summed up the challenge and the fascination of thinking about the significance of ancient Greek history (Guide to Greece 4.2.3). The subject was disputed then because Pausanias, a Greek, lived and wrote under the Roman Empire,…
THIS book introduces the documentary heritage inscriptions from Africa on the Memory of the World International Register up to 2023. Its publication was made possible thanks to the collective expertise and efforts of the members of the Africa Regional Committee for Memory of the World (ARCMoW), the custodians of the Memory of the World inscriptions across Africa, the national Memory of the Worl…
This book brings together thirteen scholars to introduce the newest and most cutting-edge research in the field of Russian and East European art history. Reconsidering canonical figures, re-examining prevalent debates, and revisiting aesthetic developments, the book challenges accepted histories and entrenched dichotomies in art and architecture from the nineteenth century to the present. In do…
Mount Kailash in Asia, the Black Hills in North America, Uluru in Australia: around the globe there are numerous mountains that have been and continue to be attributed sacredness. Worship of these mountains involves prayer, meditation and pilgrimage. Christianity, which for a long time showed little interest in nature, provides a foil to these practices and was one factor in the tensions that a…
At a crucial crossroads between Africa and Europe, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and the “Arab World” and the West, Morocco has long had a special place in U.S. diplomacy and strategic planning. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), Morocco’s importance to the United States has only increased; in 2004, President George W. Bush designated the country as a “major…
The area lies in North Africa, on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. It is bordered by Morocco in the north, Algeria in the east (they have 42 kms of common boundary) and Mauritania from the east and south. Its area is 266,000 square kilometres. Just like in most African countries, the borders were marked out by the colonial powers by ratifying different treaties, agreements. The borders of Weste…
‘‘We look into history from motives of two kinds,’’ says the Oxford classicist Jasper Griffin. ‘‘There is curiosity about the past, what happened, who did what, and why; and there is the hope to understand the present, how to place and interpret our own times, experiences, and hopes for the future.’’1 As with the history of antiquity, the best contemporary history is usually dri…
Explanations for the onset of the Cold War must begin with World War II. A conflict that ranks, by any conceivable measure, as the most destructive in human history, World War II brought unparalleled levels of death, devastation, privation, and disorder. ‘The conflagration of 1939–1945 was so wrenching, so total, so profound, that a world was overturned,’ notes historian Thomas G. Paterso…
Why does the history of dogmatism deserve our attention? This open access book analyses uses of the term, following dogmatism from Victorian Britain to Cold War America, examining why it came to be regarded as a vice, and how understandings of its meaning have evolved. Whilst the field of scientific thought is committed to continuous innovation, ideas about dogmatism – with their roots in anc…
Latinization is a strangely overlooked topic. Historians have noted it has been ‘taken for granted’ and viewed as an unremarkable by-product of ‘Romanization’, despite its central importance for understanding the Roman provincial world, its life and languages. This volume aims to fill the gap in our scholarship, along with its sister volumes, Latinization, Local Languages and Literacies…
As a result of World War I, Japan, the United States and Great Britain came to be referred to as the three great powers. The [former German] equatorial Pacific Islands lying between the U.S. territories of the Philippines and Guam and the U.S. mainland became mandated territories of Japan. From way back, Britain had acquired various rights and interests in China with Singapore and Hong Kong ser…
This collaborative volume explores changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the long nineteenth century. During this period, popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were challenged, modified, and reframed by the politics and structures of ‘modern life’, understood in industrial, social, commercial, and technological te…
The study of Roman urbanism – especially its early (Republican) phases – is extensively rooted in the evidence provided by a series of key sites, several of them located in Italy. Some of these Italian towns (e.g. Fregellae, Alba Fucens, Cosa) have received a great deal of scholarly attention in the past and they are routinely referenced as textbook examples, framing much of our understandi…
Thessaly was a region of great importance in the ancient Greek world, possessing both agricultural abundance and a strategic position between north and south. It presents historians with the challenge of seeing beyond traditional stereotypes (wealth and witches, horses and hospitality) that have coloured perceptions of its people from antiquity to the present day. It also presents a complex and…
Archaeological findings have indicated that Southern Africa is the land from which humankind’s ancestors evolved, between 3 million and 1 million years ago. Indeed, it is probable that the indigenous San, Pygmy, and Khoekhoe peoples of Southern Africa are linked genetically to that earlier, ancient population. Little, if anything, is known about interaction among these particular early group…
Modern Western culture is inordinately present-minded. Politicians are ignorant of the past. School curricula foreshorten the historical record by focusing on recent events. People lack a sense of their location in time and fail to perceive that contemporary society is constrained by its cultural as well as its biological inheritance. Many historians of the white South African establishment sta…
As the first study of manuscript collections, this book asks what changes when sayings, stories, songs, and spells are brought together on the same carrier. Covering a plethora of manuscripts from the Warring States and early empires, and spanning sources from philosophy, historiography, poetry, and technical literature, this study describes the whole life-cycle of multiple texts collected on a…
The modern US Army as we know it was largely created in the years between the two world wars. Prior to World War I, officers in leadership positions were increasingly convinced that building a new army could not take place as a series of random developments but was an enterprise that had to be guided by a distinct military policy that enjoyed the support of the nation. In 1920, Congress accepte…
Mary Pat Brady traces the figure of the captive and cast-off child over 150 years of Latinx/Chicanx literature as a critique of colonial modernity and the forms of confinement that underpin racialized citizenship.
