Search results for ""author alex"

Crazy Rich Asians meets One of Us is Lying in this electrifying YA thriller where students at an elite prep school are forced to confront their secrets when their ex-best friend turns up dead. Nancy Luo is shocked when her former best friend, Jamie Ruan, top-ranked junior at Sinclair Prep, goes missing, and then is found dead. Nancy is even more shocked when word starts to spread that she and her friends - Krystal, Akil, and Alexander - are the prime suspects, thanks to "the Proctor," someone anonymously incriminating them via the school’s social media app. They all used to be Jamie’s closest friends, and she knew each of their deepest, darkest secrets. Now, somehow the Proctor knows them, too. The four must uncover the true killer before The Proctor exposes more than they can bear and costs them more than they can afford, like Nancy’s full scholarship. Soon, Nancy suspects that her friends may be keeping secrets from her, too. Katie Zhao’s YA debut is an edge-of-your-seat drama set in the pressure-cooker world of academics and image at Sinclair Prep, where the past threatens the future these teens have carefully crafted for themselves. How We Fall Apart is the irresistible, addicting, Asian-American recast of Gossip Girl that we’ve all been waiting for.

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In The Captive Sea, Daniel Hershenzon explores the entangled histories of Muslim and Christian captives—and, by extension, of the Spanish Empire, Ottoman Algiers, and Morocco—in the seventeenth century to argue that piracy, captivity, and redemption helped shape the Mediterranean as an integrated region at the social, political, and economic levels. Despite their confessional differences, the lives of captives and captors alike were connected in a political economy of ransom and communication networks shaped by Spanish, Ottoman, and Moroccan rulers; ecclesiastic institutions; Jewish, Muslim, and Christian intermediaries; and the captives themselves, as well as their kin. Hershenzon offers both a comprehensive analysis of competing projects for maritime dominance and a granular investigation of how individual lives were tragically upended by these agendas. He takes a close look at the tightly connected and ultimately failed attempts to ransom an Algerian Muslim girl sold into slavery in Livorno in 1608; the son of a Spanish marquis enslaved by pirates in Algiers and brought to Istanbul, where he converted to Islam; three Spanish Trinitarian friars detained in Algiers on the brink of their departure for Spain in the company of Christians they had redeemed; and a high-ranking Ottoman official from Alexandria, captured in 1613 by the Sicilian squadron of Spain. Examining the circulation of bodies, currency, and information in the contested Mediterranean, Hershenzon concludes that the practice of ransoming captives, a procedure meant to separate Christians from Muslims, had the unintended consequence of tightly binding Iberia to the Maghrib.

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To date, lesbian and gay history has focused largely on the East and West coasts, and on urban settings such as New York and San Francisco. The American South, on the other hand, identified with religion, traditional gender roles, and cultural conservatism, has escaped attention. Southerners celebrate their past; lesbians and gays celebrate their new-found visibility; historians celebrate the South—yet rarely have the three crossed paths. John Howard's groundbreaking anthology casts its net widely, examining lesbian and gay experiences in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee. James Schnur, by virtue of a Freedom of Information Act query, sheds light on the sinister machinations of the Johns Committee, whose clandestine duty it was to ferret out suspected homosexuals during the McCarthy years. In his essay on the great Southern writer William Alexander Percy, William Armstrong Percy provides tangible evidence that Southern citizens, historians, and archivists have long sought to repress or obscure certain individuals within what C. Vann Woodward described as the perverse section. Moving chronologically through America's past, from the antebellum and postbellum periods, through the Jim Crow era and the Cold War, to the present, this volume introduces an important new framework to the field of lesbian and gay history—that of regional history.

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According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19:6). The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is paradoxical, for priests are by definition a minority, yet the meaning in context is clear: the entire people is holy. The words also point to some significant tensions in the biblical understanding of the people of Israel. If the entire people is holy, why does it need priests? If membership in both people and priesthood is a matter not of merit but of birth, how can either the people or its priests hope to be holy? How can one reconcile the distance between the honor due the priest and the actual behavior of some who filled the role? What can the people do to make itself truly a kingdom of priests? Himmelfarb argues that these questions become central in Second Temple Judaism. She considers a range of texts from this period, including the Book of Watchers, the Book of Jubilees, legal documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of Philo of Alexandria, and the Book of Revelation of the New Testament, and goes on to explore rabbinic Judaism's emphasis on descent as the primary criterion for inclusion among the chosen people of Israel—a position, she contends, that took on new force in reaction to early Christian disparagement of the idea that mere descent from Abraham was sufficient for salvation.

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A fascinating study of the motivations behind the political activities and philosophies of Putin’s government in Russia“Part intellectual history, part portrait gallery . . . Black Wind, White Snow traces the background to Putin’s ideas with verve and clarity.”—Geoffrey Hosking, Financial Times “Required reading. This is a vivid, panoramic history of bad ideas, chasing the metastasis of the doctrine known as Eurasianism. . . . Reading Charles Clover will help you understand the world of lies and delusions that is Eurasia.”—Ben Judah, Standpoint A powerful strain of Russian nationalism now lies at the heart of the Kremlin’s political thinking: "Eurasianism". But how did this dangerous ideology, once a fringe theory, come to dominate Moscow’s elite? Promoted most notably in recent years by Alexander Dugin, this theory has become the driving force behind the invasion of Ukraine and the perplexing manoeuvrings of Putin’s Russia. In this fascinating investigation, Charles Clover, an award-winning journalist, traces Eurasianism’s origins in the writings of White Russian exiles in 1920s Europe, through Siberia’s Gulag archipelago in the 1950s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and up to its steady infiltration of the governing elite. Based on extensive research and dozens of interviews with Putin’s close advisers, this eye-opening account is essential reading to understand Russia’s past century – and the dangers of our present political moment.

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The Persian Empire was the world's first hyperpower, with territory stretching from Central Asia to Northeastern Africa and from Southeastern Europe to the Indus Valley. It was the dominant geopolitical force from the later sixth century to its conquest by Alexander in the 330s BCE. Much of the empire's territory was conquered by its founder, Cyrus the Great, who reigned from 559-530 BCE. Cyrus became a legend in his own lifetime, and his career inspired keen interest from Persia's unruly neighbors to the west, the ancient Greeks. The idealized portrait of Cyrus by the Greek Xenophon had a profound impact on ancient, medieval, and early modern debates about rulership. King of the World provides an authoritative and accessible account of Cyrus the Great's life, career, and legacy. While Greek sources remain central to any narrative about Cyrus, a wealth of primary evidence is found in the ancient Near East, including documentary, archaeological, art historical, and biblical material. Matt Waters draws from all of these sources while consistently contextualizing them in order to provide a cohesive understanding of Cyrus the Great. This overview addresses issues of interpretation and reconciles limited material, while the narrative keeps Cyrus the Great's compelling career at the forefront. Cyrus' legacy is enormous and not fully appreciated— King of the World takes readers on a journey that reveals his powerful impact and preserves his story for future generations.

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The remarkable story of how Greek-speaking writers and thinkers sustained and developed the intellectual legacy of Classical Greece under the rule of Rome. In 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic; some sixty years later, when Athens and other Greek city-states rebelled against Rome, the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla destroyed the city of Socrates and Plato, laying waste the famous Academy where Aristotle had studied. However, the traditions of Greek cultural life would continue to flourish – across the eastern Mediterranean world and beyond – during the centuries of Roman rule that followed, in the lives and work of a distinguished array of philosophers, rhetoricians, historians, doctors, scientists, geographers and theologians. Charles Freeman's accounts of such luminaries as the polymathic physician Galen, the soldier-botanist Dioscorides, the Alexandrian geographer and astronomer Ptolemy and the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus are interwoven with 'interludes' that counterpoint and contextualise a sequence of unjustly neglected and richly influential lives. This is the story of a vibrant, constantly evolving tradition of intellectual inquiry across a period of more than five hundred years, from the second century BC to the start of the fifth century ad – one that would help shape the intellectual landscape of the Middle Ages and long after. The Children of Athena is a cultural history on an epic scale.

