Tony Robinson takes you on a headlong gallop through time, pointing out all the most important, funny, strange, amazing, entertaining, smelly and disgusting bits about the British! It's history, but not as we know it! Find out everything you ever needed to know in this brilliant, action-packed, fact-filled book including: - How to avoid scurvy - Why bright red isn't the best colour for a soldier's uniform - Why not being able to swim was considered an advantage, and - How to cure the most gruesome tropical diseases

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson to Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. This son of Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." Editor Ted Solotaroff hasselected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that he regarded as his heritage and endeavored to pass on.

Presented as an anthropoligist's view of Jewish culture and history, antisemitism is noted in terms of Christianity and contempt for Jews in terms of Islam (chs. 7 and 6, respectively). The Holocaust (including religious responses and literature) is the topic of ch. 13, "Smoke: How the Germans Gave the Jews Graves in the Air, " and reistance that of ch. 14, "Fire: How the Jews Fought Back."

Tony Robinson takes you on a headlong gallop through time, pointing out all the most important, funny, strange, amazing, entertaining and gory bits about the Romans! It's history, but not as we know it! Find out everything you ever needed to know in this brilliant, action-packed, fact-filled book including: - How to keep the gods happy - Why you should never ignore an omen - How to defeat an army who are riding elephants, and - How to spot a barbarian

This book is a study of the city and urban life in Roman Palestine during the Talmudic period, 100-400 B.C. Rather than focus on a specific city, Daniel Sperber synthesizes what is known about city life in Talmudic Palestine to create a paradigmatic hypothetical Palestinian city. Drawing on numerous literary records for his information, he describes the structure and use of many physical aspects of the city, such as its markets, pubs, streets, bathhouses, roads, walls, toilets, and water supply. Rounding out the study is a chapter describing the archeological evidence, written by Sperber's colleague, Professor Joshua Schwartz. With the recent upsurge of interest in urbanization in the Greco-Roman world, The City in Roman Palestine will attract not only scholars of Judaic literature and history, but also classicists and ancient historians.

Tony Robinson takes you on a headlong gallop through time, pointing out all the most important, funny, strange, amazing, entertaining, smelly and disgusting bits about the Greeks! It's history, but not as we know it! Find out everything you ever needed to know in this brilliant, action-packed, fact-filled book, including: - Why the ancient Greeks were mad about olive oil - Who Pythagoras was - Why Alexander the Great named a city after his horse, Bucephalus, and - How the Greeks invented the first computer, vending machine and death-ray

"Lukacs's book is a lyrical, sometimes dazzling, never merely nostalgic evocation of a glorious period in the city's history. . . . {His} true sympathy lies . . . not with the famous expatriates, but with the writers and intellectuals who lived and died at home: the poets Endre Ady and Mihaly Babits; the novelists Ferenc Herczeg, Sandor Hunyady, Frigyes Karinthy, Dezso Kosztolanyi, Gyula Krudy, Kalman Mikszath, and Zsigmond Moricz; the political essayist DezsoSzabo; the playwright Erno Szep; the literary historian Antal Szerb; and others. . . . {John Lukacs} sets out to explain Hungarian literature to English-speaking readers. Though I have no idea whether or not he will succeed, few interpreters of Hungarian literature have made a more touching and eloquent attempt." -- The New York Review of Books

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This volume gathers sixteen essays on monarchy and power in the Hellenistic period and charts a new approach to Hellenistic history by focusing attention on biblical and Jewish evidence and reading that evidence in new ways. The essays consider the kings, queens, and power figures of the Hellenistic dynasties, as well as ancient Israelite kings, the Babylonian and Persian rulers of the Bible, Parthians, and Romans. The volume also represents a new kind of interpretation of the Greek Bible (Septuagint) and of the Jewish literature of the period, setting them in the context of Hellenistic political thought and practice.

In this book, each of the chapters offers an analysis of the origins and development of an important aspect of Japanese culture, including religion (Pure Land Buddhism and Zen, Shinto and folk religions, Confucianism and Tokugawa era ideology), philosophy (classical Buddhism and the contemporary Kyoto School), literature and the arts (medieval poetry and drama, modern fiction and films), and social behavior (family system, feminism, nationalism, and economic growth). The central, underlying theme is the uniqueness and creativity of Japan as seen from twentieth century perspectives. One of the fascinating things about Japanese culture is that, on the one hand, it seems to have held onto its traditional foundations with a greater sense of determination and celebration than most societies and, at the same time, it appears to have attained a position at the forefront of international modernist and postmodernist developments. The authors explore several approaches to this issue. One school of thought is influenced by recent Japanese writers and intellectual historians such as Mishima, Tanizaki, Watsuji, and Nakamura. Another approach is influenced by Western poststructuralist commentators such as Barthes, Derrida, and Lyotard. A third approach is to argue against the thesis known as nihonjinron ("Japanism" or cultural exceptionalism), by suggesting that the notion of Japanese uniqueness is itself a cultural myth generated by nationalist and particularist trends originating in the Tokugawa era. The volume features an essay by Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, entitled "Japan, the Dubious, and Myself."

