Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.

    The Soviet Union had lost the heart of its industry, and the United States was not yet armed.The Allied victory in 1945 was not inevitable. Overy shows us exactly how the Allies regained military superiority and why they were able to do it. He recounts the decisive campaigns: the war at sea, the crucial battles on the eastern front, the air war, and the vast amphibious assault on Europe. He then explores the deeper factors affecting military success and failure: industrial strength, fighting ability, the quality of leadership, and the moral dimensions of the war.

    With an understanding of human nature, a sense of humor, sharp thinking, and fierce determination, Tenney endured the rest of the war as a slave laborer in Japanese prison camps. My Hitch in Hell is an inspiring survivor's epic about the triumph of human will despite unimaginable human suffering.

    For the second edition, the book has been thoroughly rewritten and expanded. It includes two new chapters, as well as an extensive preface in which the author reflects on the scholarly traditions which have influenced his work and explains his current thinking about the book's themes.New edition of popular account of the first 1000 years of Christianity. Thoroughly rewritten, with extensive new preface of author's current thinking.Includes new maps, substantial bibliography, and numerous chronological tables.

    Includes a detailed chronology of the war, historical maps, a glossary of military terms, and photos and illustrations.

    Because it is so thoroughly researched and up-to-date, it is also the kind of indispensable handbook that deserves a place on every early modernist's bookshelf.— American Historical Review

    

    Through the works of men and women, Jews and non-Jews, this anthology offers a vision of the human reality of the catastrophe. Essays by familiar writers like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel accompany lesser-known efforts by Yankiel Wiernik and Frantisek Kraus; stories by Tadeusz Borowski and Ida Fink join fiction by neglected authors such as Isaiah Spiegel and Adolf Rudnicki; and extensive selections have been chosen from the works of six poets - the renowned Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and Abraham Sutzkever among them. Each selection (except for self-contained excerpts from ghetto journals and diaries) appears here in its complete form.Lawrence L. Langer also includes in their entirety a novel by Aharon Appelfeld, a novella by Pierre Gascar, and Joshua Sobol's controversial drama Ghetto. In addition, this volume features a visual essay in the form of reproductions of twenty works of art created in the Terezin concentration camp.

    Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to choose from, there is a perfect gift for everyone.Drawn from wartime newspaper and magazine reports, radio transcripts, and books, this unique two-volume anthology collects 191 pieces by eighty writers recording events from the Munich crisis to the birth of the nuclear age."At last, the best of the great writing about the world's greatest war. A treasure". -- David Brinkley, ABC News

    involvement in World War I. Now, bestselling author/researcher Robert Ballard probes the decades-old controversy surrounding this pivotal maritime tragedy. Illustrated with over 300 photos, many in color, charts, paintings, and a four-page gatefold.

    In what was a relatively small area, both sides bombarded each other relentlessly for three months, each trying to overwhelm the other by sheer fire power.The Guns of Normandy puts the reader in the front lines of this horrific battle. In the most graphic and authentic detail, it brings to life every aspect of a soldier’s existence, from the mortal terror of impending destruction, to the unending fatigue, to the giddy exhilaration at finding oneself still, inexplicably, alive.The story of this crucial battle opens in England, as the 4th Field Regiment receives news that something big is happening in France and that after long years of training they are finally going into action. The troop ships set out from besieged London and arrive at the D-Day beaches in the appalling aftermath of the landing.What follows is the most harrowing and realistic account of what it is like to be in action, as the very lead man in the attack: an artillery observer calling in fire on enemy positions. The story unfolds in the present tense, giving the uncomfortably real sense that “You are here.”The conditions under which the troops had to exist were horrific. There was near-constant terror of being hit by incoming shells; prolonged lack of sleep; boredom; weakness from dysentery; sudden and gruesome deaths of close friends; and severe physical privation and mental anguish. And in the face of all this, men were called upon to perform heroic acts of bravery and they did. Blackburn provides genuine insight to the nature of military service for the average Canadian soldier in the Second World War – something that is all too often lacking in the accounts of armchair historians and television journalists. The result is a classic account of war at the sharp end.From the Hardcover edition.

