Search results for ""author merchant"

“Brave and vivid.”—New York Review of BooksThese enchanting stories from early modern Bengal reveal how Hindu and Muslim traditions converged on timeless themes of human morality, social culture, and survival. The Bengali stories in this collection are first and foremost tales of survival. Each story in Needle at the Bottom of the Sea underscores the need for people to work together—not just to overcome the challenges of living in the Sundarban swamps of Bengal, but also to ease hostilities born of social differences in religion, caste, and economic class. Translated by award-winning scholar of early modern Bengali literature Tony K. Stewart, Needle at the Bottom of the Sea brims with fantasy and excitement. Sufi protagonists travel through a world of wonder where tigers talk and men magically grow into giants, a Hindu princess falls in love with a Muslim holy man, and goddesses rub shoulders with kings and merchants. Across religion, class, and gender, what binds these fabulous stories together is the characters’ pursuit of living honorably and morally in a difficult, corrupt world.

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A feast for the eyes and an entertaining, erudite read, this book opens with an illustrated survey of the 120 doges who led the Venetian Republic before continuing with a detailed survey of the incredible array of sculptures and monuments that memorialize them. Although celebrated for painting and music, Venice has a sculptural tradition that was overshadowed by Florence and Rome. Based on new scholarship, this volume reveals the true magnificence of six centuries of Venetian sculpture. With the oldest works dating to the thirteenth century, these masterpieces fill the city s churches and include pieces by great masters from the Lombardo family to Antonio Rizzo, Jacopo Sansovino, Alessandro Vittoria, and Baldassare Longhena. The sculptural marvels of Venice tell the story of a procession of doges politicians, scholars, conquerors, merchants, and even a saint, Pietro Orseolo over a thousand-year history. Engaging text highlights the adventurous, eventful, and sometimes glorious lives of these legendary figures, while the newly commissioned photography showcases the grandeur and beauty of a neglected aspect of Venice s cultural history.

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Havana, 1950. As the beautiful daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Cuba, Esmeralda knows the importance of marrying well. But when her father takes her on a business trip to London, she falls in love with a young merchant named Christopher. When Christopher visits her father''s sugar farm, Esmeralda knows that they must keep their love affair hidden at all costs. Then the country falls into revolution and Esmeralda is faced with an impossible choice. London, present day. Claudia is rebuilding her life. But when her mother asks for to trace her grandmother''s history, her curiosity is piqued. Her only clue is the Diaz family crest, once one of the wealthiest dynasties in Cuba. Impulsively Claudia books a ticket to Havana, to uncover her family''s true story. Arriving in the vibrant city she meets Mateo, a chef who loves nothing more than to cook his family''s recipes. As they grow closer, Mateo reveals that h

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A fast-paced carnival of setbacks and skullduggery that reminds me of... me! Charming from the first twist to the last.Scott LynchSet in a city of traders and thieves, monsters and murderers, this page-turning epic fantasy debut is a must-read for fans of Nicholas Eames and Joe Abercrombie.Lukan Gardova is a cardsharp, academy dropout, andthanks to a duel that ended badlythe disgraced heir to an ancient noble house. His days consist of cheap wine, rigged card games, and wondering how he might win back the life he threw away.When Lukan discovers that his estranged father has been murdered in strange circumstances, he finds fresh purpose. Deprived of his chance to make amends for his mistakes, he vows to unravel the mystery behind his father''s death.His search for answers leads him to Saphrona, fabled city of merchant princes, where anything can be bought if one has the coin. Lukan only seeks the truth, but instead he finds

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In 1492 Spain is held in firm grip by the inquisition. Per decree an announcement is made that all Jews have to leave the country. A large exodus starts. 15-year-old Yonah is left on his own after his brother and father are killed. Instead of converting to Christianity or fleeing he decides to stand firm by his faith and to fight for himself. Three years later Yonah is keen to settle somewhere. In Granada he finally meets people of his own faith again - the family of the silk merchant Saadi, who still practice Judaism in secrecy. Yonah's love for Ines, the young daughter of the family, however remains unfulfilled. Yonah moves on to Gibraltar where he starts an apprenticeship with Fierro, an armourer. Fierro has to flee from the inquisition himself and asks his young apprentice to accompany him on his journey to the North and when he finally arrives in Saragossa meeting Nuno seals his fate. Yonah immediately senses that medicine is his true calling...

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Disenthralling Ourselves portrays contemporary Israel in a process of transition. Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli communities share a nation-state divided by the separate truths of its conflicting fundamental narratives. This book considers ways of converting those separate and antagonistic narratives from fuel for conflict to seeds of change. Its purpose is to undo the convenient coherence of collective memory and master narratives through fostering a capacious moral imagination able to apprehend diverse, even contentious, stories and truths. Contemporary Israel functions as a case study in an in-depth and interdisciplinary exploration of conflict resolution, viewing Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli documentary film, poetry, fiction, essays, memoir, peace initiatives, and other elements of collective narrative-building through a prism of three analogously themed Shakespearean plays. This comparative methodology is integrated with theoretical perspectives on reconciliation, resilience, critical reflection, and peace education in presenting concrete alternatives to the convenient comforts of the inimical master narratives that perpetuate what can now be seen as a hundred-year war. The readings offered in this book generate perspectives that can be adopted and adapted in relation to each other in the process of moving from a single static narrative of incessant warfare. The first section, 'Seeing in the Dark,' considers rhetoric and identity formation of cultures in transition. Its first half focuses on revenge cultures and reads Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Juliano Mer Khamis's documentary 'Arna's Children' in a fictive and documentary pairing of people stripped of all but revenge. Its second half considers rhetoric and Israeli identities in transition through the prism of Hamlet. Three genre-challenging authors represent Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli narrative identity formation; Yaron Ezrahi, Emile Habiby,and Anton Shammas reflect a hybridity that emphasi

