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In the parade of highlights with which many have tried to sum up the twentieth century, the overarching patterns and fundamental transformations often fail to come into focus. The Columbia History of the 20th Century, however, is much more than a chronicle of the previous century's front-page news. Instead, the book is a series of twenty-three linked interpretive essays on the most significant developments in modern times--ranging from athletics to art, the economy to the environment. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, each author uncovers patterns of worldwide change. James Mayall, for example, writes on nationalism from the rise of European fascism to the rise of Asian and African ...
The twenty-four studies in this volume propose a new approach to framing the debate around the history of medieval art and architecture to highlight the multiple roles played by women, moving beyond today's standard division of artist from patron.
These volumes propose a renewed way of framing the debate around the history of medieval art and architecture to highlight the multiple roles played by women. Today’s standard division of artist from patron is not seen in medieval inscriptions—on paintings, metalwork, embroideries, or buildings—where the most common verb is 'made' (fecit). At times this denotes the individual whose hands produced the work, but it can equally refer to the person whose donation made the undertaking possible. Here twenty-four scholars examine secular and religious art from across medieval Europe to demonstrate that a range of studies is of interest not just for a particular time and place but because, fro...
Concubines and Courtesans contains sixteen essays on enslaved and freed women across medieval and pre-modern Islamic social history. The essays consider questions of slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production, sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time.
A groundbreaking history of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern age In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europ...
The relationship between Islam and the West is one of the most urgent and hotly debated issues of our time. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive overview of the way in which Muslims are represented within modern English writing, ranging from the novel, through memoir and travel writing to journalism. Covering a wide range of texts and authors, it scrutinises the identity 'Muslim' by looking at its inscription in recent and contemporary literary writing within the context of significant events like the Rushdie Affair and 9/11. Examining the wide range of writing internationally that takes Islam or Islamic cultures as its focus, the author discusses the representation of Muslim identity in writing by non-Muslim writers, former Muslim 'native informants', and practising Muslims.
The sociology of sports in the Middle East has been neglected compared to other world regions. This volume aspires to encourage a greater focus on this topic. Here are assembled papers that discuss various aspects of this subject. As it happens all deal with football (soccer) largely in Egypt but including other Middle Eastern countries. Some are historically or politically oriented while others take a more sociological approach. Papers deal with the relation between organized sports and fans, with the special place of youngsters and women in sports, or with the role of sports in a more general understanding of culture and society as indicators of modernization and other facets of social change. Sportive competitions arouse keen passions around such issues as gender, class, and nationality, while they raise questions about leadership on and off the field, and about the economic impact of the games. The topic needs more research.
In the twentieth century, the political Zionist movement and Egyptian rulers completely uprooted the country's thriving Jewish community - a goal the Pharaohs tried to realize as early as 3500 years ago. Mostly comprised of descendants of Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula, the world's oldest Jewish community totaled 85,000 members in 1948. No more than 100 to 200 Jews live in Egypt today. This book tells the story of Egypt's Jewish history from Biblical times to 1967, the year of one of the last major Jewish emigration waves from Egypt. It highlights the First Exodus in ca. 1500 BCE and the Second Exodus, which was triggered by the foundation of the State of Israel and three successive wa...
This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.