From That Flame

A Novelized Account of the Life, Death, and Legacy of Ahmed Shah Massoud

by MaryAnn T. Beverly

FROM THAT FLAME follows journalist Michelle Garrett as she interviews the legendary Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud – the “Lion of Panjshir” – in Afghanistan’s rugged Hindu Kush Mountains. Without warning, an attack by Taliban and al-Qaeda troops propels Michelle into a wartime adventure with Commander Massoud and his Mujahidin, one in which a friendship between the journalist and Massoud grows, giving her a unique perspective into the man the Wall Street Journal credited as being “the Afghan who ended the Cold War.”

Egypt

by Ben Hubbard

Spanning history from Ancient Egypt through Roman, Greek and Aztec times, History Spy brings the past to life using devices which never fail to get attention. Stunning art, cunning mazes, and a spy adventure draw young readers into the heart of troubled times. While they come to grips with complicated situations, they find out more than they bargained for about the way people worked and lived. The accompanying side art and detailed facts about that period see to that.

Rome

by Ben Hubbard

Spanning history from Ancient Egypt through Roman, Greek and Aztec times, History Spy brings the past to life using devices which never fail to get attention. Stunning art, cunning mazes, and a spy adventure draw young readers into the heart of troubled times. While they come to grips with complicated situations, they find out more than they bargained for about the way people worked and lived. The accompanying side art and detailed facts about that period see to that.

L’embryon et son âme dans les sources grecques (VIe s. av. J.-C.-Ve s. apr. J.-C.)

by Marie-Hélène CONGOURDEAU 

Comment l’âme vient-elle à l’embryon? Quel rapport le corps entretient-il avec son âme? Cet ouvrage explore les théories des tenants d’une épopée de l’âme tombée du ciel, attelée à un corps et cherchant à regagner le monde des esprits purs, et celles des irréductibles de l’âme non séparable pour qui l’âme ne peut se concevoir indépendamment du corps qu’elle anime. D’où vient l’âme? Quand s’unit-elle au corps en gestation? L’enquête montre que c’est sur ces fondations que se bâtira la réflexion médiévale, avec ses retombées juridiques et éthiques.

Flogging Others

Corporal Punishment and Cultural Identity from Antiquity to the Present

by G.Geltner

Corporal punishment is often seen as a litmus test for a society's degree of civilization. Its licit use purports to separate modernity from premodernity, enlightened from barbaric cultures. As Geltner argues, however, neither did the infliction of bodily pain typify earlier societies nor did it vanish from penal theory, policy, or practice. Far from displaying a steady decline that accelerated with the Enlightenment, physical punishment was contested throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, its application expanding and contracting under diverse pressures. Moreover, despite the integration of penal incarceration into criminal justice systems since the nineteenth century, modern nation states and colonial regimes increased rather than limited the use of corporal punishment. Flogging Others thus challenges a common understanding of modernization and Western identity and underscores earlier civilizations' nuanced approaches to punishment, deviance, and the human body. Today as in the past, corporal punishment thrives due to its capacity to define otherness efficiently and unambiguously, either as a measure acting upon a deviant's body or as a practice that epitomizes - in the eyes of external observers - a culture's backwardness.

Seks, drugs en rock en roll in de gouden eeuw

by Benjamin Roberts

In Seks, Drugs en Rock 'n' Roll in de Gouden Eeuw (‘Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Golden Age’), historian Benjamin B. Roberts paints a fascinating portrait of the lives of young men int he first half of the seventeenth century. He describes the riotous behaviour of prominent figures such as Rembrandt – born in 1606 – and brings the values of his rebellious peers to life. Roberts convincingly demonstrates that young men rebelled then as they do now, and moved against previous generations. They grew out their hair, wore outrageous clothes, smoked, drank too much, got into fights with the city guards, cheated, and sang bawdy songs. This accessibly written book paints a vivid portrait of youth culture in the Golden Age; a time when the advent of printing allowed for a rapid spread of a culture of permissiveness. The spread of liberal ideas, together with the rising incomes, created a new generation of ‘bad boys’. Using hilarious examples, Roberts shows that deviant behaviour is timeless.

Jimmy Hoffa Called My Mom A Bitch: Profiles in Stupidity

by Jason H. Vines

The book is broken up into various chapters of stupidity: Stupid Democrats, Stupid Republicans, Stupid Atheists, Stupid Christians, Stupid Criminals, Stupid Policies, Stupid People and so on. The “Stupid Criminals” chapter contains one of my favorite columns that appeared on the Detroit News’ political website. The June 29, 2010 column is titled “Globe Al Warming Gets Rubbed the Wrong Way,” and it takes on allegations that the former VP got inappropriately horny with female masseuse at a Portland, Oregon hotel. That column also continues the sick, yet hilarious saga of Otis “Masturgate” Mathis, the illiterate (no kidding), former head of Detroit Public Schools who was forced out after he admittedly fondled himself in front of numerous female superintendents. No, I am not making this up. I coined the scandal “Masturgate” and it soon became the rage in Detroit media and made my column one of the most popular on the site.

