2604 results for "World History"

Jews in a Graeco-Roman world

Martin Goodman
The papers in this book represent a unique integration of Jewish history and classics. They tackle from different angles the extent to which Jews in the Graeco-Roman period differed from other peoples in the Mediterranean region, and how much Jewish evidence can be used for the history of the wider classical world. The authors make extensive use not only of types of evidence familiar to classicists, such as inscriptions and the writings of Josephus, but also Jewish religious literature, including Rabbinic texts. The various studies demonstrate that, although Jews lived to some extent apart from others with distinctive customs, in many ways their history also highlights the cultural presuppositions and preoccupations of their non-Jewish contemporaries. The book aims to encourage wider use of the Jewish evidence by classicists and will be important for all students of the classical world.
Clarendon 1998 293 pages

Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology

Raven, Arlene
From the Preface: "The essays in Feminist Art Criticism are theoretical, and we selected them for several reasons. First, they show a diversity of concerns. These include spirituality, sexuality, the representation of women in art, the necessary inter-relationship of theory and action, women as artmakers, ethnicity, language itself, so-called postfeminism and critiques of hte art world, the discipline of art history and the practice of art criticism. Second, the contributors' work has not been either widely disseminated or readily available. Third, the essays, especially arranged as they are (chronologically), demonstrate a continuous feminist discourse in art from the early 1970s through the present, a discourse that is neither monolithic nor intellectually trendy but that rather exhibits many elements, the polemical, Marxist, lyrical, and poststructuralist being only a few.
Routledge 2019-06-13 260 pages

The mirror of magic: a history of magic in the western world

Seligmann, Kurt
In the occult classic THE MIRROR OF MAGIC, renowned Surrealist, Kurt Seligmann (1900– 1962), draws from his encyclopaedic practitioner's knowledge and extensive antiquarian collection to offer a comprehensive, illustrated history of magic and the occult from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt to the 18th century. He explores the gods and divinatory arts of the legendary Sumerians and the star-wise Baby[Bokinfo]
Inner Traditions 2018-10-16 512 pages

Yankees World Series Memories

Maury Allen
The most successful franchise in American sports history, the New York Yankees, have won 26 World Series. Now author Maury Allen recalls the Yankees greatest Series events of the last 60 years starting in 1947 and moving through the Bronx Bombers most recent appearance in 2003. The magical moments are captured through the eyes of the author, the players who made them happen, and the other professional observers of baseballs most electric scenes. Each Series had its own unique contribution to the history of the games most-storied franchise, along with its heroes and its villains, and its miraculous plays and emotional moments. Included are stories from Hank Bauer, who remembers the catch he made against Sal Yvars ending the 1951 series between the Yankees and Bobby Thompsons New York Giants; and Yogi Berra, who talks of the home runs he hit off Don Newcombe of Brooklyn and the fly ball he watched sail over his head in 1960 for Bill Mazeroskis Series-clinching walk-off homer.
Sports Publishing, LLC 2008-04 175 pages

Hearts grown brutal: sagas of Sarajevo

Cohen, Roger
In this brilliant book, Roger Cohen of The New York Times weaves together the history of Yugoslavia and the story of the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995, as experienced by four families. “I have tried to treat the story of Yugoslavia, which lived for seventy-three years, as a human one,” Cohen writes in this masterly book, which, like Thomas L. Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem and David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb, makes us eyewitnesses at the center of historic events. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the Bosnian conflict shattered the West’s confidence, reviving Europe’s darkest ghosts and exposing an America reluctant to confront or acknowledge an act of genocide on European soil. Through Cohen’s compelling reconstruction of the twentieth-century history that led up to the war, and his account of the war’s effect on everyday lives, we at last find the key to understanding Europe’s most explosive region and its peoples. “This was a war of intimate betrayals,” Cohen goes on to say, and in Hearts Grown Brutal, the betrayals begin in the family of a man named Sead. Through his search for his lost father, we relive the history of Yugoslavia, founded at the end of World War I with the encouragement of President Woodrow Wilson. Sead’s desperate quest is punctuated by the lies, half truths, and pain that mark other sagas of Yugoslavia. Through three more families—one Muslim-Serb, one Muslim, and one Serb-Croat—we experience the war in Bosnia as it breaks up marriages and sets relative against relative. The reality of the Balkans is illuminated, even as the hypocrisy of the international response to the war is exposed. Hearts Grown Brutal is a remarkable book, a testament to the loss of a multi-ethnic European state and a warning that the violence could return. It is a magnificent achievement that blends history and journalism into a profoundly moving human story.
Random House 1998-08-25 523 pages