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As Christian leaders in the first through fifth centuries embraced ascetic interpretations of the Bible and practices of sexual renunciation, sexual slander—such as the accusations Paul leveled against wayward Gentiles in the New Testament—played a pivotal role in the formation of early Christian identity. In particular, the imagined construct of the lascivious, literal-minded Jew served as a convenient foil to the chaste Christian ideal. Susanna Drake examines representations of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings that use accusations of carnality, fleshliness, bestiality, and licentiousness as strategies to differentiate the "spiritual" Christian from the "carnal" Jew. Church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Hippolytus of Rome, Origen of Alexandria, and John Chrysostom portrayed Jewish men variously as dangerously hypersexual, at times literally seducing virtuous Christians into heresy, or as weak and effeminate, unable to control bodily impulses or govern their wives. As Drake shows, these carnal caricatures served not only to emphasize religious difference between Christians and Jews but also to justify increased legal constraints and violent acts against Jews as the interests of Christian leaders began to dovetail with the interests of the empire. Placing Christian representations of Jews at the root of the destruction of synagogues and mobbing of Jewish communities in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Slandering the Jew casts new light on the intersections of sexuality, violence, representation, and religious identity.

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This delightful book tells the story of ancient libraries from their very beginnings, when “books” were clay tablets and writing was a new phenomenon. Renowned classicist Lionel Casson takes us on a lively tour, from the royal libraries of the most ancient Near East, through the private and public libraries of Greece and Rome, down to the first Christian monastic libraries. To the founders of the first public libraries of the Greek world goes the credit for creating the prototype of today’s library buildings and the science of organizing books in them. Casson recounts the development of ancient library buildings, systems, holdings, and patrons, addressing questions on a wide variety of topics, such as: • What was the connection between the rise in education and literacy and the growth of libraries?• Who contributed to the early development of public libraries, especially the great library at Alexandria?• What did ancient libraries include in their holdings?• How did ancient libraries acquire books?• What was the nature of publishing in the Greek and Roman world?• How did different types of users (royalty, scholars, religious figures) and different kinds of “books” (tablets, scrolls, codices) affect library arrangements?• How did Christianity transform the nature of library holdings?Just as a library yields unexpected treasures to a meandering browser, this entertaining book offers to its perusers the surprising history of the rise and development of ancient libraries—a fascinating story never told before.

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Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism century Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the 19th and 20th centuries-the aristocratic Bolshevik, Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue, Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand, Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan turned scientist turned global women's activist, Elena Lagadinova-Kristen Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of socialist and communist women. None of these women were "perfect" leftists. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege, but they still managed to move forward their own political projects through perseverance and dedication to their cause. Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the desire to force their sometimes callous male colleagues to take women's issues seriously, these five women pursued novel solutions with lessons for activists of today. In brief conversational chapters-with plenty of concrete examples from the history of the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe and contemporary reflections on the status of women in the world today-Ghodsee renders the big ideas of socialist feminism accessible to those newly inspired by the emancipatory politics of insurgent left feminist movements around the globe.

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A cosy Dandy Gilver mystery set in 1920s Scotland. For fans of PG Wodehouse, Alexander McCall Smith and Agatha Christie.'1920s lady detective Dandy Gilver lands a sleuthing gig in a setting straight out of Enid Blyton,. Cosier than a pair of WI-knitted mittens, Corpses serves up murder most foul - and is also good for several giggles.' TIME OUT Before she was a detective, before she was a reluctant wife and distracted mother, before she was even a debutante, Dandy Gilver spent one perfect summer with the Lipscotts of Pereford. The golden memories of it have sustained her through many a cold snap in Perthshire. So when two of the Lipscott sisters beg her to help the third, she can hardly refuse. Sweet, pretty Fleur Lipscott: where is she now? The astonishing answer to this is that Fleur - still Miss Lipscott, indeed more Miss Lipscott than ever - is buried alive in the tiny seaside village of Portpatrick, working as a schoolmistress at St Columba's College for Young Ladies.But she is one of the few remaining, for St Columba's has been shedding mistresses as a snake its skins and the exodus is far from over. With mistresses vanishing and corpses mounting up, can Mrs Gilver, detective, pass herself off as Miss Gilver, English mistress, to solve the one and stop the other?Catriona McPherson's latest novel in the series, Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble is now available for pre-order.

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DISCOVER 2,000 YEARS OF SCOTTISH HISTORY TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT - FROM THE ROMAN INVASION TO THE SNP PARLIAMENTARY VICTORY IN 2007.Featuring writing from Tacitus, Mary Queen of Scots, Oliver Cromwell, David Livingston and Billy Connolly. ______________Scotland's history is wide and vast. Depending on the lens applied, it can be seen as an unrelenting tale of oppression and poverty or a glowing roll-call of innovation, exploration and entrepreneurship. In fact, it's all of the above. In Scotland: An Autobiography, Professor Rosemary Goring shows Scotland's history as it happened by those who were there - from criminals, servants, house-wives, poets, journalists and nurses to politicians, novelists, prisoners, comedians, sportsmen and even queens. It is the good and the bad. The everyday and the key historical moments. A vivid, panoramic and engrossing account, she has created a living history and the perfect read for anyone not only seeking to understand Scotland's past but also its heart and soul. ______________'History caught on the hoof and the wing by those who were actually there - a brilliant selection' Andrew Marr'An unqualified triumph, superb, a real page-turner . . . what a stirring, dramatic, poignant story it has been' Alexander McCall Smith, Spectator 'Fascinating and very valuable. Goring gives us vivid snapshots of Scottish life and history from Neolithic times . . . should find a place in every Scottish home' Allan Massie, Scotsman

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In an alternate 15th century where magic still is part of life, the Holy Roman Empire rules Europe. Constantinople is under siege by the Venetians and their allies. Hekate, Goddess of Crossroads, presides over the conflict and carnage as alternate visions of civilization collide. And since Constantinople is the crossroad city of east and west, and it is here that Italian captain Benito Valdosta must deal with the powerful magical manifestation of the Weeping Woman, a disguised Hekate, in order to save his daughter and to destroy the fleets of the Chernobog assembling in the Black Sea before they can cut into the soft underbelly of Europe. With land battle, naval action, cunning assassinations, and heartbreak aplenty — not to mention the ongoing conflict between Lord of the Dead Aidonus and Benito for the love of a woman, civilization is at the crossroads and choices must be made that will bring victory and freedom for centuries to come — or a new Dark Age! Burdens of the Dead is the sequel to Much Fall of Blood, Book 4 in the Heirs of Alexandria series.

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For however smart your Roomba or Alexa might seem, historically, robots have been fairly dumb. They are only able to do their jobs when given a narrow set of tasks, confined in a controlled environment, and overseen by a human operator. But things are changing. A new breed of robots is in development that will operate largely on their own. They'll drive on roads and sidewalks, ferry deliveries within buildings, stock shelves in stores, and coordinate teams of doctors and nurses. These autonomous systems will find their way into busy, often unpredictable public spaces. They could be truly collaborative, augmenting human work by attending to the parts of tasks we don't do as well, without our having to stop and direct them. But consider, for a moment, the sorcerer's apprentice. The broom he set to work was also supposed to be collaborative, too, and should have made his life much easier. But the broom didn't know how to behave, and the apprentice no longer understood the thing he had made. The challenge of this next generation of robots is that, like the apprentice's broom, they will wreak complete havoc, inadvertently hurting or even killing people, unless we can recognize a simple truth: collaborative robots will be the first truly social creatures that technology has created. They will need to know how to behave in unfamiliar spaces and around untrained users and bystanders.Robot experts Julie Shah and Laura Major are among those engineers leading the development of collaborative robots, and in this book, they will offer their vision for how to make it in the new era of human-robot collaboration. They set out the blueprint for what they call working robots, which in many ways resemble service animals, and take readers through the many fascinating and surprising challenges that both engineers and the public will need to address in figuring out these machines can be responsibly integrated into society: what they will have to look like, how they will have to talk to strangers and what robot etiquette will be, whether we will have to "robot-proof" public spaces and infrastructure, and how the safety-critical work of human-robot collaboration will force a sea change in how the tech industry is regulated. Today, we still gawk at a car that drives by without a driver. Tomorrow, you might find yourself driving next to five of them. We can debate whether the singularity will ever come, but robots need not be superintelligent in order to revolutionize our relationship to technology. Read this book to find out how.

