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A mixed infantry formation made up of about 3,000 men armed with pikes, swords and handguns, the innovative and influential tercio or 'Spanish square' was the basic combat unit of the armies of Spain throughout much of the 16th and 17th centuries. Arguably the first permanent tactical formation seen in Europe since the Roman cohort, the tercio was the forerunner of modern formations such as the battalion and regiment. The variety of different weapons fielded in the tercio meant the Spanish infantry could resist opposing cavalry forces while overcoming every kind of enemy infantry deployed against them. Featuring full-colour artwork and photographs of rare items held at the Spanish Army Museum, this study covers the whole period during which the tercios were active, opening with the third Italian war between the forces of France and the Holy Roman Emperor and concluding with the final transformation of the Spanish tercios into regiments in 1704.
Annotation Photographer Nacho Lopez was Mexico's Eugene Smith, fusing social commitment with searing imagery to dramatize the plight of the helpless, the poor, and the marginalized in the pages of glossy illustrated magazines. Even today, Lopez's photographs forcefully belie the picturesque exoticism that is invariably presented as the essence of Mexico. In Nacho Lopez, Mexican Photographer, John Mraz offers the first full-length study in English of this influential photojournalist and provides a close visual analysis of more than fifty of Lopez's most important photographs. Mraz first sets Lopez's work in the historical and cultural context of the authoritarian presidentialism that characte...
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Buddhists across Asia have often aspired to die with a clear and focused mind, as the historical Buddha himself is said to have done. This book explores how the ideal of dying with right mindfulness was appropriated, disseminated, and transformed in premodern Japan, focusing on the late tenth through early fourteenth centuries. By concentrating one’s thoughts on the Buddha in one’s last moments, it was said even an ignorant and sinful person could escape the cycle of deluded rebirth and achieve birth in a buddha’s pure land, where liberation would be assured. Conversely, the slightest mental distraction at that final juncture could send even a devout practitioner tumbling down into the...
This book investigates urban conflict, popular protest and social control in Barcelona during the period 1898-1937. Focusing upon the sources of anarchist power in the city and the role of the organised anarchist movement during the Second Republic the volume concludes with an analysis of the decline of the power of the anarchist movement during the civil war in its identification of the local conditions that made Barcelona into the capital of European anarchism.
Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolaño's Fiction and Poetry examines the ways in which Bolaño employs a type of literary aesthetics that subverts traits traditionally associated with postmodernism. Pastén B. coins these aesthetics "postmodernism of resistance" and argues that this resistance stands in direct opposition to critical discourses that construe the presence of hopeless characters and marginal settings in Bolaño's works as signs of the writer's disillusionment with the political as a consequence of the defeat of the Left in Latin America. Rather, he contends, Bolaño creates a fictional world comprised of characters and situations that paradoxically refuse to accept defeat--even while displaying the scars of terrible historical events. In this work Pastén B. challenges some critical assumptions about Bolaño's fiction and poetry that led to decontextualized interpretations of his work and offers a singularly comprehensive investigation that synthesizes multiple perspectives of a complicated author into one text.
This is the first complete, critical English translation of the Cakrasamvara Tantra, also known as the Sriherukabhidhana and Laghusamvara. This is the first complete, critical English translation of the Cakrasamvara Tantra. Composed in India during the eighth century, it is a foundational scripture of one of the most important Indian Buddhist tantric traditions. The translator’s introductory essay provides an analysis of the historical and intellectual contexts in which the Cakrasamvara Tantra was composed. The heavily annotated translation was made on the basis of the surviving Sanskrit manuscripts of the tantra and its commentaries, parallel passages in related explanatory tantras (vyakh...