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A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR"An essential read."—The Washington Post"Essential… This book belongs on the shelf next to Merchants of Doubt, Dark Money, and Kochland." —Roy Scranton, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene"The petroleum industry is guilty of a Big Tobacco–style public cover-up, according to this vivid exposé."—Publishers Weekly STARRED ReviewBurning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic global warming: this is what top American oil executives were told by scientists in 1959. But they ignored that warning. Instead, they developed one of the biggest, most polluting oil sources in the world—the oil sands in Alberta, Canada. As investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki reveals in this explosive book, the decades-long conspiracy to keep the oil sands flowing into the U.S. would turn out to be one of the biggest reasons for the world’s failure to stop the climate crisis.In The Petroleum Papers, Dembicki draws from confidential oil industry documents to uncover for the first time how companies like Exxon, Koch Industries, and Shell built a global right-wing echo chamber to protect oil sands profits—a misinformation campaign that continues to this day. He also tells the high-stakes stories of people fighting back: a Seattle lawyer who brought down Big Tobacco and is now going after Big Oil, a Filipina activist whose family drowned in a climate disaster, and a former Exxon engineer pushed out for asking hard questions.With experts now warning we have less than a decade to get global emissions under control, The Petroleum Papers provides a step-by-step account of how we got to this precipice—and the politicians and companies who deserve our blame.Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute

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The North Yorkshire Cook Book Second Helpings is the latest in the `Get Stuck In' series of regional cook books from Meze Publishing. It celebrates the best of the area's food and drink scene with over 40 recipes contributed by a diverse selection of restaurants, bars, cafes and small producers across the region, including a foreword and recipes from Michelin-star holder Tommy Banks, owner of the 2017 Trip Advisor Best Restaurant in the World, The Black Swan at Oldstead. Other recipes come from TV chef Shaun Rankin's restaurant Grantley Hall, plastic-free shop The Bishy Weigh, as well as the first ever Yorkshire whisky distillery, Spirit of Yorkshire. Meanwhile wine pairings from Field and Fawcett wine merchants and deli and fabulous cakes from Jervaulx Abbey Tearooms make for an eclectic mix of recipes that celebrate the best of this famous foodie region. So whether your taste is fine dining, no nonsense hearty food or something altogether more exotic, there's something for everyone.

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Pam Evans' family saga brings post-war London vividly to life as, amid rationing and food shortages, a young girl finds a passion for growing her own vegetables.It is 1945 and April Green and her cousin Heather wonder if the war will ever end. Then tragedy strikes when the local pub in Chiswick takes a direct hit. April and her brother do all they can to help their grieving mother and, by tending her father's allotment, April discovers a passion for growing vegetables.Meanwhile, Winnie Benson is facing the fact that her husband may never walk again and, until their son, George, returns from the Merchant Navy, Winnie must run their greengrocer's on her own. Once the war is over and George is home, things start to improve but rationing remains in force and April's supply of home-grown vegetables couldn't be more welcome. And, before long, George can't help wishing he was the apple of her eye...

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In the sixteenth century, the vast and sophisticated empire of China lay almost entirely unknown to Western travellers. As global trade expanded, this land of reputedly boundless wealth, pale-faced women, and indecipherable tongues began to feed the fantasies of European merchants and adventurers. The Catholic Church, meanwhile, saw in this great people millions of souls who would be damned unless the Christian message could be brought to them. In this book, Mary Laven tells the extraordinary story of the first Jesuit mission to China. Confronting enormous challenges, the Italian priest Matteo Ricci and a tiny handful of learned companions gained permission from the notoriously xenophobic Wanli emperor to settle in the fabled Forbidden City.Living among eunuchs and mandarins, wearing the clothes of Confucian scholars, Ricci and his associates strove to master the language and culture of their hosts. At the same time, they energetically preached the virtues of Western art and science. In Mission to China Mary Laven brings this remote world vividly to life.

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Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, Anishanslin unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter. Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, Anishanslin makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history.

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Understanding the Brahma Kumaris The Brahma Kumaris are a new spiritual tradition. The movement has more than one million adherents worldwide. As with all spiritual traditions, the Brahma Kumaris are different, bewildering and fascinating in their newness and in their complexity. In 1936, in Hyderabad in Sind, an old millionaire diamond merchant named Lekhraj Khubchand began to have visions. These led him to start meetings in his own home which were attended mainly by women. This was the beginning of the Brahma Kumaris. The Brahma Kumaris moved later to Mount Abu in Rajasthan in India and this remains their headquarters. Through phenomenology involves putting one's own world-view aside in order to understand the world-view of others. Applying 'epoche', to avoid bias, and 'empathy', to engage sympathetically, the objective of this study is to understand, as far as is possible for an outsider, this new tradition from within. Frank Whaling is emeritus professor of the study of religion, University of Edinburgh. He has taught and researched in many countries including India, the USA and South Africa.