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CONTENTS: Abdol Rauh Yaccob, British policy on Arabia before the First World War: an internal argument; Adrian G. Parker &. Jeffrey I. Rose, Climate change and human origins in southern Arabia; Alexandrine Guérin & Faysal Abdallah al-Na’imi, Nineteenth century settlement patterns at Zekrit, Qatar: pottery, tribes and territory; Anthony E. Marks, Into Arabia, perhaps, but if so, from where?; Audrey Peli, A history of the Ziyadids through their coinage (203– 442/818–1050); Aurelie Daems & An De Waele, Some reflections on human-animal burials from pre-Islamic south-east Arabia (poster); Brian Ulrich, The Azd migrations reconsidered: narratives of ‘Amr Muzayqiya and Mālik b. Fahm in historiographic context; Christian Darles, Derniers résultats, nouvelles datations et nouvelles données sur les fortifications de Shabwa (Hadramawt); Eivind Heldaas Seland, The Indian ships at Moscha and the Indo-Arabian trading circuit; Fabio Cavulli & Simona Scaruffi, Stone vessels from KHB-1, Ja’lān region, Sultanate of Oman (poster); Francesco G. Fedele, Wādī al-Tayyilah 3, a Neolithic and Pre-Neolithic occupation on the eastern Yemen Plateau, and its archaeofaunal information; Ghanim Wahida, Walid Yasin al-Tikriti & Mark Beech, Barakah: a Middle Palaeolithic site in Abu Dhabi Emirate; Jeffrey I. Rose & Geoff N. Bailey, Defining the Palaeolithic of Arabia? Notes on the Roundtable Discussion; Jeffrey I. Rose, Introduction: special session to define the Palaeolithic of Arabia; Julie Scott-Jackson, William Scott-Jackson, Jeffrey Rose & Sabah Jasim, Investigating Upper Pleistocene stone tools from Sharjah, UAE: Interim report; Krista Lewis & Lamya Khalidi, From prehistoric landscapes to urban sprawl: the Masn’at Māryah region of highland Yemen; Michael J. Harrower, Mapping and dating incipient irrigation in Wadi Sana, Hadramawt (Yemen); Mikhail Rodionov, The jinn in Hadramawt society in the last century; Mohammed A.R. al-Thenayian, The Red Sea Tihami coastal ports in Saudi Arabia; Mohammed Maraqten, Women’s inscriptions recently discovered by the AFSM at the Awām temple/Mahram Bilqīs in Marib, Yemen; Nasser Said al-Jahwari & Derek Kennet, A field methodology for the quantification of ancient settlement in an Arabian context; Rémy Crassard, The “Wa’shah method”: an original laminar debitage from Hadramawt, Yemen; Saad bin Abdulaziz al-Rāshid, Sadd al-Khanaq: an early Umayyad dam near Medina, Saudi Arabia; Ueli Brunner, Ancient irrigation in Wādī Jirdān; Vincent Charpentier & Sophie Méry, A Neolithic settlement near the Strait of Hormuz: Akab Island, United Arab Emirates; Vincent Charpentier, Hunter-gatherers of the “empty quarter of the early Holocene” to the last Neolithic societies: chronology of the late prehistory of south-eastern Arabia (8000–3100 BC); Yahya Asiri, Relative clauses in the dialect of Rijal Alma’ (south-west Saudi Arabia); Yosef Tobi, Sālôm (Sālim) al-Sabazī’s (seventeenth-century) poem of the debate between coffee and qāt; Zaydoon Zaid & Mohammed Maraqten, The Peristyle Hall: remarks on the history of construction based on recent archaeological and epigraphic evidence of the AFSM expedition to the Awām temple in Mārib, Yemen

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Survival, the IISS’s bimonthly journal, challenges conventional wisdom and brings fresh, often controversial, perspectives on strategic issues of the moment.In this issue: Nigel Gould-Davies assesses the impact of Western sanctions on Russia, arguing that they represent a major development in economic statecraft In a special colloquium on the North Korean nuclear threat, Jina Kim, John K. Warden, Adam Mount, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Vipin Narang, Ankit Panda, Ian Campbell and Michaela Dodge offer their ideas for deterring Pyongyang Alexander Klimburg warns that CYBERCOM’s strategy of ‘persistent engagement’ is encouraging a cyber arms race And eight more thought-provoking pieces, as well as our regular book reviews and noteworthy column

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A fake relationship with a one-night stand is anything but an act in this witty and heartfelt new romantic comedy that is perfect for fans of Alexandria Bellefleur, Casey McQuiston and Rosie Danan.--- Everyone around Iris Kelly is in love.And she's happy for all of them, truly. So what if she misses her friends and family, who are busy with their perfectly paired partners. At least she has her brand-new career writing romance novels (the irony), right?Wrong. She is completely out of ideas after having spent all of her romantic energy on her debut. Perfectly happy to ignore her problems as usual, Iris goes to a Portland bar. But a night of dancing with a sexy stranger named Stefania turns into the worst one-night stand Iris has had in her life (vomit and crying are regretfully involved).To get her mind off everything, Iris tries out for a local play only to come face-to-face with Stefania-or, Stevie, her real name. When Stevie desperately asks Iris to play along as her girlfriend, Iris is shocked but goes along with it in a bid to get her creative juices flowing.As the two women play the part of a couple, they turn into a constant state of hot-and-bothered and soon it just comes down to who will make the real first move . . .Why readers love Ashley Herring Blake . . .'A hot, frothy romcom with a relatable heart beating at its centre. I can't wait for the rest of the series!' Talia Hibbert'A truly exquisite romance . . . I'm wildly in love with this book' Rachel Lynn Solomon'A swoon-worthy, laugh-out-loud romp of a romance' Kosoko Jackson'Snappy banter and seriously scorching chemistry; you'll need a very cold shower after this read!' Lana Harper'Charming and entertaining . . . Blake's masterful blend of sexual tension and growing affection will have readers swooning' Karelia Stetz-Waters'Snarky, steamy, and swoony in equal measure, I never wanted this book to end' Meryl Wilsner

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This collection of short stories, both poignant and skillfully crafted, bring to life the tragic demise of traditional Nubian life and culture. If the earlier dams that were built across the Nile during the first half of the twentieth century caused increasing numbers of the men-folk to migrate north to Cairo and Alexandria to work as servants, waiters, and doormen, the completion of the High Dam in 1964 sounded the death knell. While the temples of Abu Simbel were meticulously relocated at great expense, the drowning of the ancient heartland of the Nubian people along the banks of the Nile went largely unnoticed. Haggag Oddoul’s work, as well as documenting the personal tragedy of individuals caught up in massive social transformation, also casts a nostalgic light on the heritage and way of life of the Nubians: their rhythmic dancing, their beautiful women, the lively humor of their elders, and the enormous centrality of their traditions and the spirits with which they shared the environment. Two stories in this collection, ‘’Zeinab Uburty’’ and ‘’Nights of Musk,’’ offer a bucolic and dream-like insight into the world that has disappeared for ever under the water behind the dam. Meanwhile, two other stories, ‘’Adila, Grandmother’’ and ‘’The River People,’’ document the departure of the men, while the women are left behind to go fallow, and the second and third generations born in the cities of the north have only their grandmother’s tales and her pigeon Arabic to remind them of their heritage.

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"Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony" so wrote Kierkegaard. While we commonly think of irony as a figure of speech where someone says one thing and means the opposite, the concept of irony has long played a more fundamental role in the tradition of philosophy, a role that goes back to Socrates Ð the originator and exemplar of the urbane ironic life. But what precisely is Socratic irony and what relevance, if any, does it have for us today? Bernstein begins his inquiry with a critical examination of the work of two contemporary philosophers for whom irony is vital: Jonathan Lear and Richard Rorty. Despite their sharp differences, Bernstein argues that they complement one other, each exploring different aspects of ironic life. In the background of Lear’s and Rorty’s accounts stand the two great ironists: Socrates and Kierkegaard. Focusing on the competing interpretations of Socratic irony by Gregory Vlastos and Alexander Nehamas, Bernstein shows how they further develop our understanding of irony as a form of life and as an art of living. Bernstein also develops a distinctive interpretation of Kierkegaard’s famous claim that a life that may be called human begins with irony. Bernstein weaves together the insights of these thinkers to show how each contributes to a richer understanding of ironic life. He also argues that the emphasis on irony helps to restore the balance between two different philosophical traditions philosophy as a theoretical discipline concerned with getting things right and philosophy as a practical discipline that shapes how we ought to live our lives.

