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The history of coffee is much more than the tale of one luxury good—it is a lens through which to consider various strands of world history, from food and foodways to religion and economics and sociocultural dynamics. A Rich and Tantalizing Brew traces the history of coffee from its cultivation and brewing first as a private pleasure in the highlands of Ethiopia and Yemen through its emergence as a sought-after public commodity served in coffeehouses first in the Muslim world, and then traveling across the Mediterranean to Italy, to other parts of Europe, and finally to India and the Americas. At each of these stops the brew gathered ardent aficionados and vocal critics, all the while reshaping patterns of socialization. Taking its conversational tone from the chats often held over a steaming cup, A Rich and Tantalizing Brew offers a critical and entertaining look at how this bitter beverage, with a little help from the tastes that traveled with it—chocolate, tea, and sugar—has connected people to each other both within and outside of their typical circles, inspiring a new context for sharing news, conducting business affairs, and even plotting revolution.
Explores the Holy Land as a critical site where Catholics sought spiritual and political legitimacy during a period of profound change.
The history of early modern travel is captured in its volatile and evolving literature. From the middle of the 1400s, what had been for centuries a travel literature of pilgrimage to the Holy Land underwent two "modernizations" in rapid succession. The first, in the wake of Gutenberg, was the casting or recasting of pilgrims' accounts in the new medium of print. By the waning of the fifteenth century, such printed literature had reconfirmed and enhanced long-distance pilgrimage as the primary narrative of European travel. The second, forged by the great discoveries and reformations of the sixteenth century, reworked and enlarged, again in the revolutionary medium of print, the very content o...
The looting of the Iraqi National Museum in April of 2003 provoked a world outcry at the loss of artifacts regarded as part of humanity's shared cultural patrimony. But though the losses were unprecedented in scale, the museum looting was hardly the first time that Iraqi heirlooms had been plundered or put to political uses. From the beginning of archaeology as a modern science in the nineteenth century, Europeans excavated and appropriated Iraqi antiquities as relics of the birth of Western civilization. Since Iraq was created in 1921, the modern state has used archaeology to forge a connection to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and/or Islamic empires and so build a sense of nation...
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Out of the diverse traditions of medical humanism, classical philology, and natural philosophy, Renaissance naturalists created a new science devoted to discovering and describing plants and animals. Drawing on published natural histories, manuscript correspondence, garden plans, travelogues, watercolors, and drawings, The Science of Describing reconstructs the evolution of this discipline of description through four generations of naturalists. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, naturalists focused on understanding ancient and medieval descriptions of the natural world, but by the mid-sixteenth century naturalists turned toward distinguishing and cataloguing new plant and a...
Based on micro-level research of the District of Jerusalem, this book addresses some of the most crucial questions concerning the Ottoman empire in a time of crisis and disorientation: decline and decentralization, the rise of the notable elite, the urban-rural-pastoral nexus, agrarian relations and the encroachment of European economy. At the same time it paints a vivid picture of life in an Ottoman province. By integrating court record, petitions, chronicles and even local poetry, the book recreates a historical world that, though long vanished, has left an indelible imprint on the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings.
This book argues that eighteenth-century British travel writings about the Arabian Overland Routes to India offered fascinating anecdotes of encounters that allow us to rethink Enlightenment understanding of the meaning of improvement. Travelling among and writing about the inhabitants, government, culture, religion and ruins of Syria and Mesopotamia offered Britons opportunities to pose themselves in their narratives as men of improvement abroad. To that end, travelling appeared in their books as serious attempt to improve their readers’ knowledge about a region that many in Britain saw as decayed, barbaric and primitive. But the various encounters British travellers experienced in the region allowed them to negotiate the impact of excessive materialism on the traditions, morality, religion and landscape of eighteenth-century Britain. At the heart of this book’s understanding of Enlightenment writings about the Levant is the idea that a journey in a region which many considered as a theatre for the arts, sciences and military conquests in the past and decay in the present represents a fraught relationship modern Europeans had with the past, present and future.