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Ignorance about Islam runs deep in the West – ignorance of its rites, its beliefs, and above all its prophet.  Who was Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and the man Muslims believe was God’s last prophet on earth? In this concise and colourful account, the acclaimed writer and broadcaster Barnaby Rogerson tells the story of the illiterate orphan who was raised in the desert and trained as a merchant on the camel trade routes that criss-crossed Arabia, before defying his tribe to found a new religion, establish a world language, and create an almost unstoppable force that only 100 years after his death has conquered an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to the Hindu Kush. It was when he was 40 that Muhammad experienced his first revelation on a mountainside outside Mecca, hearing the divine order: 'Recite!'  From then until his flight from Mecca his tale is one of rejection and persecution, but it is also one of puzzling contradictions: why did he order the mur

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A richly illustrated publication that explores the networks of contacts and exchanges spanning Afro-Eurasia from 500 to 1000 ce, highlighting how the movement of people, objects and ideas shaped cultures and histories. The term Silk Road' conjures a range of romantic images. Camel caravans crossing desert dunes. Merchants trading silk and spices. Far-flung commerce between East' and West'. The reality was far richer. Focusing on a defining period between 500 and 1000 CE, this beautifully illustrated book reimagines the Silk Roads as a web of interlocking networks linking Asia, Africa and Europe, from Japan to Ireland, from the Arctic to Madagascar. It tells a remarkable story of people, objects and ideas flowing in all directions, through the traces these journeys left behind including ceramics from Tang China recovered from a shipwreck in the Java Sea, sword-fittings set with Indian garnets buried in England, and a selection of letters and legal texts from a synagogue in Cairo r

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British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response - Reflections Across the Pond presents 14 essays by distinguished art - and cultural - historians. Collectively, they examine points of similarity and difference in the approaches to art collecting practiced in Britain and the United States. Unlike most of their Continental European counterparts, the English and Americans have historically been exceptionally open to collecting the art made by and for other cultures. At the same time, they developed a tradition of opening private collections to a public eager for educational and cultural advancement. Approximately half the essays examine the trends and market forces that dominated the British art collecting scene of the nineteenth century, such as the Orléans sale and the shift away from aristocratic collections to those of the new urban merchant class. The essays that focus on American collectors use biographical sketches of collectors and dealers, as well as case studies of specific transactions to demonstrate how collectors in the United States embraced and embellished on the British model to develop their own, often philanthropic approach to art collecting.

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History at War is a unique book. It throws light on important unexplored aspects of the pursuit of historical truth. It tells how, alone among historians, Noble Frankland fought in the bomber offensive during the Second World War and then, together with Sir Charles Webster, wrote its official history; how he transformed the Imperial War Museum from a dying institution into one of the world's leading historical centres for the study of the conflicts of the 20th century; how he played a major part in television documentary productions, including in particular The World at War; and how he wrote a series of original, rigorously researched historical works. In History at War he describes the battles he had to fight against the mandarins and media merchants who sought to impose a spin on history to suit their own ends, and were ruthless and unscrupulous in their methods. Its meticulous documentation gives a guarantee of authenticity to his staggering account of how those in high places tried to distort history, which might otherwise seem scarcely credible. The revelations about 'Bomber' Harris' relations with his superior, Lord Portal, during the war and their joint opposition to the two authors' account of the strategic air offensive, still a highly topical issue, will set alight a new debate among military and other historians. Unlike most books on the theory and practice of history, it does not confine itself to what can be written on the page. It also covers Dr Frankland's experience of demonstrating history in museum galleries, on the television screen, on sites such as Duxford Airfield near Cambridge, and on board HMS Belfast in the Pool of London. The problem for historians of publishing a full and unbiased account and analysis of controversial events and episodes in politics and international affairs is as acute in the 1990s as it ever has been. All readers with a concern for the truth will learn much about such issues from this unflinching and penetrating book

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Landscapes of Power and Identity is a groundbreaking comparative history of two colonies on the frontiers of the Spanish empire—the Sonora region of northwestern Mexico and the Chiquitos region of eastern Bolivia’s lowlands—from the late colonial period through the middle of the nineteenth century. An innovative combination of environmental and cultural history, this book reflects Cynthia Radding’s more than two decades of research on Mexico and Bolivia and her consideration of the relationships between human societies and the geographic landscapes they inhabit and create. At first glance, Sonora and Chiquitos are quite different: one a scrub-covered desert, the other a tropical rainforest of the greater Amazonian and Paraguayan river basins. Yet the regions are similar in many ways. Both were located far from the centers of colonial authority, organized into Jesuit missions and linked to the principal mining centers of New Spain and the Andes, and then absorbed into nation-states in the nineteenth century. In each area, the indigenous communities encountered European governors, missionaries, slave hunters, merchants, miners, and ranchers.Radding’s comparative approach illuminates what happened when similar institutions of imperial governance, commerce, and religion were planted in different physical and cultural environments. She draws on archival documents, published reports by missionaries and travelers, and previous histories as well as ecological studies and ethnographies. She also considers cultural artifacts, including archaeological remains, architecture, liturgical music, and religious dances. Radding demonstrates how colonial encounters were conditioned by both the local landscape and cultural expectations; how the colonizers and colonized understood notions of territory and property; how religion formed the cultural practices and historical memories of the Sonoran and Chiquitano peoples; and how the conflict between the indigenous communities and the surrounding creole societies developed in new directions well into the nineteenth century.

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First published in 1946, this atmospheric memoir of the battle of the Atlantic offers one of the most original accounts of war at sea aboard a corvette, escorting convoys in both the North and South Atlantic. The author, an RNVR lieutenant, experienced the terrors of U-boat attacks and the hardships of autumn gales as well as the relief of shore runs in ports as far apart as Halifax and Freetown. The narrative begins with Harling's voyage from the Clyde to New York on the Queen Mary (or QM, as she was known during her martial career), on route to join a newly-built corvette in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was to be her First Lieutenant, and his service at sea started in the spring of 1941, just as the battle of the Atlantic was entering its most crucial stage. During the first east-bound convoy he was to experience attacks by U-boats, the loss of merchant vessels and a steep learning curve as the ship's crew struggled to live in the harsh wartime conditions. Later that summer they made return voyages to Iceland where runs ashore offered some solace from dangerous days at sea. Time was also spent in the South Atlantic with voyages to Freetown and Lagos, before a short interlude when he experienced the excitement of fighting with Coastal Forces. The corvette subsequently returned to escorting convoys from Halifax to Europe. His narrative is both serious and humorous, and his picture of wartime Britain, his descriptions of being buffeted by great storm-tossed seas in the cockleshell corvettes', and the recounting of grim losses are all too real and authentic. His story ends as he leaves his ship after a violent cold developed into pneumonia, and soon afterwards he hears the heart-breaking news of her loss, along with the captain and half the crew, after being torpedoed. He is left to ponder on the many tombless dead consigned by the war to the Steep Atlantick Stream.