    Indeed, there has been nothing like it in human history: a single war that spanned three continents--a war which saw more men and women under arms, moredeaths, and more destruction than any other. Now Oxford University Press provides the definitive one-volume reference to this cataclysmic event. The Oxford Companion to World War II brings together an international team of 140 experts to cover every aspect of the conduct and experience of the conflict, from grand strategic decisionmaking to the struggles of daily life. More than 1,700 entries--ranging from brief identifications to in-deptharticles on complex subjects--bring the far-flung elements and events of the war into focus. Here are essays on overarching themes and broad topics, such as the origins of the war, diplomacy, the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere, and the Final Solution. Military campaigns and battles, ofcourse, receive extensive attention: entries include the Fall of France, Operation Barbarossa, and the Battle of Midway, as well as such smaller events as the sinking of the Scharnhorst and the fall of Wake Island. Scores of analytical biographies range from the national leaders--Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Roosevelt, Churchill--to an array of military and political figures, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Ho Chi Minh, from Marshal Timoshenko to General von Manstein. World War II was also an era of technological leaps, covert exploits, and horrific atrocities--and the Companion gives thoroughcoverage to each, with articles on weapons ranging from tanks to E-boats to rockets, on intelligence organizations (ranging from the O.S.S. to Smersh), and on the German Einstatzgruppen and Todt organization. The Companion also provides exceptional coverage beyond the military and political spheres, revealing the war as it affected the millions of noncombatants. In addition to exploring the economics and social policies of belligerent states, the Companion addresses such topics as children--explaininghow hundreds of thousands were evacuated from threatened cities, thrown into combat, killed by bombing raids, or made into orphans. Indeed, the Companion's emphasis on the social history and daily experience of the war makes it the most complete one-volume reference on this critical chapter inhistory. In addition to thousands of entries, conveniently arranged in an a-to-z format, the book also features hundreds of maps, charts, tables, and evocative photographs. There is no finer resource on the war that shaped the modern world.Features * More than 1,750 entries ranging from brief identifications to in-depth articles * More than 140 leading international experts have contributed, including David Kennedy, Martin Gilbert, Robert Dallek, Yogi Akashi, Ben-Ami Shillony, Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, Norman Davies, Wilhelm Diest, and many more * Massively illustrated with more than 100 evocative photographs and supplemented by 100 maps, thirty diagrams, and over 170 tables, charts and graphs * Articles on every aspect of the war, including: --surveys of countries, from economics to politics to military structure --portraits of wartime leaders, including generals, admirals, political figures, and heads of state--military campaigns and battles, from the Doolittle Raid to Operation Overlord, from Kassarine Pass to the Warsaw Uprising --intelligence organizations and exploits, from the Abwehr to Smersh, from codebreaking to commando raids --military technology, ranging from submarines to aircraft carriers, from fighter planes to V-1 and V-2 missiles, from the Enigma machine to radar * In-depth coverage of the social aspects of the war, such as the role of women, children, war production, and life under occupation

    Here, she approaches a similar theme in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, telling a series of riveting human stories to illuminate the paradox that rabid anti-Communism at times resembles Communism. In the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and the former East Germany, she talks to erstwhile dissidents now victimized because they are named in old police registers; to low-level agents accused of crimes that were not crimes when committed; and to high officials who now run things just like before. She convincingly suggests that the best antidote to Communism may be, not revenge, but "tolerance and the rule of law."

    The Black Holocaust for Beginners answers a series of questions regarding all dimensions of the Black Holocaust - from its widespread and destructive effect on African cultures through to its impact on daily life in the present.

    Polizzotti reconstructs Breton's intense and formative friendships with Man Ray, Duchamp, Dali, and Miro, among others; his legendary encounters with Trotsky, Freud, and Sartre; and his several marriages and love affairs.