Following conflicting desires for an Aztec crown, this book explores the possibilities of repatriation. In The Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll meditates on the case of a spectacular feather headdress believed to have belonged to Montezuma, the last emperor of the Aztecs. This crown has long been the center of political and cultural power struggles, and it is one of the most cont…
In this volume amulets and talismans are studied within a broader system of meaning that shapes how they were manufactured, activated and used in different networks. Text, material features and the environments in which these artifacts circulated, are studied alongside each other, resulting in an innovative approach to understand the many different functions these objects could fulfil in pre-mo…
What is the ocean’s role in human and planetary history? How have writers, sailors, painters, scientists, historians, and philosophers from across time and space poetically envisioned the oceans and depicted human entanglements with the sea? In order to answer these questions, Søren Frank covers an impressive range of material in A Poetic History of the Oceans: Greek, Roman and Biblical text…
In the early 1980s I was sitting in the coffee shop of the Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur, reflecting on the strange fact that Dutch troops had come ashore nearby, less than 80 years previously, on their way to perpetrate one of the more extraordinary massacres in the history of colonialism. I did not know that the Japanese had also landed in this same area in 1942, or that the Dutch had returned he…
Historically speaking, Danish is a dialect of a common Scandinavian language known from around 200 AD. Around 1100-1200 AD, Danish became a distinctive language with a distinctive pronuncation. The period from 800-1100 AD is called Old Danish or Runic Danish, as our knowledge of the language is primarily based on runic inscriptions. In the 20th century, the advent of radio broadcasts in 1932 an…
The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. From pilgrimage sites in the far west of Europe to the Persian court; from mystic visions to a gruesome contemporary “dance”; from a mundane poem on wine to staggering religious art: thus far in space and time extends the world of the Armenians. A glimpse of the vast and st…
The first people to reach North America almost certainly did so without knowing they had crossed into a new continent. They would have been following game, as their ancestors had for thousands of years, along the Siberian coast and then across the land bridge. Once in Alaska, it would take these first North Americans thousands of years more to work their way through the openings in great glaci…
This book provides the first comprehensive historical account of the evolution of scientific traditions in astronomy, astrophysics, and the space sciences within the Max Planck Society. Structured with in-depth archival research, interviews with protagonists, unpublished photographs, and an extensive bibliography, it follows a unique history: from the post-war relaunch of physical sciences in W…
This book looks at the impact women’s migration had on Ireland in the crucial years of initial independence, from the partition of the island and the founding of the Free state to the declaration of a Republic. This period saw Ireland move from internal political instability in the 1920s to a more internationally focused country in the 1950s. However, emi…
Growing up in Western Australia, in the southwestern corner of that huge and sparsely populated state, it was difficult to be unaware of the bizarre splendour, diversity and colour of the local vegetation. This, the South West Botanical Province, is now recognised as one of 25 biodiversity hotspots in the world. Its abundance of flowering plants, possibly over 9,000 species, is greater than alm…
This book is a story. It’s a story about ordinary people in very different parts of the world dealing with rapid change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
Writing history is an art and a craft. This handbook supports research students and independent scholars by showing how the historical profession works and how to participate in its vibrant community of scholars. It outlines techniques to help design large-scale research projects, demonstrates the difference between quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and provides advice on brin…
Urban histories tend to be dominated by large, global cities. But what does the history of the modern, colonial era look like from the perspective of smaller cities? By shifting the focus from the metropolis to the secondary city of Chiang Mai, this study provides an alternative narrative of the formation of the modern Thai state that highlights the overlap between European, American, and Siame…