The libraries of Tunis are considered lost since the sack of the city by European armies in 1535. This study reconstructs the original holdings of Tunis’ medieval libraries by bringing together dispersed manuscripts from over 30 library collections worldwide. The outcome is twofold: the book maps the networks of the first European Orientalists and, by doing so, retrieves from oblivion an impo…
This title is published in Open Access with the support of the University of Helsinki Library. The book surveys and analyzes changes in religious groups and identities in late antique Arabia, ca. 300-700 CE. It engages with contemporary and material evidence: for example, inscriptions, archaeological remains, Arabic poetry, the Qur??n, and the so-called Constitution of Medina. Also, it suggests…
Albert Hoffstädt was the architect of a unique cooperation between Brill pub-lishers and the Leiden Department of Comparative Indo-European Linguis-tics, a cooperation that has so far resulted in a series of twelve etymological dictionaries and an online publication of fifteen etymological databases (). In all the years that Albert was directly involved …
Some people are one-book people; their lives and their workare dominated, usually with conscious complicity, by a single book.William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham (1708-78), seems to have found a"politician's vade-mecum" in Spenser's Faerie Queene.1 Umberto Eco,despite the vast range of reference apparent in all that he writes, in-sists that the guiding star of it all is…
Considering their imposing nature, this study thus aims to find out how the communities coped with the investments associated with manufacturing the buildings. Analysing the cost of large-scale construction for a society has been researched before (e.g. Abrams and Bolland 1999, who focused on Central America), but few have made Mycenaean Greece the primary focus of such…
It is a curious situation that technologies we now take for granted have, when first introduced, so often stoked public controversy and concern for public welfare. At the root of this tension is the perception that the benefits of new technologies will accrue only to small sections of society, while the risks will be more widely distributed. Drawing from nearly 600 years of technology histor…
Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil’s Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018 is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Antônio Gonçalves Dias’s “Canção do exílio.” Written in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1843 by a homesick student longing for Brazil, “Song of Exile” has inspired thousands of parodies and pastiches, and new variations continue to appear to this day. Every ge…
In this book we share the rich documentary and photographic sources from the early years of the Oenpelli mission. Though it consists mainly of records produced by non-Indigenous missionaries, we consider this book a book of Aboriginal history. Why? The letters, reports and photographs that form its core were produced by missionaries who sought to convert and change Aboriginal peop…
This book brings together recent research on the end of the Cold War in the Third World and engages with ongoing debates about regional conflicts, the role of great powers in the developing world, and the role of international actors in conflict resolution. Most of the recent scholarship on the end of the Cold War has focused on Europe or bilateral US-Soviet relations. By contrast, relatively l…
This book corrals global scholarship on ancient writing systems from China, Mesopotamia, Central America, the Mediterranean, to more recent newly created scripts such as the Rongorongo from Easter Island, the Caroline Island scripts, as well as the alphabet. The aim is to dig into the foundations of writing and showcase the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the pote…
This landmark collection of essays makes a major contribution to the globally burgeoning f ield of broadside ballad study by extending our gaze to include the largely underexplored treasure trove of some 100,000 Central/Eastern European broadside ballads of the Czech Republic, from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. Czech broadside ballads, when viewed within…
"Paganism" is an evocative word that even today conjures up deep-seated emotions and prejudices. Until recently, it was primarily a derogatory term used by Christians to describe the non-Christian cultures vanquished by their churches. For some it evokes images of sacrifice and barbaric behavior, while for others it symbolizes a peace-loving, nature-worshipping spiritual relationship with the e…
In an era of extractivist economies, climate change, and forced mobil-ity, who and what belongs? Who and what does not? What can be learned from sitting with a plant you germinated from seed? One of the most significant voices to emerge in recent years, Brazil-born Maria 'lhereza Alves has focused precisely on such questions in her twenty-year art project Seeds o/Change that has spanned contine…
A recent report by the World Meteorological Organization updated to January 2022 showed that around 11% of the world’s population has no access to sufficiently safe sources of water. In addition, drought in some regions of Africa, Central Asia and the American continent is hastening the expansion of the desert belts and is causing serious difficulties in a growing…
A second reason to study work is that it is inherently social: it necessarily involves relations between people that are arguably more fundamental than their ideological relationships. Since work must go on, while ideology may be ignored or even f louted, it is a good place to start trying to understand society. Applebaum argued that the study of work is even more important for studying societi…