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Michael Higgins broadens our understanding of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by bringing science, engineering, and technology together with ancient documentation and archaeological findings. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (Pyramids of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria) have been a source of fascination for more than two thousand years. Even though six of the Wonders are now gone, historians and archaeologists have attempted to explain how and why these ancient monuments were created. However, never before have these attempts been synthesized with the contributions of science, engineering, and technology. In The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Michael Higgins combines scientific research together with ancient documentation and archaeological findings to present a rich, multi-layered portrait of each monument. To build a Wonder took advanced social organization and wealth generated by agriculture and trade, both of which depended on regional geography and climate. It also took natural resources, as well as an understanding of the environment where the Wonder would stand. Even the natural processes often responsible for a Wonder's destruction sometimes contributed to the preservation of its ruins. These and other topics are accessibly explored in this book. After using science, engineering, and technology to answer key questions about the Wonders, Higgins speculates on how we could recreate these ancient monuments and make new wonders that could withstand environmental changes and natural disasters for the next two thousand years.

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It has been said that during times of war, the Muses fall silent. However, anyone who has read the major figures of mid-twentieth-century literature—Samuel Beckett, Richard Hillary, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others—can attest that it was through writing that people first tried to communicate and process the horrors that they saw during one of the darkest times in human history even as it broke out and raged on around them.In Bearing Witness, John Carpenter explores how across the world those who experienced the war tried to make sense of it both during and in its immediate aftermath. Writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Theodore Plievier questioned the ruling parties of the time based on what they saw. Correspondents and writer-soldiers like John Hersey and James Jones revealed the chaotic and bloody reality of the front lines to the public. And civilians, many of who remain anonymous, lent voice to occupation and imprisonment so that those who didn’t survive would not be forgotten. The digestion of a cataclysmic event can take generations. But in this fascinating book, Carpenter brings together all those who did their best to communicate what they saw in the moment so that it could never be lost.

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Understanding associations in the Greco-Roman world enhances the study of the rise of early Christianity—whether at the micro-level of interpreting particular texts or at the macro-level of assessing the spread of Christ-devotion in the pre-Constantinian era. The twenty-five contributions contained within Greco-Roman Associations, Deities, and Early Christianity enlarge our perspectives on the extent to which Greco-Roman associations bring features of Christian origins into relief.Thematic studies include associational social reputation; women in associations; deities and devotion; financial strategies of group maintenance; care for the poor; varieties of group identity; refinements of terminological and conceptual apparatus; funerary practices; occupational groups; and the alleged role of Christianity in the demise of associations. Studies of particular phenomena include 1 Thessalonians, 1 Corinthians, Paul's Collection, Hebrews, a late first-century Christian family, 1 Clement, and Clement of Alexandria.While the essays cover a wide spectrum of topics, they retain a clear focus on aspects of corporate life within ancient associations as comparanda for the study of early Christ-groups within their social milieu. These essays, all kept to a disciplined length, represent the work of impressive scholars from a range of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and international contexts. The volume's symposium of voices and lively scholarly exchange productively expand current conversations about Greco-Roman associations, deities, and early Christianity.

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This sequel to The Black Librarian in America (Scarecrow, 1970) contains an array of contributors representing a new generation of African American librarians, addressing the same perplexing problems that their predecessors examined. This volume is being issued at a time when there is a great concern about cultural diversity in the country. Cultural diversity is laudable, but the pervasive problem in the country is institutional racism. All of the contributors aggree that it is racism that should be eradicated if a truly multicultural society that represents cultural diversity is to develop. A wide range of topics are explored. In addition, a profile of Dorothy Porter Wesley, one of the pioneer African American librarians; librarians and archivists as writers, and a provocative essay by Congresswoman Major R. Owens on "The Specter of Racism in an Age of Cultural Diversity: The New Paradigm for African American Librarians." Among the contributors are Carolyn O. Frost, Herman L. Totten, Carla Hayden, Charles M. Brown, Alexander Boyd, Jesse Carney Smith, James F Williams,II, Lou Helen Saunders, Ina A. Brown, Vivian Davidson Hewitt, Monteria Hightower, Ella Gaines Yates, and Ann Allen Shockley. Especially designed for professional librarians, library school students, and other information professionals, this volume would be a useful addition to African American collections and other scholarly collections dealing with American society. A copious index that is cross referenced makes it very useful as a reference tool.

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The Romare Bearden Reader brings together a collection of new essays and canonical writings by novelists, poets, historians, critics, and playwrights. The contributors, who include Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Kobena Mercer, contextualize Bearden's life and career within the history of modern art, examine the influence of jazz and literature on his work, trace his impact on twentieth-century African American culture, and outline his art's political dimensions. Others focus on specific pieces, such as A Black Odyssey, or the ways in which Bearden used collage to understand African American identity. The Reader also includes Bearden's most important writings, which grant readers insight into his aesthetic values and practices and share his desire to tell what it means to be black in America. Put simply, The Romare Bearden Reader is an indispensable volume on one of the giants of twentieth-century American art. Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Romare Bearden, Mary Lee Corlett, Rachel DeLue, David C. Driskell, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Henri Ghent, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harry Henderson, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Robert G. O’Meally, Richard Powell, Richard Price, Sally Price, Myron Schwartzman, Robert Burns Stepto, Calvin Tomkins, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson

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The United States is a nation of joiners. Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville published his observations in Democracy in America, Americans have recognized the distinctiveness of their voluntary tradition. In a work of political, legal, social, and intellectual history, focusing on the grassroots actions of ordinary people, Neem traces the origins of this venerable tradition to the vexed beginnings of American democracy in Massachusetts.Neem explores the multiple conflicts that produced a vibrant pluralistic civil society following the American Revolution. The result was an astounding release of civic energy as ordinary people, long denied a voice in public debates, organized to advocate temperance, to protect the Sabbath, and to abolish slavery; elite Americans formed private institutions to promote education and their stewardship of culture and knowledge. But skeptics remained. Followers of Jefferson and Jackson worried that the new civil society would allow the organized few to trump the will of the unorganized majority. When Tocqueville returned to France, the relationship between American democracy and its new civil society was far from settled. The story Neem tells is more pertinent than ever—for Americans concerned about their own civil society, and for those seeking to build civil societies in emerging democracies around the world.

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Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet's hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordings of seismographs but also on the observations of eyewitnesses to destruction. During the nineteenth century, a scientific description of an earthquake was built of stories - stories from as many people in as many situations as possible. Sometimes their stories told of fear and devastation, sometimes of wonder and excitement. In The Earthquake Observers, Deborah R. Coen acquaints readers not only with the century's most eloquent seismic commentators, including Alexander von. Humboldt, Charles Darwitt, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Kraus, Ernst Mach, John Muir, and William James, but also with countless other citizen-observers, many of whom were women. Coen explains how observing networks transformed an instant of panic and confusion into a field for scientific research, turning earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of the physical and human sciences. Seismology abandoned this project of citizen science with the introduction of the Richter Scale in the 1950s, only to revive it in the twenty-first century in the face of new hazards and uncertainties. The Earthquake Observers tells the history of this interrupted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk.

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American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature analyses the influence of British Gothic novels and historical romances on American art and architecture in the Romantic era. American artists and architects were among the most avid readers of Gothic fiction, which in turn informed their artistic output. In a period of increasing nationalism, the Gothic Revival architectural style in particular served to legitimise the American landscape with the materiality of European culture. At the core of this book is an analysis of American architecture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an understudied era. Key figures include Thomas Jefferson, Washington Allston, Alexander Jackson Davis, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Thomas Cole, Edwin Forrest, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne articulated the subject of this book when he wrote that he could understand Sir Walter Scott's romances better after viewing Scott's Gothic Revival house Abbotsford, and he understood the house better for having read the romances. From the very beginning, the Gothic Revival has been a phenomenon that crosses modern disciplinary boundaries.The groundwork in Gothic literary scholarship allows us to move beyond literature to examine how the Gothic seeps into other forms of artistic creation. This interdisciplinary book investigates the symbiotic relationship between the arts and Gothic literature to reveal new interpretative possibilities.

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America is witnessing the rise of a new generation of socialist activists. More young people support socialism now than at any time since the labor movement of the 1920s. The Democratic Socialists of America, a big-tent leftist organisation, has well over 50,000 members nationwide. In the fall of 2018, one of the most influential congressmen in the Democratic Party lost a primary to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old socialist who had never held office before. Now, AOC is one of the most influential politicians in the country. But what does all this mean? Should we be worried about our nation, or should we join the march toward our bright socialist future? In Why You Should Be a Socialist, Nathan J. Robinson will give readers a primer on twenty-first-century socialism: what it is, what it isn’t, and why everyone should want to be a part of this exciting new chapter of American politics. From the heyday of Occupy Wall Street through the 2020 presidential election and beyond, young progressives have been increasingly drawn to socialist ideas. However, the movement’s goals need to be defined more sharply before it can effect real change on a national scale. Robinson’s charming, accessible, and well-argued book will convince even the most skeptical readers of the merits of socialist thought.