The lights that failed: European international history, 1919-1933

Steiner, Zara
The peace treaties represented an almost impossible attempt to solve the problems caused by a murderous world war. In The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-1933, part of the Oxford History of Modern Europe series, Steiner challenges the common assumption that the Treaty of Versailles led to the opening of a second European war. In a radically original way, this book characterizes the 1920s not as a frustrated prelude to a second global conflict but as a fascinating decade in its own right, when politicians and diplomats strove to re-assemble a viable European order. Steiner examines the efforts that failed but also those which gave hope for future promise, many of which are usually underestimated, if not ignored. She shows that an equilibrium was achieved, attained between a partial American withdrawal from Europe and the self-imposed constraints which the Soviet system imposed on exporting revolution. The stabilization painfully achieved in Europe reached it fragile limits after 1925, even prior to the financial crises that engulfed the continent. The hinge years between the great crash of 1929 and Hitler's achievement of power in 1933 devastatingly altered the balance between nationalism and internationalism. This wide-ranging study helps us grasp the decisive stages in this process. In a second volume, The Triumph of the Night , Steiner will examine the immediate lead up to the Second World War and its early years.
Oxford University Press 2005 938 pages

Einstein's German World

Stern, Fritz
The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once observed that the twentieth century "could have been Germany's century." In 1900, the country was Europe's preeminent power, its material strength and strident militaristic ethos apparently balanced by a vital culture and extraordinary scientific achievement. It was poised to achieve greatness. In Einstein's German World, the eminent historian Fritz Stern explores the ambiguous promise of Germany before Hitler, as well as its horrifying decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule, and aspects of its remarkable recovery since World War II. He does so by gracefully blending history and biography in a sequence of finely drawn studies of Germany's great scientists and of German-Jewish relations before and during Hitler's regime. Stern's central chapter traces the complex friendship of Albert Einstein and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, contrasting their responses to German life and to their Jewish heritage. Haber, a convert to Christianity and a firm German patriot until the rise of the Nazis; Einstein, a committed internationalist and pacifist, and a proud though secular Jew. Other chapters, also based on new archival sources, consider the turbulent and interrelated careers of the physicist Max Planck, an austere and powerful figure who helped to make Berlin a happy, productive place for Einstein and other legendary scientists; of Paul Ehrlich, the founder of chemotherapy; of Walther Rathenau, the German-Jewish industrialist and statesman tragically assassinated in 1922; and of Chaim Weizmann, chemist, Zionist, and first president of Israel, whose close relations with his German colleagues is here for the first time recounted. Stern examines the still controversial way that historians have dealt with World War I and Germans have dealt with their nation's defeat, and he analyzes the conflicts over the interpretations of Germany's past that persist to this day. He also writes movingly about the psychic cost of Germany's reunification in 1990, the reconciliation between Germany and Poland, and the challenges and prospects facing Germany today. At once historical and personal, provocative and accessible, Einstein's German World illuminates the issues that made Germany's and Europe's past and present so important in a tumultuous century of creativity and violence.
Princeton University Press 2016-05-24 335 pages

Apologies to Thucydides: understanding history as culture and vice versa

Sahlins, Marshall David
Thucydides' classic work on the history of the Peloponnesian War is the root of Western conceptions of history—including the idea that Western history is the foundation of everyone else's. Here, Marshall Sahlins takes on Thucydides and the conceptions of history he wrought with a groundbreaking new book that shows what a difference an anthropological concept of culture can make to the writing of history.Sahlins begins by confronting Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War with an analogous "Polynesian War," the fight for the domination of the Fiji Islands (1843-55) between a great sea power (like Athens) and a great land power (like Sparta). Sahlins draws parallels between the conflicts with an eye to their respective systems of power and sovereignty as well as to Thucydides' alternation between individual (Pericles, Themistocles) and collective (the Athenians, the Spartans) actors in the making of history. Characteristic of most histories ever written, this alternation between the agency of "Great Men" and collective entities leads Sahlins to a series of incisive analyses ranging in subject matter from Bobby Thomson's "shot heard round the world" for the 1951 Giants to the history-making of Napoleon and certain divine kings to the brouhaha over Elián Gonzalez. Finally, again departing from Thucydides, Sahlins considers the relationship between cultural order and historical contingency through the recounting of a certain royal assassination that changed the course of Fijian history, a story of fratricide and war worthy of Shakespeare.In this most convincing presentation yet of his influential theory of culture, Sahlins experiments with techniques for mixing rich narrative with cultural explication in the hope of doing justice at once to the actions of persons and the customs of people. And he demonstrates the necessity of taking culture into account in the creation of history—with apologies to Thucydides, who too often did not. --
University of Chicago Press 2004-12 334 pages