Rembrandt

The Painter Thinking

by Ernst van de Wetering

Even during the artist’s lifetime, contemporary art lovers considered Rembrandt van Rijn to be an exceptional artist. In this revelatory sequel to the acclaimed Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, renowned Rembrandt authority Ernst van de Wetering investigates precisely why the artist, from a very early age, was praised by prominent connoisseurs. He argues that Rembrandt, from his very first endeavors in painting, embarked on a journey past all the foundations of the art of painting that, according to (up till now misinterpretated) contemporary written sources, were considered essential in the seventeenth century. Rembrandt never stopped searching for solutions to the pictorial problems that confronted him; this led over time to radical changes in course that can’t simply be attributed to stylistic evolution or natural development. In a quest as rigorous and novel as the artist’s, Van de Wetering reveals how Rembrandt became the best painter the world had ever seen. Gorgeously illustrated throughout, this groundbreaking exploration reconstructs Rembrandt’s closely guarded theories and methods, shedding new light both on the artist’s exceptional accomplishments and on the practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age.

AmaZizi: the Dlamini of Southern Africa 2nd Ed

by Jongisilo Z. Z. Pokwana Ka Menziwa, Ngangomzi Pokwana Ah! Jongumhlaba

The Dlamini people are a stock race that, during the 19th century, spread throughout the then largely uninhabited Southern Africa. Today they can be found concentrated in Swaziland, in the Eastern Cape, in KwaZulu Natal and in many other parts of the country. The first edition traced a story of these people from before 2000 years ago until today, then focused on a section of the Dlamini known as AmaZizi. The second edition expands this base with new research and information. If you have the surname Dlamini, the history and traditions of your ancestors can be found within these pages.

Environmental and Social Justice in the City

Historical Perspectives

by Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud and Richard Rodger (eds)

The world is full of environmental injustices and inequalities, yet few European historians have tackled these subjects head on; nor have they explored their relationships with social inequalities. In this innovative collection of historical essays the contributors consider a range of past environmental injustices, spanning seven northern and western European countries and with several chapters adding a North American perspective. In addition to an introductory chapter that surveys approaches to this area of environmental history, individual chapters address inequalities in the city as regards water supply, air pollution, waste disposal, factory conditions, industrial effluents, fuel poverty and the administrative and legal arrangements that discriminated against segments of society.

Die Jüdische Revolution

Untersuchungen zu Ursachen, Verlauf und Folgen der hasmonäischen Erhebung

by Johannes Christian Bernhardt

In 168 BCE, the Seleucid King Antiochus IV intervened against the Temple cult in Jerusalem, resulting in a revolt by the Hasmoneans that led to their establishment as high priests and to the independence of Judea. This study examines the causes and the consequences of the revolt as an historical process and offers a political-theological interpretation of the events. ;

Handbook Global History of Work

by Marcel van der Linden, Karin Hofmeester

A comprehensive survey of labour historiography around the world, including contributions on the definition of work, descriptions of various kinds of work and different types of labour relations. Reflects upon on people'sattitudes towards work; workers'organizations and strikes, the incentives that made people work and the various types of migration that are work related. Covers the period from 1500 onwards. ;

Tyne after Tyne

An Environmental History of a River’s Battle for Protection 1529–2015

by Leona J. Skelton

Over the last five centuries, North-East England’s River Tyne went largely with the flow as it rode with us on a rollercoaster from technologically limited early modern oligarchy, to large-scale Victorian ‘improvement’, to twentieth-century deoxygenation and twenty-first-century efforts to expand biodiversity. Studying five centuries of Tyne conservatorship reveals that 1855 to 1972 was a blip on the graph of environmental concern, preceded and followed by more sustainable engagement and a fairer negotiation with the river’s forces and expressions as a whole and natural system, albeit driven by different motivations. Even during this blip, however, several organisations, tried to protect the river’s environmental health from harm. This Tyne study offers a template for a future body of work on British rivers that dislodges the Thames as the river of choice in British environmental history. And it undermines traditional approaches to rivers as passive backdrops of human activities. Departing from narratives that equated change with improvement, or with loss and destruction, it moves away from morally loaded notions of better or worse, and even dead, rivers. The book fully situates the Tyne’s fluvial transformations within political, economic, cultural, social and intellectual contexts. With such a long view, we can objectify ourselves through our descendants’ eyes, reconnecting us not only to our past, but also to our future. Let us sit with the Tyne itself, some of its salmon, a seventeenth-century Tyne River Court Juror, some nineteenth-century Tyne Improvement Commissioners, a 1920s biologist, a twentieth-century Tyne angler, shipbuilder and council planner and some twenty-first-century Tyne Rivers Trust volunteers. Where would they agree and disagree? How would they explain their conceptualisation of what the river is for and how it should be used and regulated? This book takes you to the heart of such virtual debates to revive, reconnect and reinvigorate the severed bonds and flows linking riparian places, issues and people across five centuries.