    A team of typographers and printers was pulled out of the rows of prisoners on their way to the gas chambers and transferred to the strictly isolated Block 19 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There they were presented with the enormous task of producing almost perfect counterfeits to the value of hundreds of millions of pounds sterling. These notes were to be dropped from bombers over London, with the aim of causing financial chaos. When the time came the Luftwaffe's resources were fully committed in other campaigns and theaters but some of the currency was successfully used to fund operations in Germany's secret war.Moritz Nachtstern (1902-1969), was a Norwegian-Jewish typographer deported from Oslo in 1942. This is his story, as told to his wife and written down by her, then edited by journalist Ragnar Arntzen. It was originally published in Norwegian in 1949. It covers the three terrible years from his arrest and transportation to Germany, through the horrors of life in Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen to his escape in the last chaotic and terrifying days as the liberating American forces approached. At the center of this personal tale of courage and endurance is Nachtstern's absorbing description of how, in order to survive, he participated in the creation of exquisite forgeries, while working as slowly as possible, both to frustrate the Nazi plan and to ensure that he and his fellow forgers never became expendable.Nachtstern's daughter Sidsel contributes a moving foreword, "It cannot be erased", and essays by Lawrence Malkin and Bjarte Bruland place this sixty-year old document in its historical context.The translator, Margrit Rosenberg Stenge, was born in Germany but spent five years of her childhood in hiding with her parents in Norway and Sweden during World War II. She has lived in Montreal since 1951 and has translated and published a number of Holocaust memoirs.

    "The Gnostic Gospels," first published in 1979, is the now classic study of one of Christianity's earliest sects, as revealed through the Nag Hammadi texts discovered in Egypt in 1945. "Adam, Eve and the Serpent" (1988) recreates the controversies that racked the early Church as it confronted the riddles of sexuality, freedom and sin embodied in the story of Genesis. "The Origin of Satan" (1995) explores how Satan evolved from the Old Testament's mere "Adversary" to the Prince of Darkness we meet in the New Testament.

    Early in his career, the author actually interviewed aging veterans and survivors of the Napoleonic wars. Retrace each step of the Emperor's Grande Armee. Rare combat prints, drawings, and sketches accurately depict military apparel and weaponry, while charts, theater of operations, maps, casualty lists and statistics add to this chronicle's clarity and value. 560 pages, 47 b/w illus., 6 1/4 x 9 1/4.

    Each picture brings to life a different place, from a market in Thailand to a ski resort in the Alps. Small pictures around the edge of the page show things to spot, and easy-to-read captions provide snippets of information. There is also a present to find on every double-page spread and clues on where to go next - it won't be the next page in the book.

    Artist and scholar Adrian Morgan has spent twelve years collecting, studying, drawing, painting, observing, and eating his subjects. The result is a glorious feast for the eye as well as the intellect. An astonishing compendium of art history, cultural anthropology, pharmacology, herpetology, mycology, and serious conjecture. TOADS & TOADSTOOLS will delight and amaze any armchair biologist. Brimming over with almost 150 illustrations.

    One thousand years of dynastic politics and monarchist ideology came to an end. Eight decades of French rule lay shattered. Five years of Japanese military occupation ceased. Allied leaders determined that Chinese troops in the north of Indochina and British troops in the South would receive the Japanese surrender. Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president.Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews, and an examination of published memoirs and documents, David G. Marr has written a richly detailed and descriptive analysis of this crucial moment in Vietnamese history. He shows how Vietnam became a vortex of intense international and domestic competition for power, and how actions in Washington and Paris, as well as Saigon, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh's mountain headquarters, interacted and clashed, often with surprising results. Marr's book probes the ways in which war and revolution sustain each other, tracing a process that will interest political scientists and sociologists as well as historians and Southeast Asia specialists.

    With Dark Nature, world naturalist Lyall Watson presents a scientific examination of evil. Drawing on the latest insights of genetics, evolutionary ethology, anthropology and psychology, he takes the discussion of evil out of the realm of monsters and demons to reveal it for what it truly is: A biological reality that may be terrifying but can be controlled. Groundbreaking, fascinating and eminently readable, Dark Nature is a vital and timely antidote to modern despair.

    (Part 7--on gunpowder and all aspects of explosive weapons--has already been published, while Part 8--on cavalry techniques and signaling--is still in preparation.) The present volume opens with an introduction on Chinese attitudes to warfare in general. Four major sections follow: on the making and use of simple bows; on the crossbow, the standard weapon of the Han armies, and its introduction to the Western world; on the pre-gunpowder forms of artillery, including the invention of the trebuchet; and on the art of siege warfare in which the Mohists were particularly interested. There is a good deal of material on siege-warfare available, and this final section is a substantial one, covering all aspects in detail.

    This is the first of a two volume set exploring the inception, planning and preparation of the offensive to liberate Europe, Operation Overlord, culminating in its launch on D-Day.

    Their words echo the refrain that the ravages of war live on in the body and soul, in victim and victor.