The big book of porn: a penetrating look at the world of dirty movies

Grahame-Smith, Seth
An XXX Rated Celebration of Adult Movies According to film historians, the first motion picture was screened in December 1895. And the first dirty motion picture was screened just a few months later. Adult movies are nearly as old as cinema itself. The Big Book of Porn celebrates this controversial art form in all its timeless glory--from the stag films of the 1920s and the Super 8 reels of the '50s to the VHS boom of the '80s and the interactive DVDs of Tomorrow. Chapters include: * Know Your Classics: The twenty-five most important adult films of all time, including Debbie Does Dallas, Deep Throat, and an X-rated musical version of Alice in Wonderland. * Great Moments in Porn History: From the first on-screen kiss to the invention of the silicone breast implant, these are major events that defined modern-day adult films. * The Pantheon of Porn: These mini-bios of mega-stars like Seka, Linda Lovelace, and Marilyn Chambers are filled with surprising trivia. * It's A Porn World, After All: We travel around the world--from Australia and Canada to Germany and Japan--to watch the best of international porn. * Make Your Own Porno: All you need is a video camera, a willing partner, and these simple pointers ("Tell a story," "Start with a bang," "Parody a real film title whenever possible"). And that's just the beginning. You'll also find a glossary of unfamiliar terms, a catalog of favorite porn genres, tons of classic stills and posters, interviews with porn pioneers, the 300 goofiest porn titles of all time (Edward Penishands, Juranal Park, Oklahomo!), and much, much more.
Quirk Books 2005 208 pages

The discovery and conquest of Peru: chronicles of the New World encounter

Cieza de León, Pedro de
Dazzled by the sight of the vast treasure of gold and silver being unloaded at Seville’s docks in 1537, a teenaged Pedro de Cieza de León vowed to join the Spanish effort in the New World, become an explorer, and write what would become the earliest historical account of the conquest of Peru. Available for the first time in English, this history of Peru is based largely on interviews with Cieza’s conquistador compatriates, as well as with Indian informants knowledgeable of the Incan past. Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook present this recently discovered third book of a four-part chronicle that provides the most thorough and definitive record of the birth of modern Andean America. It describes with unparalleled detail the exploration of the Pacific coast of South America led by Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, the imprisonment and death of the Inca Atahualpa, the Indian resistance, and the ultimate Spanish domination. Students and scholars of Latin American history and conquest narratives will welcome the publication of this volume.
Duke University Press 1998 501 pages

History of Zionism

Nahum Sokolow,S. (Stephen) Pichon,Israel Solomons
Delve into the formative years of a pivotal political movement with Nahum Sokolow's "History of Zionism, Vol. 2 of 2: 1600-1918." This meticulously researched historical text explores the evolution of Zionism from its early roots to the end of World War I, providing crucial context for understanding the creation of modern Israel. Spanning centuries of Jewish history, this volume examines the key figures, events, and intellectual currents that shaped Zionist thought and action. Sokolow's work illuminates the complex interplay of European and Middle Eastern politics surrounding the movement, offering insights into the dynamics of colonialism and post-colonialism in Palestine. A vital resource for anyone seeking a comprehensive understanding of Zionism, its origins, and its enduring impact. This book remains an essential contribution to the study of 19th-century political thought, Jewish history, and the ongoing story of Israel. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Creative Media Partners, LLC 2025-03-29 658 pages

