The Prestes Column is one of the most famous events in modern Brazilian history. What started out as an unsuccessful rebellion soon morphed into a roving expedition that crisscrossed the country for almost three years. From 1924 to 1927, a group of roughly one thousand army officers and soldiers marched fifteen thousand miles through the vast interior regions of Brazil (…
We present, in this book, a transliterated transcription of the Bugis text of the work known as the Chronicle of Bone, together with an English translation and notes. The chronicle deals with the affairs of this traditional kingdom in South Sulawesi—almost exactly in the centre of modern Indonesia—from the fourteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century CE…
This book explores the accounts of commerce and finance developed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historians of England. Writers of the period, I argue, were engaged in a series of long-running and politically charged debates concerning a range of economic issues: the impact of popular and arbitrary forms of government on trade; the political and economic conseque…
okyo Ueno Station: A Novel (JR Uenoeki K?enguchi, 2014) by Y? Miri recounts the heartbreaking life story of an unnamed man, born in the same year as the now Emperor Emeritus Akihito (b. 1933; reigned 1989–2019). The protagonist’s son was born on the same day as Akihito’s eldest son, the present Emperor Naruhito, on 23 February 1960. In more ways than one, the life of the pro…
I have been frequently asked over the years how – from the most unlikely of backgrounds – I became a historian of Brazil and how I came to devote the greater part of my academic career to the promotion and development of Brazilian studies in the UK (and, to a lesser extent, in the US).I was born in Leeds in the north of England in 1937. I spent my entire childhood in Hunsl…
All’inizio degli anni ’90 del ’900, quando la città di Torino pareva interrogarsi, tra circospezione e scoramento, sul proprio futuro postin-dustriale, Carlo Cresto-Dina e Franco Fornaris decisero di dar vita a un documentario costruito attraverso una serie molto ampia di interviste a persone informate dei fatti, “per capire se una citt…
Writing equipment is key for the comprehensive study of Roman handwriting, non-monumental inscriptions and literacy. Cost, material and design of the equipment and how it was used had an impact on many aspects of writing such as letter shapes, document layout and who was writing. Im-portantly, the equipment also has an impact on what kinds of ancient handwritten texts have survived and therefor…
I am very thankful to be here. And there is something more in my heart, something I cannot say.’ Sister Teresa González speaks firmly, with characteristic Spanish emphasis in the English she learnt in Australia 53 years ago. She speaks for us all, and we nod. We have sung an ancient liturgy of psalms to remember the eight Benedictine Missionary Sisters who a…
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…