    From the inner councils of the Japanese to the fateful decisions to atom-bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Weintraub brings to life the cross-currents of this watershed month, in which empires fell, old orders passed away, and a new age began. Photos.

    This book, a comprehensive history of women in the Archaic and Classical Ages, completes our picture of ancient Greek society.Largely excluded from any public role, the women of ancient Greece nonetheless appear in various guises in the art and writing of the period, and in legal documents. These representations, in Sue Blundell's analysis, reveal a great deal about women's day-to-day experience as well as their legal and economic position--and how they were regarded by men. Here are women as portrayed in Homer, in Greek lyric poetry, and by the playwrights; the female nature as depicted in medical writings and by Aristotle; representations of women in sculpture and vase paintings. This is evidence filtered through a male view: Sappho is the only female writer of antiquity much of whose work survives. Yet these sources and others such as regulations and law court speeches reveal a great deal about women's lives and about their status as defined by law and by custom.By examining the roles that men assigned to women, the ideals they constructed for them, and the anxieties they expressed about them, Blundell sheds light on the cultural dynamics of a male-dominated society. Lively and richly illustrated, her work offers a fresh look at women in the ancient world.

    This biography draws on his personal documents and correspondence, granted by the Graves family, and uncovers many important letters in both private and public collections.

    Dobrynin became the main channel for the White House and the Kremlin to exchange ideas, negotiate in secret, and arrange summit meetings. Dobrynin writes vividly of Moscow from inside the Politburo, but In Confidence is mainly a story of Washington at the highest levels.

    A sociocultural reconstruction of modern Ethiopia's social history, that will have far reaching repercussions in Ethiopianist discourse.

    "Laid out in neat, horizontal rows, the illustrations and captions promise hours of pleasure to lovers of pictorial detail and facts about 'things.'" -- School Library Journal

    Smith also sheds new light on the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment by situating it within the context of black public health activity, reminding us that public health work had oppressive as well as progressive consequences.

    100,000 first printing.

    Each beautifully illustrated scene shows a different period in history, crammed with all kinds of people, animals and objects to spot. A bustling Greek marketplace, a firework display at a Chinese palace, a smoky factory town, and the inside of a 1930s department store are all included, plus lots more. As well as providing countless hours of puzzle-solving fun, The Great History Search is packed with fascinating historical facts presented in short, easy-to-read captions. If you get really stuck trying to find the hidden things, all the answers are at the back of the book.

    He begins with a fresh, insightful reading of the Hebrew Bible, revealing the profound mystery and significance of the disappearance of God there. Why does the God who is known through miracles and direct interaction at the beginning of the Bible gradually become hidden, leaving humans on their own by the Bible's end? How is it possible that the Bible, written over so many centuries by so many authors, depicts this diminishing visible presence of God - and the growing up of humankind - so consistently? Why has this not been common knowledge? Friedman then investigates this phenomenon's place in the formation of Judaism and Christianity.But this is not only the study of an ancient concept. Friedman turns to the forms this feeling of the disappearance of God has taken in recent times. Here, too, he focuses on a mystery: an eerie connection between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, who each independently developed the idea of the death of God.Friedman then relates all of this to a contemporary spiritual and moral ambivalence. He notes the current interest in linking discoveries in modern physics and astronomy to God and creation, reflecting a yearning for concrete answers in an age of divine hiddenness. And here the focus is on another mystery, intriguing parallels between Big Bang cosmology and the mysticism of the Kabbalah, which points to a territory in which religion and science are complementary rather than antagonistic.This inspiring work is grounded in learned research. It is a brilliantly original exploration of the Bible that also shows how the Bible is much more than "ancient history." In the Bible the hiding of the face of God is a literary and theological development, but in the twentieth century it is a spiritual crisis, and Friedman aims to apply solutions to this quandary. Moving through rich and provocative examinations of world literature, history, theology, and physics, The Disappearance of God is as readable and exciting as a good detective story, with a conclusion that offers real hope in a time of spiritual longing.

