Turmoil in 19th Century Spain
The analysis begins judiciously with the war of 1793-95 and its aftermath...
Read MoreThe Truth of the Future
Since Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was first published, posthumously, in 1980, it has earned praise as one of the most significant books of our time. Leon Aron called it “the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century.”
Read MoreColonial Responses to the Nazi Regime
it was an often deplored “fact” among German enthusiasts of colonialism that too few of their compatriots were thoroughly interested in the colonies.
Read MoreKarla Huebner: Prague, Crossroads of Europe
As this book is a travel guide, we may reasonably ask whether it is useful beyond that specific purpose. What does it offer scholars of urban history, or for that matter scholars in general who may or may not be planning trips to Prague?
Read MoreThe Myth of Blubber Town, an Arctic Metropolis
Perched on a desolate island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — 1,500 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle — sits the settlement of Smeerenburg.
Read MoreErnesto Bassi on the Occupation of Havana
The Siege of Havana, 1762, Dominic Serres the Elder, 1767 by Ernesto Bassi The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, by Elena Andrea Schneider, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 360 pp. On a Sunday morning in early June 1762, Cuba’s captain general,...
Read MoreAbu Bakr II’s 200 Ships
Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms
Read MoreModernity as a Heuristic to Study the Great Divergence
Kaveh Yazdani, in India, Modernity and the Great Divergence, provides the readers with a case study of Mysore and Gujarat to explain why precolonial India could not experience an economic take-off similar to the one that happened in western Europe.
Read MoreHow Jung’s collective unconscious inspired Alcoholics Anonymous
According to correspondence between Rowland Hazard and his cousin, he had daily sessions with Jung in Zürich over several months, and stopped drinking...
Read MoreMarjorie Harrington on Medieval Soul-Health
The idea of Christus medicus, Christ the Physician, is a commonplace in late medieval religious texts. In Soul-Health: Therapeutic Reading in Later Medieval England, Daniel McCann...
Read MoreChairman of the Board
Ten thousand years ago, in the Neolithic period, before human beings began making pottery, we were playing games on flat stone boards drilled with two or more rows of holes...
Read MoreChrissy Lau: White Leisure and the Making of the American “Oriental”
During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, San Francisco had the popular reputation as a sexually liberal wonderland and an international city. At the same time, during the era of increasing nativism and immigration exclusion...
Read MoreWhy didn’t they see Hitler?
A few weeks ago, a six-thousand-word article in Esquire on the unexceptional life of a white teen-ager in peri-urban Wisconsin generated a furious online backlash.
Read MoreHow translation obscured the music and wordplay of the Bible
An essential fact about the Hebrew Bible is that most of its narrative prose as well as its poetry manifests a high order of sophisticated literary fashioning.
Read MoreThe Lost History of Prosecuting War Crimes by Amy Carney
Human Rights after Hitler describes the rise and fall of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). But author Dan Plesch did not write this book...
Read MoreJulian of Norwich and the Process of Transformation
Julian of Norwich was born in 1342. No stranger to violence and suffering, she grew up in a world ravaged by the Hundred Years’ War between England and France and torn apart...
Read MoreLiberalism and Slavery
Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves is a teaser, an invitation to think through the historiography on Atlantic slavery as a liberal metanarrative...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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