These verses, extracted from a longer Urdu naz?m or poem, were written by Nazir, a blacksmith and bladesmith based in the North Indian city of Rampur in the mid-twentieth century. I first encountered Nazir and his poetry as part of a collection that the librarians of the renowned Raza Library in Rampur had put together to honor the city’s artisanal and material heritage.2 Nazir’s ve…
I came to realize, after facing several difficulties in the con-struction of libraryofbabel.info, that I was attempting to make a faithful recreation of an impossible dream. The website is an online version of Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” which I hope to show was imagined by its author as self-contradictory in every aspect, from its architecture…
In 1922 an in terest ing exchange took place in Moscow’s Botkin hospital concerning a “delicate and even shy” patient who had just had a bullet extracted from his neck and was recovering in ward no. 44.1The patient wanted to know all about his nurse, the other patients, and the medical personnel. He even asked the nurse why she looked so “bad” and ques-tioned the professor tending to …
In nostra terra. From the temple of eternal fire to the Zglenicki platform. Unwritten masterpieces. And this is what Poland is. From Ko?ciuszko’s home-land. Carnival in the colour of blood. The conspirators from the “Hotel pod Luftmaszyn?.” How can we doubt the good results... A manuscript under a lucky star. Studies – the most urgent intention of all. There will be no whit…
Japanese Tattoos explains the imagery featured in Japanese tattoos so that readers can avoid getting ink they don't understand or, worse, that they'll regret. This photo-heavy book also traces the history of Japanese tattooing, putting the iconography and kanji symbols in their proper context so readers will be better informed as to what they mean and have a deeper understanding of irezumi. Fea…
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 …
No Church is monolithic—this is the preliminary premise of this volume on the public place of religion in a representative number of post-communist countries. The studies confirm that within any religious organization we can expect to find fissures, factions, theological or ideological quarrels, and perhaps even competing interest groups, such as missionary workers, regular clergy versus secu…
Seven leading specialists present chapters devoted to key themes in Soviet and post-Soviet Russian politics. Those themes include: the personal versus the institutional in the political process; legitimacy and legitimation; and change and collapse of a mono-organisational society. While the book focuses on these major themes, individual chapters deal with wide-ranging and even unusual cases: Gr…
The interaction between people and place is the basic ingredient of human history. The historians who interpret this complex and ever-changing relationship are inevitably bit players in the processes they seek to unravel. In settler societies the terms of the relationship are re-negotiated and the heightened awareness of the new and the different reshapes expectations and communal at…
On Sunday 16 September 2018, several hundred people gathered by the Auchengeich Mining Disaster Memorial in the village of Moodiesburn, North Lanarkshire. They included retired miners, trade union representatives and local councillors alongside members of local football teams and a choir made up of schoolchildren. The annual memorial service is timed to…