    Using new archeological, scientific, and documentary information (much of it in Scandinavian languages that are a bar to most Western historians), this book confronts many of the unanswered questions about early exploration and colonization along the shores of the Davis Strait.The author brings together two distinct but tangential fields of inquiry: the history of medieval Greenland and its connections with the Norse discovery of North America, and fifteenth-century British maritime history and pre-colonial voyages to North America, including that of John Cabot. In order to evaluate the situation in Norse Greenland at the end of the fifteenth century (when documented English and Portuguese voyages of northern exploration began), the author follows the colony's development—its domestic economy and foreign trade and its cultural and ecclesiastical affinities—from its inception in the tenth century. In the process, she looks critically at commonly held views that have gone unchallenged until now.Among the questions about which the author sets forth new evidence and conclusions are: the extent to which Greenlanders explored and exploited North America after Leif Eriksson, the reasons for the baffling disappearance of the Norse settlement in Greenland, the connection between their disappearance and the beginning of the voyages of exploration that began around A.D. 1500, the routes by which information concerning previous voyages traveled, the history before Cabot of the advance of English fishing fleets from Icelandic waters to the coasts of Labrador, and the influence of the roman Catholic Church on Norse Greenland.

    Langer, our age clings to the stable relics of faded eras, as if ideas like natural innocence, innate dignity, the inviolable spirit, and the triumph of art over reality were immured in some kind of immortal shrine, immune to the ravages of history and time. But these ideas have been ravaged, and in Admitting the Holocaust. Langer presents a series of essays that represent his effort, over nearly a decade, to wrestle with this rupture in human values--and to see the Holocaust as it really was. His vision is necessarily dark, but he does not see the Holocaust as a warrant for futility, or as a witness to the death of hope. It is a summons to reconsider our values and rethink what it means to be a human being. These penetrating and often gripping essays cover a wide range of issues, from the Holocaust's relation to time and memory, to its portrayal in literature, to its use and abuse by culture, to its role in reshaping our sense of history's legacy. In many, Langer examines the ways in which accounts of the Holocaust--in history, literature, film, and theology--have extended, and sometimes limited, our insight into an event that is often said to defy understanding itself. He singles out Cynthia Ozick as one of the few American writers who can meet the challenge of imagining mass murder without flinching and who can distinguish between myth and truth. On the other hand, he finds Bernard Malamud's literary treatment of the Holocaust never entirely successful (it seems to have been a threat to Malamud's vision of man's basic dignity) and he argues that William Styron's portrayal of the commandant of Auschwitz in Sophie's Choice pushed Nazi violence to the periphery of the novel, where it disturbed neither the author nor his readers. He is especially acute in his discussion of the language used to describe the Holocaust, arguing that much of it is used to console rather than to confront. He notes that when we speak of the survivor instead of the victim, of martyrdom instead of murder, regard being gassed as dying with dignity, or evoke the redemptive rather than grevious power of memory, we draw on an arsenal of words that tends to build verbal fences between what we are mentally willing--or able--to face and the harrowing reality of the camps and ghettos. A respected Holocaust scholar and author of Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, Langer offers a view of this catastrophe that is candid and disturbing, and yet hopeful in its belief that the testimony of witnesses--in diaries, journals, memoirs, and on videotape--and the unflinching imagination of literary artists can still offer us access to one of the darkest episodes in the twentieth century.

    Exploring the many connections among writing, social organization, and political control, including how alphabetic writing is linked with the exercise of power, Walter D. Mignolo claims that European forms of literacy were at the heart of New World colonization. It has long been acknowledged that Amerindians were at a disadvantage in facing European invaders because native cultures did not employ the same kind of texts (hence "knowledge") that the Europeans valued. Yet no one but Mignolo has so thoroughly examined either the process or the implications of conquest and destruction through language. The book continues to challenge commonplace understandings of New World history and to stimulate new colonial and postcolonial scholarship. Walter D. Mignolo is Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and the Program in Literature, Duke University.

    This essential reference presents the enormous value of maps to societies worldwide and explores the many ways they have been used to depict the earth, sky, and cosmos from ancient times to the present.Volume 2, book 2, considers the cartographic traditions of China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Tibet, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines, presenting significant new research and interpretation of archaeological, literary, and graphic sources. Richly illustrated with forty color plates and over five hundred black and white illustrations, the book includes a number of rare and elaborate maps, many previously unpublished.