The term shie-tzyy was appropriated from the Chinese car-penter, to whom it denoted a small wedge-shaped cut of wood usedto fill a crack or cleavage in an article of furniture. With similarprecision, the Yuarn dramatist could always turn to the demi-actfor a flexible alternative to the simple four-act format of the stan-dard music drama.…
The books presents the study undertaken by the ASEAN-India Centre (AIC) at Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) on India’s cultural links with Southeast Asia, with particular reference to historical and contemporary dimensions. The book traces ancient trade and maritime links, Chola Empire and Southeast Asia, religious exchanges (the Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic he…
Indonesia is by far the largest nation in Southeast Asia and has the fourth largest population in the world after the United States. Indonesian history and culture are especially relevant today as the Island nation is an emerging power in the region with a dynamic new leader. It is a land of incredible diversity and unending paradoxes that has a long and rich history stretching back a thousand …
From one of the most admired admirals of his generation—and the only admiral to serve as Supreme Allied Commander at NATO—comes a remarkable voyage through all of the world’s most important bodies of water, providing the story of naval power as a driver of human history and a crucial element in our current geopolitical path. From the time of the Greeks and the Persians clashing in th…
During the time of Spanish splendor, at the peak of the Spanish Indies trade,the position of the rich merchants in Seville was remarkably strong. ?ey resid-ed at the hub between the European and the American economy and the com-mercial opportunities seemed endless. Based on recent literature and abundantsource material, this chapter gives a survey of the economic and social struc-ture of the ci…
This book is devoted to an imposing world map, printed on twelve sheets and rich in detail, that was designed by the Germancartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1516, whose only surviving exemplar is in the Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Libraryof Congress. This map, theCarta marina, has tended to live in the shadow of Waldseemüller’s earlier world map, thatprinted in 1507, which is famous …
The Politics of Security tells the story of how people experienced the cold war as a war. It is about the impact of the cold war on political cultures. This crucial issue is often forgotten in historical memory. In particular, the book follows British and West German anti-nuclear-weapons activists in their attempts to campaign for and create security after the destruction of the Second World Wa…
After WWII, cinema was everywhere: in movie theatres, public squares, factories, schools, trial courts, trains, museums, and political meetings. Seen today, documentaries and newsreels, as well as the amateur production, show the kaleidoscopic portrait of a changing Europe. How did these cinematic images contribute to shaping the new societies emerging from the ashes of war, both in the Western…
his exhibition, Northeastern Asia and the Northern Rockies, has been conceived as an introduction in four parts that will help visitors to the museum and scholars of the university understand key elements of both traditional and current Northeastern Asian native and migrant cultures. The first three parts of the exhibition introduce fundamen-tal concepts inherent in Daoism, Confucian…
In today’s hypercompetitive world, contact sports bring about fierce rivalries between fans, between players, and even between countries. From the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Michigan Wolverines in grid iron football, to the Australian Wallabies and the New Zealand All Blacks in rugby, to Real Madrid and Barcelona in association football (soccer), contact sports incite a passion few other gam…
Maps in this book were reproduced by Paul Heggarty from maps provided by chapter authors, by converting them into a GIS (Geographic Information System) database, collated and enriched for South America for the purposes of this book. All data used on the maps are thus geo- referenced – set to actual latitude and longitude coordi-nates – as precisely as possible. Individual p…
The last two decades have seenadynamic increase in the number of activitiesthat are explicitlylinked to the notion of interreligious dialogue (IRD). All overthe world, empirical research projects underlinethe establishment of highlycomplex local scenes of these types of initiatives.¹Especiallyatthe nationallevel, it is possibleto identifyasignificant increase in dialogue organizations–either…
In the recent cultural heritage boom, community-based and national identity projects are intertwined with interest in cultural tourism and sites of the memory of enslavement. Questions of historical guilt and present responsibility have become a source of social conflict, particularly in multicultural societies with an enslaving past. This became apparent in the context of the Black Lives Matte…
This volume introduces a new publication series and a new emphasis in memory studies. The title of the series is Entangled Memories in the Global South. The term “mnemonic solidarity” which gives this book its title signals one response to the observation that historical memories have become entangled. It proposes that that entanglement invites us to rethink memory stu…
Learn the unbelievable true history of the great warrior tribes of Mexico. More than thirteen centuries of incredible spellbinding history are detailed in this intriguing study of the rulers and warriors of Mexico. Dozens of these charismatic leaders of nations and armies are brought to life by the deep research and entertaining storytelling of Peter Tsouras. Tsouras introduces the reader…
Presents the latest archaeological and historical research on all aspects of Maya society, from its earliest beginnings to the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century.