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Before colonial Americans could declare independence, they had to undergo a change of heart. Beyond a desire to rebel against British mercantile and fiscal policies, they had to believe that they could stand up to the fully armed British soldier. Prelude to Revolution uncovers one story of how the Americans found that confidence. On April 19, 1775, British raids on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge made history, but it was an episode nearly two months earlier in Salem, Massachusetts, that set the stage for the hostilities. Peter Charles Hoffer has discovered records and newspaper accounts of a British gunpowder raid on Salem. Seeking powder and cannon hidden in the town, a regiment of British Regulars were foiled by quick-witted patriots who carried off the ordnance and then openly taunted the Regulars. The prudence of British commanding officer Alexander Leslie and the persistence of the patriot leaders turned a standoff into a bloodless triumph for the colonists. What might have been a violent confrontation turned into a local victory, and the patriots gloated as news spread of "Leslie's Retreat." When British troops marched on Lexington and Concord on that pivotal day in April, Hoffer explains, each side had drawn diametrically opposed lessons from the Salem raid. It emboldened the rebels to stand fast and infuriated the British, who vowed never again to back down. After relating these battles in vivid detail, Hoffer provides a teachable problem in historic memory by asking why we celebrate Lexington and Concord but not Salem and why New Englanders recalled the events at Salem but then forgot their significance. Praise for the work of Peter Charles Hoffer "This book more than succeeds in achieving its goal of helping students understand and appreciate the cultural and intellectual environment of the Anglophone world." (New England Quarterly, reviewing When Benjamin Franklin Met the Reverend Whitefield). "A synthetic essay of considerable grace and scope...An excellent overview of the field." (Journal of Legal History, reviewing Law and People in Colonial America).

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This is a unique book written by one of the leading scholars in the field. It uses detailed case studies to analyze the successes, failures and challenges of renewable energy initiatives in developing and emerging countries.Incorporating the insights and perspectives of researchers who come from the respective countries covered, the study compares some of the most exciting success stories, including: China's meteoric rise from near zero use of renewable energy to being the world leader in solar thermal, solar photovoltaic and wind energy; Brazil's success in becoming the world s top ethanol producer and exporter; and India's pioneering use of a hedge plant to produce biodiesel and its use of animal and human wastes for rural electrification. The book also describes Indonesia s disastrous palm oil program which cut down its forests and excavated its peat bogs. It concludes that good leadership is the largest factor in success, but that it is also critical to include public participation, training, transparency, environmental consideration, fair labor practices, protection against exploitation and enforcement.This book is designed to be helpful to other countries seeking to initiate renewable energy programs. It will appeal to local administrators and policymakers, field personnel from UN agencies and NGOs, and renewable energy funders, as well as to academic researchers.Contents: Preface Introduction 1. Case Studies of Renewable Energy in China with Chen Yitong, Long Xue and Zheyuan Liu 2. Nuclear Power in China: Successes and Challenges with Jingru Feng 3. Renewable Energy in the Philippines with Alvin K. Leong 4. Case Study of the Implementation of the Integrated Solar Combined Cycle Pilot Plant in Aïn Beni Mathar, Morocco with Alexis Thuau 5. Case Study of Biofuels in India with Sayan S. Das 6. Case Study of Renewable Energy in Brazil with Douglas S. Figueiredo and Lia Helena M.L. Demange 7. Case Study of Indonesia's Palm Oil-based Biodiesel Program with Christopher J. Riti 8. Case Study of Renewable Energy in Pakistan with Shakeel Kazmi 9. Conclusion Index

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Before colonial Americans could declare independence, they had to undergo a change of heart. Beyond a desire to rebel against British mercantile and fiscal policies, they had to believe that they could stand up to the fully armed British soldier. Prelude to Revolution uncovers one story of how the Americans found that confidence. On April 19, 1775, British raids on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge made history, but it was an episode nearly two months earlier in Salem, Massachusetts, that set the stage for the hostilities. Peter Charles Hoffer has discovered records and newspaper accounts of a British gunpowder raid on Salem. Seeking powder and cannon hidden in the town, a regiment of British Regulars were foiled by quick-witted patriots who carried off the ordnance and then openly taunted the Regulars. The prudence of British commanding officer Alexander Leslie and the persistence of the patriot leaders turned a standoff into a bloodless triumph for the colonists. What might have been a violent confrontation turned into a local victory, and the patriots gloated as news spread of "Leslie's Retreat." When British troops marched on Lexington and Concord on that pivotal day in April, Hoffer explains, each side had drawn diametrically opposed lessons from the Salem raid. It emboldened the rebels to stand fast and infuriated the British, who vowed never again to back down. After relating these battles in vivid detail, Hoffer provides a teachable problem in historic memory by asking why we celebrate Lexington and Concord but not Salem and why New Englanders recalled the events at Salem but then forgot their significance. Praise for the work of Peter Charles Hoffer "This book more than succeeds in achieving its goal of helping students understand and appreciate the cultural and intellectual environment of the Anglophone world." (New England Quarterly, reviewing When Benjamin Franklin Met the Reverend Whitefield). "A synthetic essay of considerable grace and scope...An excellent overview of the field." (Journal of Legal History, reviewing Law and People in Colonial America).

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The new edition of the popular survey of Near Eastern civilization from the Bronze Age to the era of Alexander the Great A Companion to the Ancient Near East explores the history of the region from 4400 BCE to the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire in 330 BCE. Original and revised essays from a team of distinguished scholars from across disciplines address subjects including the politics, economics, architecture, and heritage of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Part of the Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World series, this acclaimed single-volume reference combines lively writing with engaging and relatable topics to immerse readers in this fascinating period of Near East history. The new second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include new developments in relevant fields, particularly archaeology, and expand on themes of interest to contemporary students. Clear, accessible chapters offer fresh discussions on the history of the family and gender roles, the literature, languages, and religions of the region, pastoralism, medicine and philosophy, and borders, states, and warfare. New essays highlight recent discoveries in cuneiform texts, investigate how modern Egyptians came to understand their ancient history, and examine the place of archaeology among the historical disciplines. This volume: Provides substantial new and revised content covering topics such as social conflict, kingship, cosmology, work, trade, and law Covers the civilizations of the Sumerians, Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Israelites, and Persians, emphasizing social and cultural history Examines the legacy of the Ancient Near East in the medieval and modern worlds Offers a uniquely broad geographical, chronological, and topical range Includes a comprehensive bibliographical guide to Ancient Near East studies as well as new and updated references and reading suggestions Suitable for use as both a primary reference or as a supplement to a chronologically arranged textbook, A Companion to the Ancient Near East, 2nd Edition is a valuable resource for advanced undergraduates, beginning graduate students, instructors in the field, and scholars from other disciplines.

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Major edition revealing key ideas and events in the lives and work of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and Victorian literary circles: 5,800 letters (including 2,000 previously unpublished letters) to 330 recipients. The best of these letters, flowing rapidly from his pen, radiate charisma and enthusiasm, warmth and care for his friends, and a total engagement with art and literature. BURLINGTON MAGAZINE [Julian Treuherz] 1835-1854: This nine-volume edition will represent the definitive collection of extant Rossetti correspondence, an outstanding primary witness to the range of ideas and opinions that shaped Rossetti's art and poetry. The largest collection ofRossetti's letters ever to be published, it features all known surviving letters, a total of almost 5,800 to over 330 recipients, and includes 2,000 previously unpublished letters by Rossetti and selected letters to him. In addition to this, about 100 drawings taken from within letter texts are also reproduced. In its entirety the collection will give an invaluable and unparalleled insight into Rossetti's character and art, and will form a rich resource for students and scholars studying all aspects of his life and work. The correspondence has been transcribed from collections in sixty-four manuscript repositories, containing Rossetti's letters to his companions in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt and Stephens; friends such as Boyce and Bell Scott; his early patrons, Ellen Heaton and James Leathart; and his publisher friend, Alexander Macmillan. An additional twenty-two printed sources have also been accessed. Index; extensive annotations.WILLIAM E. FREDEMAN (1928-1999) was professor of English at the University of British Columbia from 1956-1991. His many books, articles and reviews on the Pre-Raphaelites and their followersinclude his important Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study. He died in 1999 with this edition almost completed. An editorial committee chaired by Betty Fredeman has been formed to see it through the press.