    It unites the formal history and the individual memoir by telling the story of 1917 in the words of eyewitnesses who say history in the making. They witnessed two revolutions - the overthrow of Tsarism in March and the Bolshevik seizure of power in November - and described them with an immediacy that later accounts never achieve.These witnesses are British and American rather than Russian: as outsiders, they could see more of the game. They include diplomats, newspaper correspondents, the military, businessmen, even the occasional English governess. There are also adventurous young American radicals like John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, and unexpected figures like Arthur Ransome, who married Trotsky's secretary and later wrote such children's classic as Swallows and Amazons. Their brilliant journalism has been unread since 1917, while many other eyewitness accounts are published here for the first time. Harvey Pitcher skilfully weaves their accounts into a vivid and absorbing narrative, treating the witnesses' often conflicting views of the Revolution with impartiality and leaving readers free to form their own judgements.In a new Afterword to the Pimlico edition, Harvey Pitcher relates the events of 1917 to what is happening in Russia today.

    Her focus, the Ina Valley, served as a gateway to the mountainous interior of central Japan. Using methods drawn from historical geography and economic development, Wigen maps the valley's changes—from a region of small settlements linked in an autonomous economic zone, to its transformation into a peripheral part of the global silk trade, dependent on the state. Yet the processes that brought these changes—industrial growth and political centralization—were crucial to Japan's rise to imperial power. Wigen's elucidation of this makes her book compelling reading for a broad audience.

    Takes you behind-the-scenes of a typical town; the "agora"; a gymnasium; a stadium; a typical home; the theater; the Acropolis; and more. Informative text, photos, and the many illustrations cover architecture, government and defense, and the pleasure, pastimes and customs that made up everyday life in ancient Greece. Features a timetable of important events, a comprehensive glossary of terms, and a guide to gods and goddesses. An ideal learning tool for young students.

    It tells a tale of ten tumultuous decades - not from the towering vantage point of princes and presidents but from the modest perspective of ordinary people who found themselves swept up in dramatic events of historic proportions. Thousands of personal recollections have been blended into a powerful narrative and enhanced by photographs, vivid illustrations, and detailed maps. "People's Century" is an illuminating and unforgettable saga of the great triumphs and tragedies of humankind in the twilight of a millennium.

    Now, in this beautifully illustrated, oversized volume--boasting over 250 pictures, 30 in full color--eleven leading authorities chronicle the full sweep of this stunning musical genre, ranging from the earliest known works to such recent experimental efforts as Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach. The contributors--including such noted opera critics as William Ashbrook, Paul Griffiths, and Barry Millington--provide superb coverage of all the major periods. We read of the remarkable success of opera in republican Venice, where by 1650 some fifty operas had been performed, including masterworks by Monteverdi, the giant of the era. We learn of opera seria--which within the world of eighteenth-century Italian opera was the summit of prestige--and opera buffa, most noted today for three major works by Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutti. We explore the peak of opera's popularity in nineteenth-century France, Italy, and Germany, with astute commentary on such major composers as Berlioz, Bizet, Rossini, Donizetti, and especially Wagner and Verdi. And we examine the remarkably diverse works of our own century, from Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier and Alban Berg's Wozzeck to Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice and John Adams's Nixon in China. Throughout, the contributors illuminate how opera often reflects the cultural concerns of the age, how it is part of the social fabric, and in three fascinating sections on staging, singers, and the social climate, they give us a look behind the scenes as well as a feel for what opera was like in the past. We discover, for instance, that before the late nineteenth century, patrons were not expected to arrive on time, sit still, keep quiet, concentrate on the stage action, or stay to the end (Wagner put an end to this practice by darkening the theatre). Not least important are the numerous illustrations in the book, which highlight the richly visual nature of opera, the manner in which it communicates so vividly through staging and costume. Exhaustively researched and informatively captioned, these striking pictures offer an immediacy with the past that both enriches and complements the narrative. Nowhere does the rich panoply of opera history unfold more grandly than in this volume. Authoritative, vividly written, and exquisitely designed, it will be treasured by everyone who loves opera.

    First published in 1994 and a sell-out success, RoutledgeCurzon is pleased to present this new edition, updated to the present. Saunders skilfully elucidates historiographical controversies over important events, persons and developments in Brunei's past which are still important issues in defining Brunei's identity and its political and social systems today. These controversies, over the antecedents of the Sultanate, the date of the conversion to Islam, the reigns of the early sultans, early contacts with Europeans and others, retain their relevance. Newly presented are interpretations of events since 1945 during the transition from protected state to full independence, and thence to the present Malay Islamic Monarchy.

