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'Extraordinary' Ai Weiwei 'Brilliant' Simon Schama Fear has long been a driving force - perhaps the driving force - of world history: a coercive tool of power and a catalyst for radical change. Here, Robert Peckham traces its transformative role over a millennium, from fears of famine and war to anxieties over God, disease, technology and financial crises. In a landmark global history that ranges from the Black Death to the terror of the French Revolution, the AIDS pandemic to climate change, Peckham reveals how fear made us who we are, and how understanding it can equip us to face the future.
Empires of Panic is the first book to explore how panics have been historically produced, defined, and managed across different colonial, imperial, and post-imperial settings—from early nineteenth-century East Asia to twenty-first-century America. Contributors consider panic in relation to colonial anxieties, rumors, indigenous resistance, and crises, particularly in relation to epidemic disease. How did Western government agencies, policymakers, planners, and other authorities understand, deal with, and neutralize panics? What role did evolving technologies of communication play in the amplification of local panics into global events? Engaging with these questions, the book challenges con...
The first history of epidemics in modern Asia. Robert Peckham considers the varieties of responses that epidemics have elicited - from India to China and the Russian Far East - and examines the processes that have helped to produce and diffuse disease across the region.
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An entertaining and engaging social and cultural history of the London community of Peckham that offers lessons in urban living. “Is there life in Peckham?” asks a pop song of the 1980s. Peckham has been treated as a joke and a place to be avoided. It has been celebrated in television comedies, and denigrated for its levels of crime. It is a center for the arts and the creative industries, yet it also suffers from social deprivation and racial tension. Passport to Peckham is a guide to an unofficial part of London—social and cultural history written from the ground up. In this entertaining and engaging account, Hewison invites readers to explore Peckham’s streets and presents the por...
A New Nation of Goods highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States—chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing—to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture.
This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history. The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."
If you have an interest in Freemasonry, you may have heard of Rob Morris or have seen his name on various documents, books, poems, and songs from the mid- 1800s but don’t know much about him. A Place in the Lodge sets forth new facts about his early life and relationships and presents a slice of his life via previously unpublished family letters, sent while he was on the road. It was a time of yellow fever, Civil War, and manual farmwork, and the detail in the letters and the old photographs here make the era almost tangible. Visit this not-so-distant past and see how Morris helped Masonry evolve from its origins to take part in the United States’ women’s movement and become one of the world’s largest fraternal organizations. As he worked to standardize Freemasonry and establish the Order of the Eastern Star, his efforts were not without controversy.
Imperial Contagions argues that there was no straightforward shift from older, enclavist models of colonial medicine to a newer emphasis on prevention and treatment of disease among indigenous populations as well as European residents. It shows that colonial medicine was not at all homogeneous "on the ground" but was riven with tensions and contradictions. Indigenous elites contested and appropriated Western medical knowledge and practices for their own purposes. Colonial policies contained contradictory and cross-cutting impulses. This book challenges assumptions that colonial regimes were uniformly able to regulate indigenous bodies and that colonial medicine served as a "tool of empire."
Disease and crime are increasingly conflated in the contemporary world. News reports proclaim "epidemics" of crime, while politicians denounce terrorism as a lethal pathological threat. Recent years have even witnessed the development of a new subfield, "epidemiological criminology," which merges public health with criminal justice to provide analytical tools for criminal justice practitioners and health care professionals. Little attention, however, has been paid to the historical contexts of these disease and crime equations, or to the historical continuities and discontinuities between contemporary invocations of crime as disease and the emergence of criminology, epidemiology, and public health in the second half of the nineteenth century. When, how and why did this pathologization of crime and criminalization of disease come about? This volume addresses these critical questions, exploring the discursive construction of crime and disease across a range of geographical and historical settings.