A century and a half after it was first published, this book remains one of the great classics of natural history and travel—perhaps the greatest. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) deserves equal billing with Charles Darwin for his independently drawn but parallel conclusions on the theory of evolution. Darwin himself called Wallace "generous and noble" and referred favorably to his work in l…
It was a cold winter evening in 2010, and I had just arrived in Paris for a short research trip. The tiny hotel where I would be staying was on the fifth floor of the ophthalmological wing of the hôtel-Dieu (or hospital) just across from the cathedral of Notre Dame. 1 Given the subject of the book I was in France to research, it seemed appropri-ate that I should s…
Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state survive for so long, and where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of Europe in the twentieth century? The Complete History of Yugoslavia by Marie-Janine Calic provides a concise, accessible, comprehensive…
“This is the death of the poem as I have faithfully reported it, November 29, 1966, as I have faithfully reported it, this is the death of the poem” in-tones Canadian poet bpNichol one day after the Dominion Day celebrations marking Canada’s centennial year. Addressing a national television audi-ence, Nichol reads these lines with poets bill bissett an…
The creation of—or even the existence of—a “Pacific World” is a question that has preoccupied scholars to a much greater degree than existential doubts have bothered historians of other oceanic basins. Economic historian Eric Jones and colleagues have written that “there can be no meaningful history ofthe whole Rim or Basin [ofthe Pacific] since there…
This book tells the story of power and diplomatic agency in Pacific regionalism against the backdrop of a changing global order and a changing political situation within Pacific societies and states. Its purpose is to explore the political significance of this region-building activity for Pacific societies and its political meaning withi…
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…
Every man sees a war in which he fights from two points of view. The one is his own, his view of his personal life in relation to the harsh environment of battle; the other is the outlook of his unit which makes him share closely the corporate experience of this unit and gives that unit an individual entity and character with its own peculiar difficulties and joys, its…
For almost two decades, historians and academics from a wide- range of sub- disciplinary backgrounds have been situating their research within a global context, crossing boundaries both geographically and methodologically, in such large numbers as to necessitate the emergence of a recognisably new field of enquiry: Global History. From comparative to connective histories, the …
On 15 September 1622, the poet, onetime MP, lawyer and cleric JohnDonne delivered a sermon in the grounds of the old cathedral at St Paul’sCross, in which he argued the importance of religion to the govern-mental success of the Virginia Company (VC). Donne demonstrated,in his inimitable style, that structured religious governance would leadto the company successfully establishing control over…
In early 2012, when I visited Theodore (Ted) Schwartz at his home in Del Mar, California, he had recently finished digitising audio recordings of interviews he had conducted with Manus people in Papua New Guinea (PNG) from 1953 through 1995; the annotated catalogue went on for many pages.1 Ted gave me an audio tour and we listened to Paliau, his supporters, an…
Much of the thought and the practice of human life is irredeem-ably related to Ionia, to Achaea, to classical Greek civilisation. Certainly one, if not the only one, of the central imaginings of ourselves and our world is Ionian. Our mapping of ourselves in our world also owes a huge debt to the classical. The emergence, materialisation, and extra-territorialisation of Ionian spaces of philosop…
Following his hugely successful The Math Book and The Physics Book, Clifford Pickover now chronicles the advancement of medicine in 250 entertaining, illustrated landmark events. Touching on such diverse subspecialties as genetics, pharmacology, neurology, sexology, and immunology, Pickover intersperses “obvious” historical milestones--the Hippocratic Oath, general anesthesia, the Human Gen…
The study of islands is booming. Small wonder: islands have played a key role in the history of continents, have been crucial locales of state-making, have served dictatorships as sites of prison systems and have acted as frontiers and stepping stones of empires. However, the role that island environments have played in creating and shaping these histories has so far received little attention. …
Imagine a world in which there is only one history to watch, read, or listen to. If you find this idea difficult, then you have understood something important about history: that there is never just one version of it on offer. Some people might not like this idea, and try to refute it, but no matter how much they argue, or even work to destroy histories, they will be unsuccessful. We live with …
Approximately 75% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonoses, and the rate of emergence of zoonotic diseases is on the rise. Bats are being increasingly recognised as an important reservoir of zoonotic viruses of different families, including SARS coronavirus, Nipah virus, Hendra virus and Ebola virus. Understanding bats’ role in emerging zoonotic diseases is crucial to this rapidly expandi…
In 1976 a deadly virus emerged from the Congo forest. As swiftly as it came, it disappeared, leaving no trace. Over the four decades since, Ebola has emerged sporadically, each time to devastating effect. It can kill up to 90 percent of its victims. In between these outbreaks, it is untraceable, hiding deep in the jungle. The search is on to find Ebola's elusive host animal. And until we find i…
Plagues in World History provides a concise, comparative world history of catastrophic infectious diseases, including plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, and AIDS. Geographically, these diseases have spread across the entire globe; temporally, they stretch from the sixth century to the present. John Aberth considers not only the varied impact that disease has had upon human hist…
A visit to a town in the north-west of England 200 years ago would have been anassault on the senses. Though some parts of Liverpool, in particular, experiencedwidespread‘improving’measures from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, in themajority of other places (and indeed throughout significant parts of Liverpool too)it was not until the extensive street-widening schemes of the nineteenth …