    It is the first to discuss as related developments the many attempts in Asia and Africa in the third quarter of the twentieth century to create egalitarian rural societies (landlord abolition in Egypt, India and Iran; ujamaa in Tanzania; land reform in Indonesia; collectivization in China, Vietnam and Ethiopia), their failure, and the differentiated rural regimes that despite landlord abolition remain there to this day.

    A running timeline of events provides a chronological context for the materials, including seven maps and 20 never-before-published photos.

    Each one has behind it a dramatic story and a cast of principal characters whose dilemmas and conflicts influenced the outcome of events. New facts, often from indigenous sources, have emerged to add to our understanding of these crucial events and these, together with the latest historical research and documented first-hand accounts, bring each turning point vividly to life. Illustrated with exclusive dramatic reconstructions photographed at the actual sites of the events, History's Turning Points provides a fascinating and intriguing new perspective on the significant moments that have changed our world.

    In this study Oliver Leaman poses two questions: how can a powerful and caring deity allow terrible things to happen to obviously innocent people, and why have the Jewish people been so harshly treated throughout history, given their status as the chosen people? He explores these issues through an analysis of the views of Philo, Saadya, Maimonides, Gersonides, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, and post-Holocaust thinkers.

    But thousands of years ago, the production of silk cloth was one of China's most prized secrets. So how did silk become one of the most sought-after materials in the world?With lavish illustrations and a highly informative text, The Silk Route traces the early history of the silk trade—from the mulberry groves of China to the marketplace in Byzantium—and explores how two of the world's greatest empires were brought together, forever opening the channels of commerce between East and West.A treasure through the years, this book is perfect for the classroom and independent book reports.

    At the centre of these controversies stands the question of Soviet relations with Nazi Germany and the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939. Drawing on a wealth of new material from the Soviet Archives, this detailed and original study analyses Moscow's response to the rise of Hitler, explains the origins of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and charts the road to Operation Barbarossa and the disaster of the surprise German attack on the USSR in June 1941.

    Combining the insights of a philosopher with the experiences of a participant-observer, he interprets the Sandinista period as a people's struggle for self-realization in work, culture, politics, and community. The book alternates between journal and essay chapters, weaving descriptions of personal experiences together with interviews and analysis.

    But who drew plants, and why? How have these images reflected our changing relationship with the natural world? This beautifully illustrated book explores the purpose and function of the whole range of botanical art, from early woodcut herbals and painted florilegia, botanical treatises and records of new discoveries, to gardening manuals, seed catalogs, and field guides for the amateur enthusiast. Gill Saunders complements the sumptuous illustrations with detailed captions and an informative text, making this a book for both specialist and lay reader.Drawing on a rich archive of material in the Victoria and Albert Museum, much of it unpublished until now, Saunders presents works ranging from the fifteenth-century printed book to the art of contemporary illustrators. She includes acknowledged masters such as Ehret and Redouté as well as lesser-known examples from China, Japan, and India.In addition to their intrinsic beauty, plant illustrations have mirrored the curious and fascinating relationship between art and science. The artist's challenge has been to reconcile the often conflicting demands of those disciplines within a single image. Picturing Plants captures both this complex cultural history and the distinctive loveliness of botanical illustration, bringing a fresh approach to a perennially fascinating subject.

    Stand back and admire the well-built houses with their strong wooden walls, before joining the town’s defenders as they fight off an attack by rivals from across the sea. Kids will love this exciting and superbly illustrated guide to Viking life.

    

    Revisit exotic Zululand, once the most powerful and sophisticated black state in Africa. See its rebellions by discontented subjects and ambitious princes, its intrusions by traders, missionaries, and land-hungry settlers. View the seeds of its downfall in the invasion by the Dutch Voortrekkers, and its defeat by the British at the height of their imperial power during a six-monthfull military campaign--as well as ways the kingdom lives on in the dreams of the new South Africa. 576 pages,

    Witty, profound, wildly funny, acerbic and occasionally savage, Rudyard Kipling's poems continue to delight readers of all ages.  Included are both the familiar favorites and Kipling's lesser-known works.  This is the only complete collection of Kipling's poems available in paperback.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Blending his recreation of the military campaign with contemporary testimony and an account of his own ride over the route, Richard Holmes takes the reader on a unique journey - to glimpse the summer the old world ended.