Best of
World-History

1988

Byzantium: The Early Centuries


John Julius Norwich - 1988
    48 pages ofillustrations, 16 in color. Maps.

The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, 1818-1909


Pierre Berton - 1988
    26 illustrations.

Fear No Evil


Natan Sharansky - 1988
     Since Fear No Evil was originally published in 1988, the Soviet government that imprisoned Sharansky has collapsed. Sharansky has become an important national leader in Israel—and serves as Israel's diplomatic liaison to the former Soviet Union! New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Serge Schmemann reflects on those monumental events, and on Sharansky's extraordinary life in the decades since his arrest, in a new introduction to this edition. But the truths Sharansky learned in his jail cell and sets forth in this book have timeless importance so long as rulers anywhere on earth still supress their own peoples. For anyone with an interest in human rights—and anyone with an appreciation for the resilience of the human spirit—he illuminates the weapons with which the powerless can humble the powerful: physical courage, an untiring sense of humor, a bountiful imagination, and the conviction that "Nothing they do can humiliate me. I alone can humiliate myself."

Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology


Cheikh Anta Diop - 1988
    Challenging societal beliefs, this volume rethinks African and world history from an Afrocentric perspective.

Meeting of Minds


Steve Allen - 1988
    These four volumes offer the original scripts from the series, including material edited from the broadcast versions that ran from 1977 to 1981 on PBS stations nationwide.Many believe that Meeting of Minds is the most brilliant series ever to be written for television. The show provides a groundbreaking opportunity to be exposed to ideas by way of a medium not normally known for its intellectual vigor.Indeed, Meeting of Minds grew out of Allen's frustration with the mediocrity of the average network program. He envisioned the show as a stimulating round-table discussion conducted like any other talk show - except that the participants would be actors portraying some of the greatest minds and most prominent figures of history. Accordingly, such characters as Aristotle, Catherine the Great, Oliver Cromwell, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger, Gandhi, Thomas Paine, Cleopatra, Theodore Roosevelt, and St. Thomas Aquinas appear in startlingly effective juxtaposition, their characters revealed through brilliantly conceived dialogue.This first volume features appearances by President Theodore Roosevelt, Queen Cleopatra, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Paine, President Ulysses S. Grant, Queen Marie Antoinette, Sir Thomas More, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Galileo Galilei, and Attila the Hun.The scripts for Meeting of Minds make for excellent reading, distilling an enormous amount of research into a lively format that has the undeniable veracity of historical fact. The result is unfailingly witty, thought-provoking, and geniunely entertaining.Steve Allen's lucidity and fertile intelligence are evident on every page. Meeting of Minds remains one of the freshest, most delightful ways of gaining historical perspective ever devised, an incomparable tour de force with the power to make history come alive.

The Doolittle Raid


Carroll V. Glines - 1988
    Co. Jimmy Doolittle\s legendary bombing raid on Tokyo gave America the morale boost it needed in the wake of Pearl Harbor. This is the full story as told by the Doolittle Raiders\ official historian. Carroll Glines is also the author of Attack on Yamamoto.

Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology


Christopher Scarre - 1988
    As well as examining the well known classical civilisations, it looks at the obscure and mysterious, such as the pyramid temples of the Yucatan.

Tigers in Combat II


Wolfgang Schneider - 1988
    Based on combat diaries, the text tells the history of each unit, but most of the book is devoted to photos of the tanks and the men who manned them. It offers as unique and comprehensive a look at these lethal machines as is possible sixty years after World War II.

Polar Bears: A Natural History of a Threatened Species


Ian Stirling - 1988
    Dr Ian Stirling, the best known polar bear scientist in the world, compresses the major new discoveries of the last 40 years of research on this iconic mammal into a new easily readable and scientifically comprehensive book about the ecology and natural history of polar bears.  He explains how polar bears evolved, how they were researched, aspects of their behaviour and how the threat of global warming is jeopardizing the survival of this magnificent hunter.