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Most people don’t expect wood to flavor their food beyond the barbecue, if at all, and gastronomists rarely discuss the significance that wood has on ultimate taste. But trees and wood have a far greater influence over our plate and palate than you might think. So what does wood taste of? And how has it been used in cooking, distilling, fermenting, and even perfume creation to produce a unique flavor and smell? To find out the answers to these questions, food communications expert Artur Cisar-Erlach embarked on a global journey to understand how trees infuse the world’s most delectable dishes with the flavor of their wood. His flavor hunt extended into a three-year exploration covering everything from pizza, whisky, cheese, tea, and perfume to quinine, wine, maple syrup, blue yogurt, and more. From wooden barrels used to age scotch in Austria to wood-burning pizza ovens of Naples to traditional Canadian maple syrup producers, The Flavor of Wood explores how wood infuses some of our best-loved foods through its smoke, sap, roots, and bark. As his quest spans continents and cultures, Cisar-Erlach introduces readers to a colorful cast of characters including Modenese balsamic vinegar producers, Piedmontese truffle hunters, South Tyrolean winemakers, and wild mountain pine chefs. Discovering that wood flavors beverages as well, the author encounters Austrian whisky distillers, Bavarian brewers, avant-garde central London tea merchants, and Indian tea exporters. A world trip brimming with fascinating encounters, unexpected turns, beautiful landscapes, scientific discoveries, and historic connections, The Flavor of Wood is the story of a passionate flavor hunter, and offers readers unparalleled access to some of the world’s highest quality cuisine and unknown tree flavors.

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On a cold day in January 1944, as war raged in Europe, Betty Hussey and Jack Stoate were married. In so doing they brought together two families, whose members fought across the globe to defeat the Axis. In Called to Arms, Edward Lambah-Stoate traces the wartime experiences of nine relatives, including his parents, to present a fascinating account of the impact of conflict on the ordinary people of Britain who gallantly came forward to do their bit. These included a decorated fighter pilot, a Land Girl, a member of the Home Guard, a Royal Marine, an artilleryman, an RAF doctor and a merchant seaman, who between them fought in North Africa and Italy, were captured by the Japanese and worked on the Burma-Siam Railway, and took part in D-Day. Not all of them survived, but their contribution was invaluable – and representative. Using a wealth of previously unpublished material including log books, private correspondence and memoirs and interviews with surviving friends, this book provides a unique insight into one family’s war – and by extension, everybody’s war.

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In the late nineteenth century the borderlands between the United States, the British Empire in Canada, and the Asia-Pacific Rim emerged as a crossroads of the Pacific world. In Pacific Connections, Kornel Chang tells the dramatic stories of the laborers, merchants, smugglers, and activists who crossed these borders into the twentieth century, and the American and British empire-builders who countered them by hardening racial and national lines. But even as settler societies attempted to control the processes of imperial integration, their project fractured under its contradictions. Migrant workers and radical activists pursued a transnational politics through the very networks that made empire possible. Charting the U.S.-Canadian borderlands from above and below, Chang reveals the messiness of imperial formation and the struggles it spawned from multiple locations and through different actors across the Pacific world. Pacific Connections is the winner of the Outstanding Book in History award from the Association for Asian American Studies and is a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize from the American Studies Association.

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A concise introduction to the workings of ancient democracy, The Athenian Citizen has been a bestseller since the original edition was first published almost 60 years ago by Mabel Lang. Using archaeological evidence from excavations at the heart of ancient Athens, this volume shows how tribal identity was central to all aspects of civic life, guiding the reader through the duties of citizenship as soldier in times of war and as juror during the peace. The checks and balances that protected Athenian society from tyrants, such as legal assassination and ostracism, are described. Selected inscriptions are illustrated and discussed, as are ingenious devices such as allotment machines and water clocks, which ensured fairness in the courts. The book ends with some of the lasting products of classical administration: the silver coins accepted around the known world and the standard weights and measures that continue to protect the consumer from unscrupulous merchants. Illustrated entirely in colour, with updates and revisions by the current director of excavations at the Agora, this edition of an acknowledged classic will inform and fascinate visitors and students for many years to come.

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The colorful history of paper money before the Civil War Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. This number does not even include the plethora of counterfeit bills and the countless shinplasters of questionable legality issued by unregulated merchants, firms, and municipalities. Adding to the chaos was the idiosyncratic method for negotiating their value, an often manipulative face-to-face discussion consciously separated from any haggling over the price of the work, goods, or services for sale. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how ordinary Americans accumulated and wielded the financial knowledge required to navigate interpersonal bank note transactions. Locating evidence of Americans grappling with their money in fiction, correspondence, newspapers, printed ephemera, government documents, legal cases, and even on the money itself, Greenberg argues Americans, by necessity, developed the ability to analyze the value of paper financial instruments, assess the strength of banking institutions, and even track legislative changes that might alter the rules of currency circulation. In his examination of the doodles, calculations, political screeds, and commercial stamps that ended up on bank bills, he connects the material culture of cash to financial, political, and intellectual history. The book demonstrates that the shift from state-regulated banks and private shinplaster producers to federally authorized paper money in the Civil War era led to the erasure of the skill, knowledge, and lived experience with banking that informed debates over economic policy. The end result, Greenberg writes, has been a diminished public understanding of how currency and the financial sector operate in our contemporary era, from the 2008 recession to the rise of Bitcoin.