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A milestone in U.S. historiography, Haunted by Empire brings postcolonial critiques to bear on North American history and draws on that history to question the analytic conventions of postcolonial studies. The contributors to this innovative collection examine the critical role of “domains of the intimate” in the consolidation of colonial power. They demonstrate how the categories of difference underlying colonialism—the distinctions advanced as the justification for the colonizer’s rule of the colonized—were enacted and reinforced in intimate realms from the bedroom to the classroom to the medical examining room. Together the essays focus attention on the politics of comparison—on how colonizers differentiated one group or set of behaviors from another—and on the circulation of knowledge and ideologies within and between imperial projects. Ultimately, this collection forces a rethinking of what historians choose to compare and of the epistemological grounds on which those choices are based.Haunted by Empire includes Ann Laura Stoler’s seminal essay “Tense and Tender Ties” as well as her bold introduction, which carves out the exciting new analytic and methodological ground animated by this comparative venture. The contributors engage in a lively cross-disciplinary conversation, drawing on history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and public health. They address such topics as the regulation of Hindu marriages and gay sexuality in the early-twentieth-century United States; the framing of multiple-choice intelligence tests; the deeply entangled histories of Asian, African, and native peoples in the Americas; the racial categorizations used in the 1890 U.S. census; and the politics of race and space in French colonial New Orleans. Linda Gordon, Catherine Hall, and Nancy F. Cott each provide a concluding essay reflecting on the innovations and implications of the arguments advanced in Haunted by Empire.Contributors. Warwick Anderson, Laura Briggs, Kathleen Brown, Nancy F. Cott, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Linda Gordon, Catherine Hall, Martha Hodes, Paul A. Kramer, Lisa Lowe, Tiya Miles, Gwenn A. Miller, Emily S. Rosenberg, Damon Salesa, Nayan Shah, Alexandra Minna Stern, Ann Laura Stoler, Laura Wexler

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On a September afternoon in 1853, three African American men from St. Philip's Church walked into the Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and took their seats among five hundred wealthy and powerful white church leaders. Ultimately, and with great reluctance, the Convention had acceded to the men's request: official recognition for St. Philip's, the first African American Episcopal church in New York City. In Faith in Their Own Color, Craig D. Townsend tells the remarkable story of St. Philip's and its struggle to create an autonomous and independent church. His work unearths a forgotten chapter in the history of New York City and African Americans and sheds new light on the ways religious faith can both reinforce and overcome racial boundaries. Founded in 1809, St. Philip's had endured a fire; a riot by anti-abolitionists that nearly destroyed the church; and more than forty years of discrimination by the Episcopalian hierarchy. In contrast to the majority of African Americans, who were flocking to evangelical denominations, the congregation of St. Philip's sought to define itself within an overwhelmingly white hierarchical structure. Their efforts reflected the tension between their desire for self-determination, on the one hand, and acceptance by a white denomination, on the other.The history of St. Philip's Church also illustrates the racism and extraordinary difficulties African Americans confronted in antebellum New York City, where full abolition did not occur until 1827. Townsend describes the constant and complex negotiation of the divide between black and white New Yorkers. He also recounts the fascinating stories of historically overlooked individuals who built and fought for St. Philip's, including Rev. Peter Williams, the second African American ordained in the Episcopal Church; Dr. James McCune Smith, the first African American to earn an M.D.; pickling magnate Henry Scott; the combative priest Alexander Crummell; and John Jay II, the grandson of the first chief justice of the Supreme Court and an ardent abolitionist, who helped secure acceptance of St. Philip's.

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Published in the centenary year of the 1917 Russian Revolution, No Less Than Mystic is a fresh and iconoclastic history of Lenin and the Bolsheviks for a generation uninterested in Cold War ideologies and stereotypes. Although it offers a full and complete history of Leninism, 1917, the Russian Civil War and its aftermath, the book devotes more time than usual to the policies and actions of the socialist alternatives to Bolshevism - to the Menshevik Internationalists, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the Jewish Bundists and the anarchists. It prioritises Factory Committees, local Soviets, the Womens' Zhenotdel movement, Proletkult and the Kronstadt sailors as much as the statements and actions of Lenin and Trotsky. Using the neglected writings and memoirs of Mensheviks like Julius Martov, SRs like Victor Chernov, Bolshevik oppositionists like Alexandra Kollontai and anarchists like Nestor Makhno, it traces a revolution gone wrong and suggests how it might have produced a more libertarian, emancipatory socialism than that created by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.The book broadly covers the period from 1903 (the formation of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) to 1921 (the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion) and explains why the Bolshevik Revolution degenerated so quickly into its apparent opposite, and continually examines the Leninist experiment through the lens of a 21st century, de-centralised, ecological, anti-productivist and feminist socialism. Throughout its narrative it interweaves and draws parallels with contemporary anti-capitalist struggles such as those of the Zapatistas, the Kurds, the Argentinean "Recovered Factories", Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Intersectional feminists, attempting to open up the past to the present and points in between. We do not need another standard history of the Russian Revolution. This is not one.

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Even before its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union was engaged in an ambivalent struggle to come to terms with its violent and repressive history. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, entrenched officials attempted to distance themselves from the late dictator without questioning the underlying legitimacy of the Soviet system. At the same time, the Gulag victims to society opened questions about the nature, reality, and mentality of the system that remain contentious to this day.The Gulag Survivor is the first book to examine at length and in-depth the post-camp experience of Stalin's victims and their fate in post-Soviet Russia. As such, it is an essential companion to the classic work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Based on extensive interviews, memoirs, official records, and recently opened archives, The Gulag Survivor describes what survivors experienced when they returned to society, how officials helped or hindered them, and how issues surrounding the existence of the returnees evolved from the fifties up to the present.Adler establishes the social and historical context of the first wave of returnees who were "liberated" into exile in Stalin's time. She reviews diverse aspects of return including camp culture, family reunion, and the psychological consequences of the Gulag. Adler then focuses on the enduring belief in the Communist Party among some survivors and the association between returnees and the growing dissident movement. She concludes by examining how issues surrounding the survivors reemerged in the eighties and nineties and the impact they had on the failing Soviet system. Written and researched while Russian archives were most available and while there were still survivors to tell their stories, The Gulag Survivor is a groundbreaking and essential work in modern Russian history. It will be read by historians, political scientists, Slavic scholars, and sociologists.

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The forgotten story of a surprising anti-imperial, nationalist project at the turn of the twentieth century: a grassroots movement of Russian Jews to racialize themselves.In the rapidly nationalizing Russian Empire of the late nineteenth century, Russian Jews grew increasingly concerned about their future. Jews spoke different languages and practiced different traditions. They had complex identities and no territorial homeland. Their inability to easily conform to new standards of nationality meant a future of inevitable assimilation or second-class minority citizenship. The solution proposed by Russian Jewish intellectuals was to ground Jewish nationhood in a structure deeper than culture or territory—biology.Marina Mogilner examines three leading Russian Jewish race scientists— Samuel Weissenberg, Alexander El’kind, and Lev Shternberg—and the movement they inspired. Through networks of race scientists and political activists, Jewish medical societies, and imperial organizations like the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population, they aimed to produce “authentic” knowledge about the Jewish body, which would motivate an empowering sense of racially grounded identity and guide national biopolitics. Activists vigorously debated eugenic and medical practices, Jews’ status as Semites, Europeans, and moderns, and whether the Jews of the Caucasus and Central Asia were inferior. The national science, and the biopolitics it generated, became a form of anticolonial resistance, and survived into the early Soviet period, influencing population policies in the new state.Comprehensive and meticulously researched, A Race for the Future reminds us of the need to historically contextualize racial ideology and politics and makes clear that we cannot fully grasp the biopolitics of the twentieth century without accounting for the imperial breakdown in which those politics thrived.