A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound


Humphrey Carpenter - 1988
    He was an exotic and controversial character throughout his life, and his public career achieved melodrama in l945 when he was indicted on a charge of treason, for broadcasting Axis propaganda on Rome radio during the war. He was eventually confined to a Washington psychiatric hospital for thirteen years. The final period of his life, after his release and return to Italy, was as dramatic - and tragic - as anything that had gone before.In this vigorous and fully documented biography Humphrey Carpenter carefully scrutinizes and often takes issue with the accepted valuation of Pound's achievements and his personality. He had access to Pound's vast correspondence - including highly revealing letters to his parents - and to medical records and confidential American government memoranda relating to Pound's indictment and trial. A Serious Character is rich in fascinating detail and acutely challenging in its judgements and commentary. Its title is taken from one of Pound's favourite sayings (first recorded in 1913): 'Are you or are you not, a serious character?'.

The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa


David Gilmour - 1988
    David Gilmour's biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of 'The Leopard', one of the great novels of the 20th century.

Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire


Peter R.L. Brown - 1988
    Peter Brown, perhaps the greatest living authority on Mediterranean civilization in late antiquity, traces the growing power of Christian bishops as they wrested influence from philosophers, who had traditionally advised the rulers of Graeco-Roman society.  In the new “Christian empire,” the ancient bonds of citizen to citizen and of each city to its benefactors were replaced by a common Christianity and common loyalty to a distant, Christian autocrat.  This transformation of the Roman empire from an ancient to a medieval society, he argues, is among the most far-reaching consequences of the rise of Christianity.

The Death of William Gooch: A History's Anthropology


Greg Dening - 1988
    Pahupu, Hawaiian warriors 'cut-in-two' by their tattoos, killed him there. He was only twenty-two. Gooch's is a short life indeed on which to base a book. But Greg Dening uses the incident of his murder as the basis for a penetrating study of historical narrative and meaning. Gooch, the young astronomer on board the Daedalus, is written into history through the perceptions and intentions of the historian. This is 'history's anthropology'. The layers of interpretation and meaning are woven into the fabric of the history itself.

The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left


Stuart Hall - 1988
    Hall's critical approach is elaborated here in essays on the formation of the SDP, inner city riots, the Falklands War and the signficance of Antonio Gramsci. He suggests that Thatcherism is skillfully employing the restless and individualistic dynamic of consumer capitalism to promote a swingeing programme of 'regressive modernization'.The Hard Road to Renewal is as concerned with elaborating a new politics for the Left as it is with the project of the Right. Hall insists that the Left can no longer trade on inherited politics and tradition. Socialists today must be as radical as modernity itself. Valuable pointers to a new politics are identified in the experience of feminism, the campaigns of the GLC and the world-wide response to Band Aid.

The Hidden History of Zionism


Ralph Schoenman - 1988
    

Life's Devices: The Physical World of Animals and Plants


Steven Vogel - 1988
    My immodest aim, says the author, is to change how you view your immediate surroundings. He asks us to wonder about the design of plants and animals around us: why a fish swims more rapidly than a duck can paddle, why healthy trees more commonly uproot than break, how a shark manages with such a flimsy skeleton, or how a mouse can easily survive a fall onto any surface from any height.The book will not only fascinate the general reader but will also serve as an introductory survey of biomechanics. On one hand, organisms cannot alter the earth's gravity, the properties of water, the compressibility of air, or the behavior of diffusing molecules. On the other, such physical factors form both constraints with which the evolutionary process must contend and opportunities upon which it might capitalize. Life's Devices includes examples from every major group of animals and plants, with references to recent work, with illustrative problems, and with suggestions of experiments that need only common household materials.

Absinthe: History in a Bottle


Barnaby Conrad III - 1988
    Due to popular demand, Absinthe: History in a Bottle is back in paperback with a handsome new cover. Like the author's bestselling The Martini and The Cigar, it is a potent brew of wild nights and social history, fact and trivia, gorgeous art and beautiful artifacts. As intoxicating as its subject, Absinthe makes a memorable gift for anyone who knows how to celebrate vice.

The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers Of Jews In Nazi Europe


Samuel P. Oliner - 1988
    Why, during the Holocaust, did some ordinary people risk their lives and the lives of their families to help others--even total strangers--while others stood passively by? Samuel Oliner, a Holocaust survivor who has interviewed more than 700 European rescuers and nonrescuers, provides some surprising answers in this compelling work.