For all the world to see: visual culture and the struggle for civil rights

Berger, Maurice
In 1955, shortly after Emmett Till was murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi, his grieving mother distributed to the press a gruesome photograph of his mutilated corpse. Asked why she would do this, she explained that by witnessing with their own eyes the brutality of segregation and racism, Americans would be more likely to support the cause of racial justice. "Let the world see what I've seen," was her reply. The publication of the photograph inspired a generation of activists to join the civil rights movement. Despite this extraordinary episode, the story of visual culture's role in the modern civil rights movement is rarely included in its history. This is the first comprehensive examination of the ways images mattered in the struggle, and it investigates a broad range of media including photography, television, film, magazines, newspapers, and advertising. These images were ever present and diverse: the startling footage of southern white aggression and black suffering that appeared night after night on television news programs; the photographs of black achievers and martyrs in Negro periodicals; the humble snapshot, no less powerful in its ability to edify and motivate. In each case, the war against racism was waged through pictures, millions of points of light, millions of potent weapons that forever changed a nation. This book allows us to see and understand the crucial role that visual culture played in forever changing a nation.
Yale University Press 2010-04-20 207 pages

The Jewish Defense Organization's A History of Islamist Terrorism in America

Jewish Organization
Secret history of Islamist terrorism in America from Sirhan Sirhan to Major Hasan and how the JDO fights it. The JDO was founded in March 1982 in reaction to the demise of the Jewish Defense League (JDL). The JDO was never and never will be a Kahanist organization; instead it is based on principles first set forth by the Honorable Zev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. Jabotinsky, poet, statesman and militarist told Jewish audiences prior to the Holocaust to leave Europe. In 2010 JDO was able to get a meeting of the American Renaissance Party that was to be held at the Skyline Motel in Washington, D.C. cancelled despite the insistence of its manager that it take place. In February 2011 JDO quashed another meeting of this racist group with the help of the NAACP and City Council members Patrick Cannon and Councilman Warren Turner. These men had enough self-respect to stop these KKK jackasses from spewing their racial-hatred in Charlotte, North Carolina. Look what happened in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979 when the Klan mowed down a "Death to the Klan" march staged by Communists. Declassified FBI documents revealed that JDO Chairman Mordechai Levy warned the FBI that the Klan was planning a violent attack but his intelligence was ignored due to his status as a Jewish militant. Just the opposite should have been true. In March 2011 the JDO was able to convince the landlord of the the Nazi-Holocaust revisionist scumy group The Institute of Historical Review not to renew their lease. In May 2011 the JDO held a demonstration in front of Nazi Headquarters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. These are our latest actions - we've been staging these events and others for years and years. It is from this militant / activist point of view that the JDO research team studied the history of Islamist terrorism on American soil within certain parameters of interest. Rather than using a shotgun approach we zeroed in on terrorist plots in which bombs were actually constructed or shots were fired and excluded numerous conspiracies that the FBI nipped in the bud. Our researchers obtained the documents from every terrorism court case in the United States, conducted interviews, scoured the Internet in all languages, studied declassified government documents, filed FOIA requests then put the puzzle pieces together. We even collected the trash in front of the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations at 115 East 65th Street in Manhattan and discovered cable traffic that indicated the PLO was using Syrian diplomatic pouches to smuggle bomb parts to various locations throughout the world. JDO turned these cables over to Israeli intelligence who cautioned JDO not to reveal its methodology as it was going to be applied to other hostile diplomatic installations. JDO waited for a year before revealing its discovery on local television. Shortly thereafter a car with two Arabic looking men parked outside JDO headquarters at 6 Bleecker Street in Manhattan. A JDO member displayed his semi-auto Uzi and invited the thugs upstairs. It was just another day in the 1980's at JDO Headquarters.
Jewish Defense Organization Press 2011 465 pages

Generation freedom: the Middle East uprisings and the remaking of the modern world

Feiler, Bruce
At a time when the world is asking how the Arab Spring and the death of Osama bin Laden will reshape our times, Bruce Feiler, bestselling author of Walking the Bible and Abraham, offers a vivid behind-the-scenes portrait of history in the making. He marches with the daring young organizers in Liberation Square, confronts the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, and witnesses the dramatic rebuilding of a church at exactly the moment sectarian violence threatens the peaceful movement. Drawing on fifteen years of travels across the region, from Egypt to Israel, Iraq to Iran, Feiler brings his unprecedented experience to the most pressing questions: how the rise of freedom will affect terrorism; Middle East peace; and relations among Jews, Christians, and Muslims worldwide. Eloquent and thoughtful, Generation Freedom offers a hopeful vision of how this unrivaled upheaval will transform the world. -- Back cover.
Harper Perennial 2011-06-28 151 pages

