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…