Liverpool: A City that Dared to Fight


Peter Taaffe - 1988
    Hardly a week went by without the city being in the news headlines. Financial crises, a unique house building programme, education reform, the Heysel Stadium tragedy, the Sam Bond Affair, the expulsion of Derek Hatton, Tony Mulhearn and others from the Labour Party, through to an 18 month court battle which ended in the surcharge and disqualification of 47 Labour councillors - all are covered in Liverpool - A City That Dared To Fight. Not only a commentary, this book is also a penetrating political analysis of the grown and development of Marxism in Britain, and particularly the role of Militant in Liverpool.

The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939-1941


Anthony Read - 1988
    Here readers will be able to view the dramatic story of the circumstances behind the signing, and twenty-two months later, the breaking of this notorious pact.

Why Did The Heavens Not Darken?: The "Final Solution" In History


Arno J. Mayer - 1988
    

The Approaching Storm: One Woman's Story of Germany 1934-1938


Nora Waln - 1988
    During those four years, she took covert notes, bearing witness to the rise of Hitler and the German people's adulation of him. In 1938, security agents intercepted a portion of her manuscript en route to publishers in London and she and her husband were given 24 hours to leave Germany. She rewrote the book in England and when it became a bestseller in America, Himmler seized the children of Waln's friends. She offered herself in exchange for their freedom, but Himmler would only consent if she promised not to write about Germany, an offer which Waln refused.

In the Beginning


Irina Ratushinskaya - 1988
    In her renowned memoir, Grey is the Colour of Hope, the dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya described her four years in a Soviet labour camp.Here she looks back on the path which led to that ordeal, interweaving her account of growing up in Odessa with that of her childhood friend and eventual husband, Igor.With wit and simplicity she provides a striking insight into the everyday hardships of like in a totalitarian state, recalling the experiences which moulded her personality and enabled her - under extreme duress - to remain true to her faith and convictions.

Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple


Hershel Shanks - 1988
    Offers highest-quality authorship from respected leaders in their fields. Provides numerous color and black-and-white photos, maps, charts, and timelines. Gives a broader sweep of history, starting at an earlier point and/or ending at a later point than other books on the subject. Adds and updates evidence, analysis, and insights of events, based on developments since the book's first edition. Perfect for adult study groups and Bible groups, and anyone who wants to learn more about Israel's history or needs a refresher course.

Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy


Ellen Meiksins Wood - 1988
    Wood argues that the emergence of the peasant as citizen, juridically and politically independent, accounts for much that is remarkable in Athenian political institutions and culture.From a survey of historical writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus of which distorted later debates, Wood goes on to take issue with recent arguments, such as those of G.E.M. de Ste Croix, about the importance of slavery in agricultural production. The social, political and cultural influence of the peasant-citizen is explored in a way which questions some of the most cherished conventions of Marxist and non-Marxist historiography. This book will be of great interest to ancient historians, classicists, anthropologists and political theorists, as well as to a wider reading public.

Kitchener's Army: The Raising of the New Armies 1914-1916


Peter Simkins - 1988
    He examines the experiences and impressions of the officers and men who made up the New Armies. As well as analyzing their motives for enlisting, he explores how they were fed, housed, equipped and trained before they set off for active service abroad.

Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830


Joseph C. Miller - 1988
        With extraordinary skill, Joseph C. Miller explores the complex relationships among the separate economies of Africa, Europe, and the South Atlantic that collectively supported the slave trade. He places the grim history of the trade itself within the context of the rise of merchant capitalism in the eighteenth century. Throughout, Miller illuminates the experiences of the slaves themselves, reconstructing what can be known of their sufferings at the hands of their buyers and sellers.