Johnson's Life of London The People Who Made the City that Made the World

Boris Johnson
The exhilarating story of how London came to be one of the most exciting and influential places on earth—from the city’s colorful, witty, and well-known mayor. Once a swampland that the Romans could hardly be bothered to conquer, over the centuries London became an incomparably vibrant metropolis that has produced a steady stream of ingenious, original, and outsized figures who have shaped the world we know. Boris Johnson, the internationally beloved mayor of London, is the best possible guide to these colorful characters and the history in which they played such lively roles. Erudite and entertaining, he narrates the story of London as a kind of relay race. Beginning with the days when “a bunch of pushy Italian immigrants” created Londinium, he passes the torch on down through the famous and the infamous, the brilliant and the bizarre—from Hadrian to Samuel Johnson to Winston Churchill to the Rolling Stones—illuminating with unforgettable clarity the era each inhabited. He also pauses to shine a light on innovations that have contributed to the city’s incomparable vibrancy, from the King James Bible to the flush toilet. As wildly entertaining as it is informative, this is an irresistible account of the city and people that in large part shaped the world we know.
Penguin 2013-05-07 400 pages

Potential history: unlearning imperialism

Azoulay, Ariella
In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions--an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums--to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as "past" and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.
Verso 2019 634 pages

Owning the sun: a people's history of monopoly medicine from aspirin to COVID-19 vaccines

Zaitchik, Alexander
"Owning the Sun tells the story of one of the most contentious fights in human history: the legal right to control the production of lifesaving medicines. Medical science began as a discipline geared toward the betterment of all human life, but the merging of research with intellectual property and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry warped and eventually undermined its ethical foundations. Since the Second World War, federally funded research has facilitated most major medical breakthroughs, yet these drugs are often wholly controlled by price-gouging corporations with growing international ambitions. Why does the U.S. government fund the development of medical science in the name of the public, only to relinquish exclusive rights to drug companies, and how does such a system impoverish us, weaken our responses to global crises, and, as in the case of AIDS and COVID-19, put the world at risk? Outlining how generations of public health and science advocates have attempted to hold the line against Big Pharma and their allies in government, Alexander Zaitchik's first-in-kind history documents the rise of medical monopoly in the United States and its subsequent globalization. From the controversial arrival of patent-wielding German drug firms in the late nineteenth century, to present-day coordination between industry and philanthropic organizations-including the influential Gates Foundation-that stymie international efforts to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, Owning the Sun tells one of the most important and least understood histories of our time"--
Counterpoint 2022 285 pages

A tale of two continents: a physicist's life in a turbulent world

Pais, Abraham
"People like myself, who truly feel at home in several countries, are not strictly at home anywhere," writes Abraham Pais, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, near the beginning of this engrossing chronicle of his life on two continents. The author of an immensely popular biography of Einstein, Subtle Is the Lord, Pais writes engagingly for a general audience. His "tale" describes his period of hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland (he ended the war in a Gestapo prison) and his life in America, particularly at the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, then directed by the brilliant and controversial physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Pais tells fascinating stories about Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr, Sakharov, Dirac, Heisenberg, and von Neumann, as well as about nonscientists like Chaim Weizmann, George Kennan, Erwin Panofsky, and Pablo Casals. His enthusiasm about science and life in general pervades a book that is partly a memoir, partly a travel commentary, and partly a history of science. Pais's charming recollections of his years as a university student become somber with the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. He was presented with an unusual deadline for his graduate work: a German decree that July 14, 1941, would be the final date on which Dutch Jews could be granted a doctoral degree. Pais received the degree, only to be forced into hiding from the Nazis in 1943, practically next door to Anne Frank. After the war, he went to the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen to work with Niels Bohr. 1946 began his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked first as a Fellow and then as a Professor until his move to Rockefeller University in 1963. Combining his understanding of disparate social and political worlds, Pais comments just as insightfully on Oppenheimer's ordeals during the McCarthy era as he does on his own and his European colleagues' struggles during World War II. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Oxford University Press 1997 511 pages