THE ECLIPSE OF URBANISM AND THE GREENING OF PUBLIC SPACE.

Image Making and the Search for a Commons in the United States, 1682–1865

by Mark Luccarelli

In The Eclipse of Urbanism and the Greening of Public Space: Image Making and the Search for a Commons in the United States, 1682–1865, Mark Luccarelli pushes past unproductive mind/body debates by rooting the rise of environmental awareness in the political and geographical history of the US. Considering history in terms of the categorical development of space – social, territorial and conceptual – the book examines the forces that drove people to ignore their surroundings by distancing culture from place and by assiduously advancing the dissolution of social bonds. Thus beneath the question of the surround, and the key to its renewal today, is the quest to re-engage the common. The latter is still a part of the approach to space, its arrangement and disposition, and has a necessary environmental dimension. Concepts of urbanism, place identity, picturesque landscape and nature are part of a larger Western intellectual and cultural context but, by examining the imaging of cities and landscape, Luccarelli links particular American geographic settings – as well as the political ideals and practices of the republic – to the application and aesthetic reading of these ideas. The advocates of these various perspectives shared an aesthetic orientation as a means of redefining or recovering the common. The book looks at various American urban and regional contexts, as well as the work of artists, writers and public figures, including painter and engraver William Birch, Thomas Jefferson, engraver John Hill, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Law Olmsted. Luccarelli embeds his environmental study in the works of these men and in the course of American history between the planting of the city of Philadelphia and the establishment of Olmsted’s major urban parks.

The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus

The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra

by Adam C. English

With his rosy cheeks and matching red suit—and ever-present elf and reindeer companions—Santa Claus may be the most identifiable of fantastical characters. But what do we really know of jolly old Saint Nicholas, "patron saint" of Christmastime? Ask about the human behind the suit, and the tale we know so well quickly fades into myth and folklore.In The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus, religious historian Adam English tells the true and compelling tale of Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra. Around the fourth century in what is now Turkey, a boy of humble circumstance became a man revered for his many virtues. Chief among them was dealing generously with his possessions, once lifting an entire family out of poverty with a single--and secret--gift of gold, so legend tells. Yet he was much more than virtuous. As English reveals, Saint Nicholas was of integral influence in events that would significantly impact the history and development of the Christian church, including the Council of Nicaea, the destruction of the temple to Artemis in Myra, and a miraculous rescue of three falsely accused military officers. And Nicholas became the patron saint of children and sailors, merchants and thieves, as well as France, Russia, Greece, and myriad others.Weaving together the best historical and archaeological evidence available with the folklore and legends handed down through generations, English creates a stunning image of this much venerated Christian saint. With prose as enjoyable as it is informative, he shows why the life--and death--of Nicholas of Myra so radically influenced the formation of Western history and Christian thought, and did so in ways many have never realized. ; 1. Finding St. Nicholas2. Out of a Dying World Comes a Light3. Three Gifts and One Election4. The Work of Victory5. Riots, Beheadings, and Other Near Misfortunes6. Death Is Only the BeginningNotesRecommended ReadingsIndex

Destroyer of the gods

Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World

by Larry W. Hurtado

"Silly," "stupid," "irrational," "simple." "Wicked," "hateful," "obstinate," "anti-social." "Extravagant," "perverse." The Roman world rendered harsh judgments upon early Christianity—including branding Christianity "new." Novelty was no Roman religious virtue.Nevertheless, as Larry W. Hurtado shows in Destroyer of the gods, Christianity thrived despite its new and distinctive features and opposition to them. Unlike nearly all other religious groups, Christianity utterly rejected the traditional gods of the Roman world. Christianity also offered a new and different kind of religious identity, one not based on ethnicity. Christianity was distinctively a "bookish" religion, with the production, copying, distribution, and reading of texts as central to its faith, even preferring a distinctive book-form, the codex. Christianity insisted that its adherents behave differently: unlike the simple ritual observances characteristic of the pagan religious environment, embracing Christian faith meant a behavioral transformation, with particular and novel ethical demands for men. Unquestionably, to the Roman world, Christianity was both new and different, and, to a good many, it threatened social and religious conventions of the day.In the rejection of the gods and in the centrality of texts, early Christianity obviously reflected commitments inherited from its Jewish origins. But these particular features were no longer identified with Jewish ethnicity and early Christianity quickly became aggressively trans-ethnic—a novel kind of religious movement. Its ethical teaching, too, bore some resemblance to the philosophers of the day, yet in contrast with these great teachers and their small circles of dedicated students, early Christianity laid its hard demands upon all adherents from the moment of conversion, producing a novel social project. Christianity’s novelty was no badge of honor. Called atheists and suspected of political subversion, Christians earned Roman disdain and suspicion in equal amounts. Yet, as Destroyer of the gods demonstrates, in an irony of history the very features of early Christianity that rendered it distinctive and objectionable in Roman eyes have now become so commonplace in Western culture as to go unnoticed. Christianity helped destroy one world and create another. ; PrefaceIntroductionChapter 1. Early Christians and Christianity in the Eyes of Non-ChristiansChapter 2. A New Kind of FaithChapter 3. A Different IdentityChapter 4. A "Bookish" ReligionChapter 5. A New Way to LiveConclusionAppendixNotesIndex of Ancient SourcesIndex of Subjects and Modern Authors