Nuclear Fear: A History of Images


Spencer R. Weart - 1988
    The mushroom cloud, weird rays that can transform the flesh, the twilight world following a nuclear war, the white city of the future, the brilliant but mad scientist who plots to destroy the world-all these images and more relate to nuclear energy, but that is not their only common bond. Decades before the first atom bomb exploded, a web of symbols with surprising linkages was fully formed in the public mind. The strange kinship of these symbols can be traced back, not only to medieval symbolism, but still deeper into experiences common to all of us.This is a disturbing book: it shows that much of what we believe about nuclear energy is not based on facts, but on a complex tangle of imagery suffused with emotions and rooted in the distant past. Nuclear Fear is the first work to explore all the symbolism attached to nuclear bombs, and to civilian nuclear energy as well, employing the powerful tools of history as well as findings from psychology, sociology, and even anthropology. The story runs from the turn of the century to the present day, following the scientists and journalists, the filmmakers and novelists, the officials and politicians of many nations who shaped the way people think about nuclear devices. The author, a historian who also holds a Ph.D. in physics, has been able to separate genuine scientific knowledge about nuclear energy and radiation from the luxuriant mythology that obscures them. In revealing the history of nuclear imagery, Weart conveys the hopeful message that once we understand how this imagery has secretly influenced history and our own thinking, we can move on to a clearer view of the choices that confront our civilization.

A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present


Zvi Y. Gitelman - 1988
    Today, the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union has dwindled to half a million, but remains probably the world's third largest Jewish community. In the intervening century the Jews of that area have been at the center of some of the most dramatic events of modern history -- two world wars, revolutions, pogroms, political liberation, repression, and the collapse of the USSR. They have gone through tumultuous upward and downward economic and social mobility and experienced great enthusiasms and profound disappointments. In startling photographs from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and with a lively and lucid narrative, A Century of Ambivalence traces the historical experience of Jews in Russia from a period of creativity and repression in the second half of the 19th century through the paradoxes posed by the post-Soviet era. This redesigned edition, which includes more than 200 photographs and two substantial new chapters on the fate of Jews and Judaism in the former Soviet Union, is ideal for general readers and classroom use.

The Origins of Human Disease


Thomas McKeown - 1988
    It is a tour de force drawing upon the author's extensive work on the history of infection, as well upon evidence drawn from archaeology, history and demography.

China in World History


Samuel Adrian M. Adshead - 1988
    The theme of the book is China's relations with the non-Chinese world, not only political and economic, but cultural, social and technological as well. It seeks to show that China's history is part of everyone's history. In particular it traces China's relationship since the thirteenth century to the emergent world order and various world institutions of which that order is comprised. Each chapter discusses China's comparative place in the world, the avenues of contact between China and other civilizations, and who and what passed along these channels.

1941: Our Lives in a World on the Edge


William K. Klingaman - 1988
    

The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy


John Cannon - 1988
    This spectacular book offers the most authoritative account of the British monarchy ever published for the general reader. With over 400 illustrations--a third of them in color--it traces the crown's full history from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. The authors present a vivid picture of the lives of individual monarchs as well as of the monarchy as a political and social force. They begin the story in the fifth century with the rise of recognizable kingdoms in Scotland, Wales, and England and conclude with a discussion of the crown's constitutional role, which emerged in Queen Victoria's reign, and how this has affected the symbolic and popular monarchy of today. Along the way, we gain a clear view of how key traditions evolved: the right of succession, coronations and marriages, oaths of loyalty and military service, the granting of lands and titles, and the propagation of a powerful image of royalty. The book not only explains the monarch's political struggles and styles of governing; it is filled with fascinating details that give the story life. We learn, for instance, that Elizabeth I's famous journeys to various corners of her realm were not simply to show her off to her subjects: The standard of Tudor sanitation, the authors note, meant that the royal palaces became unbearable after several weeks of occupation and the court's absence for several months in the summer gave an opportunity to clean up. We discover that Victoria's coronation was a splendid mixture of majesty and muddle: when it came time for the Archbishop to bestow the ceremonial ring, the already befuddled cleric placed it on the Queen's wrong finger, causing considerable delay [and] some pain. And we read George VI's touching wedding message to his daughter (the present queen): Your leaving us has left a great blank in our lives but do remember that your old home is still yours. Supporting the text and carefully selected pictures are sidebars on each of the monarchs and on key general themes; color maps; an illustrated section on royal residences and tombs; a consolidated list of monarchs; genealogies; annotated lists of further reading; and a full index with personal dates.