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Asians have migrated to North America for centuries, in search of opportunities and conveyed by increasingly dense, international circuits of trade, labor markets, and family networks. Drawn by the riches promised by the relatively undeveloped, but not unpopulated, New World, Asians joined a diverse array of immigrants arriving in capacities such as merchants, farmers, fishermen, soldiers, missionaries, artists and artisans, industrial and agricultural laborers, technicians and scientists, journalists, sailors, diplomats, tourists, bankers, students, and entrepreneurs of every stripe. They contributed significantly to the massive transformation of the United States into the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, particularly on the west coast and Hawaii. Unlike their European counterparts, however, Asians challenged American conceptions of racial homogeneity and national culture which produced legislative and institutional efforts to segregate them through immigration laws, restrictions on citizenship, and limits on employment, property ownership, access to public services, and civil rights. Only with World War II, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights era's remaking of racial ideologies and forging of a more egalitarian, multiethnic democracy Asian Americans have gained ground and acceptance, albeit in the still stereotyped category of 'model minorities'. Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction provides a narrative interpretation of key themes that emerge in the history of Asian migrations to North America. Clearly written and elegantly argued, this book complements typical American history narratives by highlighting how Asian immigration has shaped the evolution of ideological and legal interpretations of America as a 'nation of immigrants'. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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Canaan, Land of Israel, the Holy Land, Bibleland—Palestine. Many names for a small speck of earth, no bigger than Wales or Massachusetts. This land has suffered most of the world’s conquerors, from the Babylonians to the British, only to brighten its aura of sanctity for millions of Muslims, Christians, and Jews to the present day. In Weathered by Miracles, Thomas Idinopulos tells the story of that one explosive moment in Palestine’s long history that began with Napoleon’s invasion of the Middle East in 1798 and concluded with the founding of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Here was the dramatic confrontation of world empires for possession and profit, the clash of Islam with the Christian West, and the pioneering zeal of explorers and excavators, diplomats, merchants, and missionaries. Here were the last days of Turkish and European imperialisms and the first breaths of Arab and Jewish nationalisms. Concentrating on the fateful ties between politics and religion, Mr. Idinopulos describes the extraordinary transformation of Palestine from wasteland to a dynamic country, and traces the origin of the violence that continues today between Arabs and Jews.

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A reinterpretation of the place and significance of chivalric culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and what it says about contemporary attitudes to the medieval. Chivalry and Romance in Renaissance England offers a reinterpretation of the place and significance of chivalric culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century and explores the implications of this reconfigured interpretation for an understanding of the medieval generally. Received wisdom has it that both chivalric culture and the literature of chivalry - romances - were obsolete by the time of the Renaissance, an understanding epitomised by the figure of Don Quixote, the reader of chivalric fictions whose risible literary tastes render him absurd. By way of contrast, this study finds evidence for the continued vitality and relevance of chivalric values at all levels of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society, from the court entertainments of Elizabeth I to the civic culture of London merchants and artisans. At the same time, it charts the process by which, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chivalric has been firstly exclusively identified with the medieval and then transformed into a virtual shorthand for 'pastness' generally. ALEX DAVIS is lecturer in English, University of St Andrews.

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This volume sheds light on the pride of the region - the great medieval churches of York Minster, the Minster and St Mary at Beverley, and Holy Trinity, Hull but also on less well known architectural pleasures of town and county. Outstanding Victorian village churches, including masterpieces by Street & Pearson, are as rewarding as the major country houses of Burton Agnes, Burton Constable and Sledmere. The countryside offes a wide range of monuments, from the beautifully sited ruins of Kirkham Priory to the spectacular Humber Bridge. Farmhouses and cottages of the Wolds, picturesque estate villages and chapels, and industrial structures are all brought into focus. A large section is devoted to York and includes a survey of the historic buildings of the city centre from the Roman period onwards. This is complemented by a detailed exploration of York's eighteenth and nineteenth-century suburbs. Equal care has been applied to the descriptions of Beverley, with its attractive townscape, and the port of Hull, where unexpected highlights include seventeenth-century merchant houses, Georgian almshouses, ornate Victorian pubs, and grand Edwardian public buildings.

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Long before there were Jewish communities in the land of the tsars, Jews inhabited a region which they called medinat rusiya, the land of Russia. Prior to its annexation by Russia, the land of Russia was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, with its annexation by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions. The three great intellectual currents in East European Jewry--Hasidism, Rabbinic Mitnagdism, and Haskalah--all converged on Eastern Belorussia, where they clashed and competed. In the course of a generation, the community of Shklov—the most prominent of the towns in the area—witnessed an explosion of intellectual and cultural activity. Focusing on the social and intellectual odysseys of merchants, maskilim, and rabbis, and their varied attempts to combine Judaism and European culture, David Fishman here chronicles the remarkable story of these first modern Jews of Russia.

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The Silk Road is iconic in world history; but what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was different--and far more interesting. In The Silk Road: A New History with Documents, Valerie Hansen describes the remarkable archeological finds that revolutionized our understanding of these trade routes. Hansen explores eight sites along the road, from Xi'an to Samarkand, where merchants, envoys, pilgrims, and travelers mixed in cosmopolitan communities, tolerant of religions from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism.Designed for use in the classroom and based on the award-winning trade edition (OUP, 2012), The Silk Road: A New History with Documents offers a selection of excerpted primary sources in each chapter. The wide-ranging sources include memoirs of medieval Chinese monks and modern explorers, letters written by women, descriptions of towns, legal contracts, religious hymns, and many others. A new final chapter provides coverage of the Silk Road during the period of Mongol rule.

