Search results for ""author paul miller""

A new interpretation of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins of World War I that places focus on the Balkans and the prewar period. The story has so often been told: Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, was shot dead on June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Thirty days later, the Archduke's uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph, declared war on the Kingdom of Serbia, producing the chain reaction of European powers entering the First World War. In Misfire, Paul Miller-Melamed narrates the history of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins of World War I from the perspective of the Balkans. Rather than focusing on the bang of assassin Gavrilo Princip's gun or reinforcing the mythology that has arisen around this act, Miller-Melamed embeds the incident in the longer-term conditions of the Balkans that gave rise to the political murder. He thus illuminates the centrality of the Bosnian Crisis and the Balkan Wars of the early twentieth century to European power politics, while explaining how Serbs, Bosnians, and Habsburg leaders negotiated their positions in an increasingly dangerous geopolitical environment. Despite the absence of evidence tying official Serbia to the assassination conspiracy, Miller-Melamed shows how it spiraled into a diplomatic crisis that European statesmen proved unable to resolve peacefully. Contrasting the vast disproportionality between a single deadly act and an act of war that would leave ten million dead, Misfire contends that the real causes for the world war lie in "civilized" Europe rather than the endlessly discussed political murder.

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Since its conception in 1998, the Iron Age Research Student Symposium (formerly ‘Seminar’) has provided postgraduates in the archaeology of Iron Age Britain an opportunity to present their current research in a friendly atmosphere. During the course of both formal seminars and informal outings (such as field trips, dinners, and the traditional pub quiz), the Iron Age Research Student Symposium (IARSS) gives students the ability to discuss their research with colleagues and peers, in addition to a number of outstanding lecturers and professors in Iron Age studies. Previous proceedings volumes (Davis et al. 2006; Humphrey 2003; Sterry et al. 2010), also offered participants the prospect of publishing their seminar paper. As a result, IARSS has become a fixture in the development of new academics while at the same time contributing fresh perspectives to Iron Age dialogues. This proceedings volume, organised to reflect three general themes (migration/interaction, material culture and the built environment), accomplishes two things. First, it provides an accessible survey of emerging concepts, ideas, methods, and fieldwork that will shape future study of the Iron Age. Second, it is an outline, not just of what the 17th IARSS accomplished, but also of a broader scheme envisioned by the organisers for future events in this Symposium series. It is the (perhaps wide-eyed) expectation of the organisers that the IARSS can and should expand to offer further opportunities to research students of the Iron Age, and they firmly hope that this volume aids in the promotion of this annual Symposium, as well as the ideas of the contributing authors.

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