An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays


Bernard S. Cohn - 1988
    Cohn's essays on colonial and post-colonial India, writings that have been of seminal importance to scholars of the subcontinent since the 1950s. A scholar of history as well as anthropology, Cohn offers readers a unique perspective on the social structure, colonization, and transformation of Indian society.

Enter the Dragon: China's Undeclared War Against the U.S. in Korea, 1950-1951


Russell Spurr - 1988
    involvement in the Korean War, this gripping, dramatic military classic re-creates six pivotal months in the conflict, told from both the Chinese and Allied sides.The Korean War was, years before Vietnam, the first great East-West military misadventure, eventually engaging sixteen countries under the U.N. flag in war against China and North Korea. Enter the Dragon examines the Chinese side of the Korean War for the first time, re-creating and dramatizing Communist China's reluctant role in the undeclared war against the U.S. in Korea. Russell Spurr's military classic is drawn from firsthand recollections of observers and participants on both sides, and focuses on six pivotal months, beginning in August 1950, when China first deliberated intervention, through their first strike in October, to the standstill at the end of January 1951.Based on five years of research and over 20 fact-finding trips to the People's Republic of China and Korea, Enter the Dragon describes why China became involved in Korea and how its strategy evolved, and re-creates life on the front lines, conference rooms, and in the streets of the embattled cities.

Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 9, Textile Technology: Spinning and Reeling


Dieter Kuhn - 1988
    These operations are the basic techniques in the production of yarn and thread, pre-requisite to weaving, and any study of Chinese textile technology must start with the raw material obtained from fibre plants such as hemp, ramie, jute, cotton, etc, and silk reeled off from cocoons of the domestic silkworm. The time-span covered runs from the neolithic to the nineteenth century. Archaeological and pictoral evidence, the bulk of it hitherto unpublished in the West, is brought together with Chinese textual sources (which are extensively translated and interpreted) to illustrate Chinese achievements in this field. Professor Kuhn's study reveals the way in which Chinese textile-technological inventiveness has influenced textile production in other regions of the world and in medieval Europe. It explains how textile technology reached its high point between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and attempts to indicate the reasons for its subsequent relative decline. The development of the textile industry in Europe was a key factor in the rise of capitalism. In the case of China after Sung times, textile technology and the organisation of textile labour may help indicate why such a development did not take place in China.

Blindspots


Roy Sorensen - 1988
    Sorensen here offers a unified solution to a large family of philosophical puzzles and paradoxes through a study of blindspots: consistent propositions that cannot be rationally accepted by certain individuals even though they might by true.

Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922: An International Perspective


Donald Harman Akenson - 1988
    There are hundreds of books and thousands of articles that either presuppose the existence of Irish Catholic-Protestant differences

Korea: Tradition and Transformation: A History of the Korean People


Andrew C. Nahm - 1988
    Prof. Nahm's work presents a scholarly analysis of the origins, the growth & never-ending process of changes in political, economic, social & cultural patterns of the Korean society throughout the ages, as well as historical & contemporary interactions of the Korean people with their neighbors near & far. The strength of the book lies in its balance. Unlike most other Korean history books, this book covers all aspects of the history of the Korean people--their art, literature, religion, & political, economic & social experiences from the ancient times to the present. It's noteworthy that, for the first time, the recent history & various aspects of national development of both North & South Korea are dealt with in the book.

American Environmental History


Joseph M. Petulla - 1988
    

Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798-1852


Roderick J. Barman - 1988
    A systematic account of Brazil's historical development from 1798 to 1852, this book analyses the process that brought the sprawling Portuguese colonies of the New World into the confines of a single nation-state.

Byzantium: Revised Edition


Rowena Loverance - 1988
    The Byzantines regarded their earthly empire as a reflection of God's empire in heaven, and this ideology was manifested in their politics, religion, and art. In this introduction to the history of Byzantium, from the fourth to the fourteenth century, Rowena Loverance draws on the British Museum's rich collections of spectacular Byzantine silver, ivories, jewelry, and icons, as well as pieces from the empire's Persian and Germanic neighbors. This revised edition, featuring a new introduction, is updated to include the most recent finds and interpretations.

Honduras: The Making Of A Banana Republic


Alison Acker - 1988