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Crispin Guest has fallen far from his privileged position as a knight in medieval high society. Accused of treason, abandoned by former friends and allies, he has survived on the gritty streets of London by reinventing himself as "The Tracker," a private investigator for hire who can locate lost objects or uncover the clandestine lives of people. When the secretive, wealthy merchant Nicholas Walcote hires Guest to investigate his alluring young wife Philippa for adultery, he discovers a seedy underworld of covert dealings and violent men of mystery. Philippa is indeed hiding something and she's not the only one. Guest soon learns that Walcote is rumored to be in possession of a mystical holy relic so powerful that some would even kill for it. Guest must contend with his nemesis, Sheriff Simon Wynchcombe in the search for answers to the questions surrounding the mysterious Walcotes. With each new day comes another layer of intrigue and Guest quickly becomes entangled in a strange world of superstition, seduction, and murder.

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Faith Madison is the very picture of a sophisticated New Yorker. Slim, blonde, stylish, married to a successful merchant banker and having raised two daughters, Faith has a life many would envy. But Faith has overcome a childhood marred by tragedy, and has carried within herself a secret she could divulge to no-one.The sudden death of her stepfather sets off a journey of change and revelation. At the funeral, painful memories flood back - and an old friend re-enters Faith's life. Brad, a long lanky boy from her childhood days who had teased, tormented and protected her. Now a busy lawyer in California, Brad re-enters Faith's life just as she makes a decision that plunges her marriage into crisis. As these two childhood friends rediscover each other, Faith is finally ready to face the most painful step of all: of sharing a secret that has long been haunting her, and opening up her heart for the first time in her life.

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Tapas with Liam Tomlin is about the style of food that Liam likes to cook and the way he likes to eat, with lots of different tastes, textures and cooking styles. After so many years in professional kitchens, Liam wanted a departure from the formal structure of restaurants with reservations, stuffy service and fixed menus that are repeated day after day. At Chefs Warehouse, he has moved away from food with too many layers, and components added simply for the sake of adding them. His way of cooking is focused on technique and on extracting as much flavour as possible to create tasty and well-balanced dishes. The tapas recipes are not intimidating, only delicious. As Andy Fenner, owner of Frankie Fenner Meat Merchants says: ‘Liam has the crew do it every day. This book will show you how to do it at home.’ This second edition of Tapas with Liam Tomlin is now available to everyone as the first, self-published edition was only available at Liam’s restaurants.

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Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world's great cuisines from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in culinary philosophy" beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe. Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan's innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.

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THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India … A book of beauty’ – Gerard DeGroot, The Times In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.

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Albion Fellows BaconIndiana's Municipal HousekeeperRobert G. BarrowsExamines the career of a leading Progressive Era reformer.Born in Evansville, Indiana, in 1865, Albion Fellows was reared in the nearby hamlet of McCutchanville and graduated from Evansville High School. She worked for several years as a secretary and court reporter, toured Europe with her sister, married local merchant Hilary Bacon in 1888, and settled into a seemingly comfortable routine of middle-class domesticity. In 1892, however, she was afflicted with an illness that lasted for several years, an illness that may have resulted from a real or perceived absence of outlets for her intelligence and creativity.Bacon eventually found such outlets in a myriad of voluntary associations and social welfare campaigns. She was best known for her work on behalf of tenement reform and was instrumental in the passage of legislation to improve housing conditions in Indiana. She was also involved in child welfare, city planning and zoning, and a variety of public health efforts. Bacon became Indiana's foremost "municipal houskeeper," a Progressive Era term for women who applied their domestic skills to social problems plaguing their communities.She also found time to write about her social reform efforts and her religious faith in articles and pamphlets. She published one volume of children's stories, and authored several pageants. One subject she did not write about was women's suffrage. While she did not oppose votes for women, suffrage was never her priority. But the reality of her participation in public affairs did advance the cause of women's political equality and provided a role model for future generations.Robert G. Barrows, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University at Indianapolis, was previously an editor at the Indiana Historical Bureau. He has published several journal articles and book chapters dealing with Indiana history and American urban history, and he coedited (with David J. Bodenhamer) the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (Indiana University Press).ContentsThe Sheltered LifeThe Clutch of the ThornsAmbassador of the PoorThe Homes of IndianaChild WelfareCity Plans and National Housing StandardsProse, Poetry, and PageantsMunicipal Housekeeper and Inadvertent Feminist

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The Prophetic Anti-Gallic Letters Adam Thom and the Hidden Roots of The Dominion of Canada by Adam Thom was published in 1836 based on Thom's editorials in Montreal Herald written under the pseudonym "Camillus" in the previous two years. They were never reprinted, despite their importance and above all the people for whom Thom was the public voice, namely the executive committee of the powerful Constitutional Association of Montreal, that included the president George Moffatt as well as Peter McGill and John McCord. Thom was also co-author of the famous Durham Report. More than an anti-French, anti-Republican tract, The Anti-Gallic Letters, though generally ignored by historians, are crucial to understanding how British North America mutated into the Dominion of Canada in 1867. Erroneously characterized as a minor discord between the Melbourne cabinet in London and a select group of merchants, bankers and gentlemen of the Montreal Tory oligarchy, The Anti-Gallic Letters reveal the total disagreement among people of British culture and background in London or in Montreal on how power should be controlled in the colonies of Canada. Westminster, inspired by the 1832 Reform Bill, believed in a gradual and harmonious transfer of British parliamentary values and institutions to a majority group of a different culture, language and background, described as "The great body of people" by Governor Gosford in his 1835 Throne speech read in French. But the Montreal Tory Oligarchy, mobilized by fear and bravado, anticipated the worst, while still espousing the same British imperial world mission as Westminster. Seeing Montreal as the hub of British North America, they brandished the spectre of a British Empire dismembered by a French Republic arising in the St. Lawrence Valley or annexation of Upper and Lower Canada by the powerful American Republic. They thus considered themselves justified to threaten the use lethal force to make Downing Street change its course. Moreover, as François Deschamps shows, they succeeded: first in 1837 with the brutal repression of the Patriotes in Lower Canada and the Reformers in Upper Canada, second with the Durham Report and the Act of Union, and finally with the 1867 BNA Act creating the Dominion of Canada. Now reprinted, the Anti-Gallic Letters with Deschamps's fascinating presentation and notes provide a new but crucial point of view as Canada prepares to mark the 150th anniversary of the Dominion of Canada in 2017. The book includes a comprehensive bibliography.