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When the US Constitution won widespread popular approval in 1788, it was the culmination of decades of passionate argument about legal and political first principles-a furious debate over the nature of government and the rights and duties of citizens that boiled over into Revolution. But ratification hardly ended America's constitutional conversation. For the next fifty years, both ordinary Americans and statesmen like George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson continued to wrestle with weighty constitutional questions, from the halls of government to the pages of newspapers. Should the nation's borders be pushed beyond its original footprint? Should America allow slavery to spread westward? Where did Indian tribes fit into the picture? Women? Free blacks? What rule should the Constitution's then-weakest branch, led for more than thirty years by Chief Justice John Marshall, play in these resolving such questions? In The Words That Made Us, celebrated Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar tells the story of America's constitutional conversation during its first eighty years-from its birth in 1760 through the 1830s, when the last of America's early leaders died and bequeathed this boisterous and sophisticated conversation to posterity. Amar traces the threads of Constitutional discourse, uniting history and law in a vivid and sweeping narrative that seeks both to reveal this history anew and to make clear who was right and who was wrong on the biggest legal issues confronting early America. Without proper popular understanding of the Constitution, America and the world suffer. In The Words That Made Us, Amar offers an essential history of the Constitution's formative decades and an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to understand America's Constitution and its relevance today.

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**CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title** In September 1814, the rulers of Europe and their ministers descended upon Vienna after two decades of revolution and war. Their task was to redraw continental borders following the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire. Inevitably, all of the major decisions were made by the leading statesmen of the five 'great powers'-Castlereagh, Metternich, Talleyrand, Hardenberg and Tsar Alexander of Russia. The territorial reconstruction of Europe marks only one part of this story. Over the next seven years, Europe witnessed unrest in Germany, Britain, and France, and revolution in Latin America, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Piedmont, Greece, and Romania. Against this backdrop, the Congress of Vienna was followed by an audacious experiment in international cooperation and counter-revolution, known as the 'Congress System'. This system marked the first genuine attempt to forge an 'international order' based upon consensus rather than conflict. The goal of the Congress statesmen was to secure long-term peace and stability by controlling the pace of political change through international supervision and intervention. The fear of revolution that first gave rise to the Congress System quickly became its exclusive concern, sowing division amongst its members and ironically ensuring its collapse. Despite this failure, the Congress System had a profound influence. The reliance on diplomacy as the primary means of conflict resolution; the devotion to multilateralism; the emphasis on international organization as a vehicle for preserving peace; the use of concerted action to promote international legitimacy - all these notions were by-products of the Congress System. In this book, Mark Jarrett argues that the decade of the Congresses marked the true beginning of our modern era. Based on original research and previously unseen sources, this book provides a fresh exploration of this pivotal moment in world history.

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Today complex numbers have such widespread practical use--from electrical engineering to aeronautics--that few people would expect the story behind their derivation to be filled with adventure and enigma. In An Imaginary Tale, Paul Nahin tells the 2000-year-old history of one of mathematics' most elusive numbers, the square root of minus one, also known as i. He recreates the baffling mathematical problems that conjured it up, and the colorful characters who tried to solve them. In 1878, when two brothers stole a mathematical papyrus from the ancient Egyptian burial site in the Valley of Kings, they led scholars to the earliest known occurrence of the square root of a negative number. The papyrus offered a specific numerical example of how to calculate the volume of a truncated square pyramid, which implied the need for i. In the first century, the mathematician-engineer Heron of Alexandria encountered I in a separate project, but fudged the arithmetic; medieval mathematicians stumbled upon the concept while grappling with the meaning of negative numbers, but dismissed their square roots as nonsense. By the time of Descartes, a theoretical use for these elusive square roots--now called "imaginary numbers"--was suspected, but efforts to solve them led to intense, bitter debates. The notorious i finally won acceptance and was put to use in complex analysis and theoretical physics in Napoleonic times. Addressing readers with both a general and scholarly interest in mathematics, Nahin weaves into this narrative entertaining historical facts and mathematical discussions, including the application of complex numbers and functions to important problems, such as Kepler's laws of planetary motion and ac electrical circuits. This book can be read as an engaging history, almost a biography, of one of the most evasive and pervasive "numbers" in all of mathematics.

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'How many recipes do you make from a typical cookbook? Three? Four? It's not often I come across a book where I want to cook every single one.' TONY TURNBULL, The Best Cookbooks of 2023, Times'The elegant simplicity and style of every word and picture in this book are a joy.' JEREMY LEE'An engaging and inspiring book of food that is a real pleasure.' CLAUDIA RODEN'I love the flavour-dense simplicity of Blanche's recipes, with the garden at their heart. This is exactly how I want to eat.' SARAH RAVEN'Seasonal, simple and sensational.' INDIA KNIGHT'Blanche Vaughan combines easy-to-achieve recipes with an inspiring voice that encourages experiment, whether you are cooking a simple supper for two or a special occasion feast. Her calm and reflective attitude to cooking is mirrored in the beautiful photographs, while her emphasis on seasonality truly makes it a book for all seasons.' ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'These are the recipes I cook at home, dishes that I turn to throughout the year because they answer a craving for a particular thing to eat at a particular time. The recipes evolved from ideas for what to cook and what I chose to include in the food pages of House & Garden each month: a reflection of our appetites, the food growing then, the weather, how we are living and eating each season.'BLANCHE VAUGHANA Year in the Kitchen, written and curated by Blanche Vaughan, Food Editor of House & Garden, shares more than 150 deliciously easy recipes inspired by the seasons. Recipes include:- Asparagus Carbonara (Spring)- Summer Greens & Soft-Cheese Pie (Summer)- Pumpkin Soup with Gruyère and Sage (Autumn)- Claudia Roden's Chicken with Sweet Wine and Grapes (Winter)

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Brought together for the first time in one volume are three books by the titan of chess, Jose Capablanca. ----- One of the greatest chess prodigies of all time, he evolved the most perfect chess technique seen on a chessboard. A former World champion, and one of the most successful tournament players in the history of the game, Capablanca's uncanny position judgment empowered him to produce games that were masterful pieces of position play, and that culminated often in combinations of startling brilliancy. ----- My Chess Career. Written one year before he became chess champion of the world, this book relives in Capablanca's own words 35 of his greatest games and those events of his life relevant to his chess career. The seminal work of the Cuban genius who repeated the exploits of Morphy, suddenly bursting onto the European scene and annihilating the great masters who had hitherto dominated the international arena. This book captures the magic of Capablanca's early victory at San Sebastian 1911 and his second place - bowing only to Lasker - at St Petersburg 1914. ----- Chess Fundamentals.Capablanca's classic instructional manual first appeared in 1921, the year he defeated Emanuel Lasker for the world championship title. This handbook is packed with timeless advice on different aspects of practical play and illustrated by Capablanca's own games. ----- A Primer of Chess. Capablanca's introduction to chess is an ideal first chess book for players of all ages. In systematic fashion, Capablanca lucidly explains the rules and basic principles of this fascinating game, and illustrates these with a wide range of practical examples. ----- After capturing the world championship in in 1921, Capablanca was for a time regarded as practically invincible. Although he surprisingly lost his title to Alexander Alekhine in 1927, Capablanca remained a leading player until his death in New York in 1942.

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Legend has it that the ocean can lure children and make them fall into the depths to never return . . .Martin, who has always been drawn to the ocean, moves his wife Alexandra and their two young children move to his family's idyllic summer cottage in the picturesque island village of Orust, on the west coast of Sweden. Martin begins to cultivate a mussel farm, where he soon runs into trouble with the locals.One January weekend, when Martin is distracted by a ringing phone, he discovers that in those few moments, his young son has gone missing and his little red bucket is bobbing in the waves. Though his body is never found, it's ruled an accidental drowning. Martin's grief is all-consuming as he falls into a deep depression, withdrawing from his family and community.When former police photographer Maya Linde arrives to Orust, she learns of the little boy's disappearance and decides to do some investigating of her own. Martin and Maya grow closer as they learn the hidden truths of this town and the locals who have always mythologized the ocean.Together they make a macabre discovery: other children have tragically died in the these waves, all on the same day in January, all in the exact same spot, though decades apart. Can it really be a coincidence, or is the ocean luring the children into its depths? As Maya and Martin grapple with a threat far greater than they ever imagined, they soon realize that the truth is actually much stranger than fiction . . .Set against a backdrop of the whispering ocean, Winter Water is an atmospheric and gripping suspense novel of the nature of grief and the many acts is can make us capable of.