The Burghers of Ceylon

Race, Representation, Identity

by Andrew Elsby

The Burghers of Ceylon traces the origins and history of the mixed-race populations of imperial Ceylon. It explains how, and why, those populations emerged, how they developed, how they were distinguished – and how they distinguished themselves – from the Europeans and from the native populations. It explores the components of burgher identity. The author also provides answers to the following questions. How reliable is the evidence of the Dutch Burgher Union’s genealogies? How prevalent is racial misrepresentation, and what were the motives behind it? How were the mixed-race populations treated by the European colonial powers? What happened to those mixed-race populations when colonial rule ended in 1948? The author’s interest in the burghers of Ceylon came about after his mother’s death, when he discovered she was from a Dutch burgher family in Ceylon. Her mother was half English and half native, and her father, Raoul Frank, was a Dutch burgher descended from a long line of German, French, Dutch, Belgian and British European male ancestors, with native or mixed-race female ancestors from the Dutch and British periods in Ceylon.

Research Methods for History

by Lucy Faire, Simon Gunn

Historians have become increasingly sensitive to social and cultural theory since the 1980s, yet the actual methods by which research is carried out in History have been largely taken for granted. Research Methods for History encourages those researching the past to think creatively about the wide range of methods currently in use, to understand how these methods are used and what historical insights they can provide. This updated new edition has been expanded to cover not only sources and methods that are well-established in History, such as archival research, but also those that have developed recently, such as the impact of digital history research. The themes of the different chapters have been selected to reflect new trends in the subject, including landscape studies, material culture and ethics. Every chapter presents new insights and perspectives and will open researchers’ minds to the expanding possibilities of historical research. ; Research Methods for History encourages those researching the past to think creatively about the wide range of methods currently in use, to understand how these methods are used and what historical insights they can provide. ; Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables Preface to the Second Edition 1., Introduction: Why Bother with Method?, Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire Part 1, The Essentials2., Working With/In the Archives, Michelle T. King 3., Approaching Visual Materials, Ludmilla Jordanova 4., Material Culture, Alan Mayne 5., Landscape and Place, Jo Guldi Part 2, Researching Individuals and Groups 6., Collective Biography, Krista Cowman;7., Life Stories and Historical Analysis, Alistair Thomson Part 3, Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis 8., GIS, Spatial Technologies and Digital Mapping, Keith D. Lilley and Catherine Porter 9., Document to Database and Spreadsheet , R. J. Morris 10., Digital Research, Bob Nicholson Part 4, Deciphering Meanings 11., Reading Language as a Historical Source, Julie-Marie Strange 12., Analysing Behaviour as Performance, Simon Gunn Part 5, Rethinking Categories 13., Ethics and Historical Research, William Gallois14., Time, Temporality and History, Prashant Kidambi Notes on Contributors Index

Fierce Imaginings

The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God

by Rachel Mann

From Rachel Mann, Canon Poet-in-Residence at Manchester cathedral, comes a lyrical and very personal story of remembrance, faith, family and identity shaped by the chaos and trauma wrought by the Great War and the flux in early twentieth century Europe. Rachel brilliantly explores the significance of the War to all of us today who live under its long shadow – our shared memories, culture and the symbols and relics that linger on all around us, as well as the influence of the Great War on her grandparents and how it echoed through her childhood in 1970s Britain discovering her authentic self in God, undergoing a change of sex and experiencing chronic illness and disability. ;

A General Collection of Analects and Thoughts of Confucius and His Disci-ples

by Yang Chaoming

Standing from a high-level academic perspective and a cutting-edge academic front, the book absorbs some of the important previous researches and gives detailed and precise annotations and translations of analects and thoughts of Confucius and his disciples. It is believed that the collection has been handed down from the older generations of the Confucius’s family and it is the most reliable and original material on Confucianism. Being easy to read, the book is of high popularizing and academic value.