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'Haywood's lucid explanations of the cultures of the Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians are vital to understanding the motivations for their movements' KIRKUS REVIEWS. The violent and predatory society of Dark Age Scandinavia left a unique impact on the history of medieval Europe. From their chill northern fastness, Norse warriors, explorers and merchants raided, traded, and settled across wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic from the late 8th to the mid-11th century. Northmen narrates their story focusing on places where key events were played out, from the sack of Lindisfarne in 793 to the murder in Iceland in 1241 of the saga-writer Snorri Sturluson. Such episodes are fascinating in themselves, but also shed crucial light on the nature of Viking activity – its causes, effects, and the reasons for its decline. In 800 the Scandinavians were barbarians in longships bent on plunder and rapine; by 1200, their homelands were an integral part of Latin Christendom. John Haywood tells, in authoritative but compellingly readable fashion, the extraordinary story of the Viking Age.

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The Second World War was the defining conflict of the twentieth century and it is one of the most popular and fascinating areas for historical research - and for family historians. More records than ever are available to researchers whose relatives served during the war. And this new book by Phil Tomaselli is the perfect guide to how to locate and understand these sources - and get the most out of them. He explains how, and from where, service records can be obtained, using real examples showing what they look like and how to interpret them. He also examines records of the military units relatives might have served in so their careers can be followed in graphic detail. The three armed services are covered, along with the merchant navy, the Home Guard, civilian services, prisoners of war, gallantry and campaign medals, casualties, women's services and obscure wartime organizations. Also included are a glossary of service acronyms, information on useful websites, an introduction to the National Archives and details of other useful sources.

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A concise introduction to the workings of ancient democracy, The Athenian Citizen has been a bestseller since the original edition was first published almost 60 years ago by Mabel Lang. Using archaeological evidence from excavations at the heart of ancient Athens, this volume shows how tribal identity was central to all aspects of civic life, guiding the reader through the duties of citizenship as soldier in times of war and as juror during the peace. The checks and balances that protected Athenian society from tyrants, such as legal assassination and ostracism, are described. Selected inscriptions are illustrated and discussed, as are ingenious devices such as allotment machines and water clocks, which ensured fairness in the courts. The book ends with some of the lasting products of classical administration: the silver coins accepted around the known world and the standard weights and measures that continue to protect the consumer from unscrupulous merchants. Illustrated entirely in colour, with updates and revisions by the current director of excavations at the Agora, this edition of an acknowledged classic will inform and fascinate visitors and students for many years to come. (Greek language edition)

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Dating from the seventeenth century at the height of the Ming Dynasty, the Selden Map of China reveals a country very different from popular conceptions of the time, looking not inward to the Asian landmass but outward to the sea. Painted in multiple colours on three pieces of Mitsumata paper, this beautifully decorative map of China was discovered to be a seafaring chart showing Ming Dynasty trade routes. It is the earliest surviving example of Chinese merchant cartography and is evidence that Ming China was outward-looking, capitalistic and vibrant. Exploring the commercial aims of the Ming Dynasty, the port city of Quanzhou and its connections with the voyages of the early traveller Zheng He, this book describes the historical background of the era in which the map was used. It also includes an analysis of the skills and techniques involved in Chinese map-making and the significance of the compass bearings, scale and ratios found on the map, all of which combine to represent a breakthrough in cartographic techniques. The enthralling story revealed by this extraordinary artefact is central to an understanding of the long history of China’s relationship with the sea and with the wider world.

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Walter Wolff was the son of a Jewish merchant family that fled their German home when the Nazis came to power and took refuge in Brussels, Belgium. On the eve of the German invasion, in May 1940, the family began its second escape. Their sixteen-month odyssey took them through the chaos of battle in France and the dangers of living clandestinely as Jews in occupied territory, before they finally boarded the notorious freighter SS Navemar in Cadiz, Spain, to be among the last Jewish refugees admitted to the United States before Pearl Harbor.Within two years of his arrival in the States, Walter was ready to take the fight back to the Nazis as a soldier in the U.S. Army. Trained for the Intelligence Corps at Camp Ritchie, he was sent first to Italy and then to Germany and Austria, where he interrogated POWs for potential prosecution as war criminals at Nuremburg. At the same time, on his travels in Europe he returned to the confiscated properties of his extended family, throwing out the occupiers and reclaiming ownership. Telling the rousing story of a Jewish boy who fled persecution and returned to prosecute the Nazi oppressors, Walter Wolff’s daughter Nina has reconstructed these events from family lore and her father’s own cache of more than 700 wartime letters and 200 photographs, which he revealed to her shortly before he died.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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A puzzling tsunami entered Japanese history in January 1700. Samurai, merchants, and villagers wrote of minor flooding and damage. Some noted having felt no earthquake; they wondered what had set off the waves but had no way of knowing that the tsunami was spawned during an earthquake along the coast of northwestern North America. This orphan tsunami would not be linked to its parent earthquake until the mid-twentieth century, through an extraordinary series of discoveries in both North America and Japan. The Orphan Tsunami of 1700, now in its second edition, tells this scientific detective story through its North American and Japanese clues. The story underpins many of today’s precautions against earthquake and tsunami hazards in the Cascadia region of northwestern North America. The Japanese tsunami of March 2011 called attention to these hazards as a mirror image of the transpacific waves of January 1700. Hear Brian Atwater on NPR with Renee Montagne http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4629401

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Antony and Cleopatra is a famous Shakespeare tragedy which follows actual events from Roman History. It is set in ancient Rome and Egypt, revolving around, Antony, a Roman General, and Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt. Antony falls in love with Cleopatra, and throughout the play remains torn between his duty and his love for her. A fun way to introduce young readers to Roman History!Also available as part of a 20 book set, including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Tragedy of Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Winter’s Tale, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Timon of Athens, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Anthony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well. About Sweet Cherry Easy Classics:Sweet Cherry Easy Classics adapts classic literature into stories for children, introducing these timeless tales to a new generation.