Oscar and Lilian Handlin show us how the new voyagers in the twentieth century--from Asia, Africa, Australia, and Latin America--record their experiences in the United States. The narratives of the non-Europeans, they find, clearly reflect the circumstances of their composition, as well as the political prejudices of their authors. These literary products have earned far less attention than those of the English, French, Germans, and Russians, and this volume proposes to redress the balance. The earliest of the thirty-one travel accounts was written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1924, and the most recent by V. S. Naipaul in 1989. Many accounts are newly translated from Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Spanish. Some authors are well known, but the less famous are equally insightful. Some insights are weighty, many are amusing. Octavio Paz, a sympathetic observer who admired his country's neighbor, was uneasy that the most powerful country in the world sustained "a global ideology as outdated as the doctrine of free enterprise, the steam boat, and other relics of the nineteenth century." The Israeli journalist Hanoch Bartov observed that "God conceived the car first, with man an afterthought, created for the car's use (a Southern California legend)." In coming to a truer understanding of the United States, these writers noted the frightening repercussions of unsettled lives, perceived class differentiation, contentions regarding the status of women, the sense of national unity amid diversity, and countless other issues of concern to those who try to find meaning in the contemporary world.

Few encounters in antiquity have had more profound consequences than the encounter between Greek culture and that of Republican Rome during the third and second centuries B.C. Focusing on the response of the ruling elites, for whom Hellenic literature, religion, and visual arts were at once intimidating and irresistibly appealing, Erich S. Gruen offers a compelling account of the assimilation and adaptation of Greek culture by the Romans. Gruen examines such key cultural developments in the history of Republican Rome as the adaptation of the legend of Troy to create a special place for Rome within Hellenic traditions, and Cato's campaign to distinguish Roman cultural achievements by comparing them to those of the Greeks. He describes the diverse purposes - civic, religious, and political - for which the Romans used Greek art, as well as the development of distinctively Roman artistic expression in portraiture, historical reliefs, and comic drama within a Hellenic context. In addition, he accounts for the perseverance of two competing strains within Republican Roman culture: on the one hand, philhellenism, and on the other, the subordination of the Greek legacy within the living Roman tradition. Gruen shows that this complex process of cultural transformation served to sharpen the Romans' sense of their own values, their national character, and their international responsibilities. Demonstrating that the Roman response to Hellenism was far more subtle and dynamic than has generally been acknowledged, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome will be welcomed as an outstanding contribution by readers interested in ancient history, classical literature, and the history of art.

The Australian writer, critic and teacher A.A. Phillips coined the term 'the cultural cringe' in 1950 to describe an Australian tendency to identify our literature and art as inferior to work produced overseas, particularly in Britain and the United States. The term has resonated in debates about Australian culture, society and identity ever since. Although Phillips' famous essay on the cringe was first published more than fifty years ago, it remains a powerful reference point in discussions of the national culture. It is reprinted here with two of his other essays on Australian culture, and with additional biographical and critical material, including an essay by Ivor Indyk.

This provocative new history of Palestinian Jewish society in antiquity marks the first comprehensive effort to gauge the effects of imperial domination on this people. Probing more than eight centuries of Persian, Greek, and Roman rule, Seth Schwartz reaches some startling conclusions--foremost among them that the Christianization of the Roman Empire generated the most fundamental features of medieval and modern Jewish life. Schwartz begins by arguing that the distinctiveness of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and early Roman periods was the product of generally prevailing imperial tolerance. From around 70 C.E. to the mid-fourth century, with failed revolts and the alluring cultural norms of the High Roman Empire, Judaism all but disintegrated. However, late in the Roman Empire, the Christianized state played a decisive role in ''re-Judaizing'' the Jews. The state gradually excluded them from society while supporting their leaders and recognizing their local communities. It was thus in Late Antiquity that the synagogue-centered community became prevalent among the Jews, that there re-emerged a distinctively Jewish art and literature--laying the foundations for Judaism as we know it today. Through masterful scholarship set in rich detail, this book challenges traditional views rooted in romantic notions about Jewish fortitude. Integrating material relics and literature while setting the Jews in their eastern Mediterranean context, it addresses the complex and varied consequences of imperialism on this vast period of Jewish history more ambitiously than ever before. Imperialism in Jewish Society will be widely read and much debated.

"In the first of four volumes on A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, Lester Grabbe presents a comprehensive history of Yehud - the Aramaic name for Judah - during the Persian Period. Among the many crucial questions he addresses are: What are the sources for this period and how do we evaluate them? And how do we make them 'speak' to us through the fog of centuries? This first volume, Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah offers the most up to date and comprehensive examination of the political and administrative structures; the society and economy; the religion, temple and cult; the developments in thought and literature; and the major political events of Judah at the time."--