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This stunning book charts the rich history of the blues, through the dazzling array of posters, album covers, and advertisements that have shaped its identity over the past hundred years. The blues have been one of the most ubiquitous but diverse elements of American popular music at large, and the visual art associated with this unique sound has been just as varied and dynamic. There is no better guide to this fascinating graphical world than Bill Dahl a longtime music journalist and historian who has written liner notes for countless reissues of classic blues, soul, R&B, and rock albums. With his deep knowledge and incisive commentary complementing more than three hundred and fifty lavishly reproduced images the history of the blues comes musically and visually to life. What will astonish readers who thumb through these pages is the amazing range of ways that the blues have been represented whether via album covers, posters, flyers, 78 rpm labels, advertising, or other promotional materials. We see the blues as it was first visually captured in the highly colorful sheet music covers of the early twentieth century. We see striking and hard-to-find label designs from labels big (Columbia) and small (Rhumboogie). We see William Alexander's humorous artwork on postwar Miltone Records; the cherished ephemera of concert and movie posters; and Chess Records' iconic early albums designed by Don Bronstein, which would set a new standard for modern album cover design. What these images collectively portray is the evolution of a distinctively American art form. And they do so in the richest way imaginable. The result is a sumptuous book, a visual treasury as alive in spirit as the music it so vibrantly captures.

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Albert James Pickett’s History of Alabama, and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period first appeared in Montgomery bookstores in September 1851. The buyers of his two-volume work paid $3 and the demand caused Charleston publisher Walker and James to issue a second and third edition before year’s end. William Gilmore Simms, the South’s most prolific writer, referred to the publication as "one of the prettiest specimens of book making ever done in America." Newspapers in Alabama and literary journals in New York, Charleston, and New Orleans commended Pickett for his "absolutely enchanting" fresh writing style, for using "great care" throughout his book, and for "his important service to his state." While some reviews questioned his narrative style, his sources, or his focus on facts, others credited Pickett for producing "a very valuable" chronicle for the people of Alabama and urged him to produce a third volume for "rising generations."Pickett opens volume one with Hernando de Soto’s explorations from Florida to Arkansas, encounters with native people, and discovery of the Mississippi River. He shifts from the early chiefdoms of the protohistoric period to the Natchez and smaller tribes in the coastal plain and then to the major Indian nations of the interior into the late eighteenth century. While the struggles of French Louisiana with the Natchez dominate the first volume, Pickett establishes the English presence with the founding of Oglethorpe’s Georgia colony and ends with the surrender of the French forts Tombecbé and Toulouse to the British. In volume two, Pickett traces the English push into present-day Alabama and Mississippi and the Revolutionary War era, the Spanish occupation of East and West Florida, the intrigues of Alexander McGillivray and William Bowles, and Georgia’s Yazoo land sales. He devotes several chapters to the Mississippi Territory, Aaron Burr, and the Indian unrest that led to the massacre at Fort Mims, the Creek War of 1813–14, and Andrew Jackson’s campaigns to destroy the Red Sticks and defeat the British in the Gulf South. Pickett concentrates his final chapters on the emergence of Alabama as a territory and state, including biographical sketches of early state leaders, the state constitutional convention, and Alabama’s first governor, William Wyatt Bibb, who died in 1820.Despite Pickett’s failure use his firsthand knowledge to bring his History chronologically beyond 1820, his work continues to be a relevant study of the state’s protohistory, colonial, territorial and early foundations. His work and his papers in the state archives are cited by all serious scholars who study Alabama’s colonial and territorial eras. While he sought all the available printed primary sources and manuscripts for volume one, his second volume was principally informed by the memoirs, reminiscences, letters, and oral interviews of the participants in the events that shaped the development of Alabama from the pre-Revolutionary era through the 1840s. Although recent literary deconstruction of Pickett and his History has been critical of his motivation and writing, Harper Lee, Alabama’s most consequential writer in the twentieth century, asserted in 1983 that he "deserves a place in American literature" and assessed his History as a "unique treasure" that "should be in every high school library" in Alabama. More recently, historian Leah Rawls Atkins declared Pickett to be the writer made the "most historical contribution to Alabama" in the antebellum period. This new edition is the first to provide general readers and scholars with a readily available hardbound, fully indexed, and annotated version of Pickett’s History.Albert James Pickett’s two-volume History of Alabama, and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period first appeared in September 1851. Demand for the $3 set caused Charleston publisher Walker and James to issue a second and third edition before year’s end. William Gilmore Simms, the South’s most prolific writer, called it "one of the prettiest specimens of book making ever done in America." Newspapers and literary journals commended Pickett’s "absolutely enchanting" fresh style and "his important service to his state."Volume one covered De Soto’s explorations from Florida to Arkansas, encounters with native people, and discovery of the Mississippi River. The narrative shifts from the early chiefdoms of the protohistoric period to the Natchez and smaller tribes in the coastal plain and then to the major Indian nations of the interior into the late eighteenth century. While the struggles of French Louisiana with the Natchez dominate the first volume, Pickett establishes the English presence with the founding of Oglethorpe’s Georgia colony and ends with the surrender of the French forts Tombecbé and Toulouse. In volume two, Pickett follows the English into present-day Alabama and Mississippi and the Revolutionary War era, the Spanish occupation of East and West Florida, the intrigues of Alexander McGillivray and William Bowles, and Georgia’s Yazoo land sales. He devotes several chapters to the Mississippi Territory, Aaron Burr, and the Indian unrest that led to the massacre at Fort Mims, the Creek War of 1813–14, and Andrew Jackson’s campaigns to destroy the Red Sticks and defeat the British. Pickett concentrates his final chapters on the emergence of Alabama as a territory and state, including biographical sketches of early state leaders, the state constitutional convention, and Alabama’s first governor, William Wyatt Bibb, who died in 1820.Pickett’s History continues to be a relevant study of the state’s protohistory, colonial, territorial, and early foundations. His work and his papers in the state archives are cited by all serious scholars who study Alabama’s colonial and territorial eras. While he sought all the available printed primary sources and manuscripts for volume one, his second volume was principally informed by the memoirs, reminiscences, letters, and oral interviews of the participants in the events that shaped the development of Alabama from the pre-Revolutionary era through the 1840s.This new edition is the first to provide general readers and scholars with a readily available hardbound, fully indexed, and annotated version of Pickett’s History.— first-ever edition of Pickett’s History that is fully annotated, updated and indexed— first hardcover edition of the work in over 100 years— the release of Pickett’s History coincdes with the 200th anniversary in 2019 of Alabama statehood; heightened interest in early settlement of the state will develop opportunities for book— this new edition will be handsome and easily readable, unlike existing facsimile editions

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Access the power of the Wiccan religion in this beautiful handbook featuring the history of the craft that includes a primer of its symbols, festivities, ceremonies, tools, elements, and practices.Wicca Magic is an essential guide to learn how the cycles of nature, the moon, and the elements work to connect you closer to the craft. Learn about the different types of Wicca: Garderian Wicca Dianic Wicca Celtic Wicca Alexandrian Wicca In Wicca Magic, you will cast a circle, purify space and participants, call down to the guardians, and more! With the use of altars and rituals, magic is right at your fingertips. Discover the origins of Wicca, types of witches, different deities, and Wiccan core beliefs while unearthing the truth about realms and portals. In addition to spells, spellcasting, rituals, and meditations, learn to make potions from the herbs and plants that are integral to the practice and how oils, incense, and candles can harness intentions. The Mystical Handbook series from Wellfleet takes you on a magical journey through the wonderful world of spellcraft and spellcasting. Explore a new practice with each volume and learn how to incorporate spells, rituals, blessings, and cleansings into your daily routine. These portable companions feature beautiful foil-detail covers and color-saturated interiors on a premium paper blend. Other books in the series include: Witchcraft, Moon Magic, Love Spells, Fairy Magic, Goddess Magic, Knot Magic, Superstitions, House Magic, and Herbal Magic.

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Winner of the 2013 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Jews and the Arts Finalist for the 2011 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, including Arkady Shaykhet, Alexander Grinberg, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Max Alpert, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust. These wartime photographers were the first liberators to bear witness with cameras to Nazi atrocities, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and Dachau. In this passionate work, David Shneer tells their stories and highlights their work through their very own images-he has amassed never-before-published photographs from families, collectors, and private archives.Through Soviet Jewish Eyes helps us understand why so many Jews flocked to Soviet photography; what their lives and work looked like during the rise of Stalinism, during and then after the war; and why Jews were the ones charged with documenting the Soviet experiment and then its near destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

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