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Written in Kashmir around 400 CE, Haribhatta's Jatakamala is a remarkable example of classical Sanskrit literature in a mixture of prose and verse that for centuries was known only in its Tibetan translation. But between 1973 and 2004 a large portion of the Sanskrit original was rediscovered in a number of anonymous manuscripts. With this volume Peter Khoroche offers the most complete translation to date, making almost eighty per cent of the work available in English. Haribhatta's Jatakamala is a sophisticated and personal adaptation of popular stories, mostly non-Buddhist in origin, all illustrating the future Buddha's single-minded devotion to the good of all creatures, and his desire, no matter what his incarnation man, woman, peacock, elephant, merchant or king to assist others on the path to nirvana. Haribhatta's insight into human and animal behaviour, his astonishing eye for the details of landscape and his fine descriptive powers together make this a unique record of everyday life in ancient India as well as a powerful statement of Buddhist ethics. This translation will be a landmark in the study of Buddhism and of the culture of ancient India.

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Written in Kashmir around 400 CE, Haribhatta's Jatakamala is a remarkable example of classical Sanskrit literature in a mixture of prose and verse that for centuries was known only in its Tibetan translation. But between 1973 and 2004 a large portion of the Sanskrit original was rediscovered in a number of anonymous manuscripts. With this volume Peter Khoroche offers the most complete translation to date, making almost eighty per cent of the work available in English. Haribhatta's Jatakamala is a sophisticated and personal adaptation of popular stories, mostly non-Buddhist in origin, all illustrating the future Buddha's single-minded devotion to the good of all creatures, and his desire, no matter what his incarnation man, woman, peacock, elephant, merchant or king to assist others on the path to nirvana. Haribhatta's insight into human and animal behaviour, his astonishing eye for the details of landscape and his fine descriptive powers together make this a unique record of everyday life in ancient India as well as a powerful statement of Buddhist ethics. This translation will be a landmark in the study of Buddhism and of the culture of ancient India.

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Winner, Victorian Society in America Book Award A colorful tale of a singular New York City neighborhood and the personalities who make it special To outsiders or East Siders, Riverside Park and Riverside Drive may not have the star status of Fifth Avenue or Central Park West. But at the city’s westernmost edge, there is a quiet and beauty like nowhere else in all of New York. There are miles of mansions and monuments, acres of flora, and a breadth of wildlife ranging from Peregrine falcons to goats. It’s where the Gershwins and Babe Ruth once lived, William Randolph Hearst ensconced his paramour, and Amy Schumer owns a penthouse. Told in the uniquely personal voice of a longtime resident, Heaven on the Hudson is the only New York City book that features the history, architecture, and personalities of this often overlooked neighborhood, from the eighteenth century through the present day. Combining an extensively researched history of the area and its people with an engaging one-on-one guide to its sights, author Stephanie Azzarone sheds new light on the initial development of Riverside Park and Riverside Drive, the challenges encountered—from massive boulders to “maniacs”—and the reasons why Riverside Drive never became the “new Fifth Avenue” that promoters anticipated. From grand “country seats” to squatter settlements to multi-million-dollar residences, the book follows the neighborhood’s roller-coaster highs and lows over time. Readers will discover a trove of architectural and recreational highlights and hidden gems, including the Drive’s only freestanding privately owned villa, a tomb that’s not a tomb, and a sweet memorial to an eighteenth-century child. Azzarone also tells the stories behind Riverside’s notable and forgotten residents, including celebrities, murderers, a nineteenth-century female MD who launched the country’s first anti-noise campaign, and an Irish merchant who caused a scandal by living with an Indian princess. While much has been written about Central Park, little has focused exclusively on Riverside Drive and Riverside Park until now. Heaven on the Hudson is dedicated to sharing this West Side neighborhood’s most special secrets, the ones that, without fail, bring both pleasure and peace in a city of more than 8 million.

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This volume approaches the topic of mobility in Southeast Europe by offering the first detailed historical study of the land route connecting Istanbul with Belgrade. After this route that diagonally crosses Southeast Europe had been established in Roman times, it was as important for the Byzantines as the Ottomans to rule their Balkan territories. In the nineteenth century, the road was upgraded to a railroad and, most recently, to a motorway. The contributions in this volume focus on the period from the Middle Ages to the present day. They explore the various transformations of the route as well as its transformative role for the cities and regions along its course. This not only concerns the political function of the route to project the power of the successive empires. Also the historical actors such as merchants, travelling diplomats, Turkish guest workers or Middle Eastern refugees together with the various social, economic and cultural effects of their mobility are in the focus of attention. The overall aim is to gain a deeper understanding of Southeast Europe by foregrounding historical continuities and disruptions from a long-term perspective and by bringing into dialogue different national and regional approaches.

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Anton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels–here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.The Steppe—the most lyrical of the five—is an account of a nine-year-old boy’s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia. The Duel sets two decadent figures—a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility—on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical spying on an important official by serving as valet to his son gradually discovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor.The resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in a brief apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov’s work.

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