Best of
World-History

2006

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918


G.J. Meyer - 2006
    In this remarkable and intimate account, author G. J. Meyer draws on exhaustive research to bring to life the story of how the Great War reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of the world we live in today.

History: The Definitive Visual Guide


Adam Hart-Davis - 2006
    By contrast, the cultural, social, and technological changes since then have been nothing less than extraordinary. Telling our story, from prehistory to the present day, DK's "History" is a thought-provoking journey, revealing the common threads and forces that have shaped human history. Includes: Inventions, discoveries, and ideas that have shaped world history A look at human achievement through artifacts, painting, sculpture, and architecture An examination of humankind in context as part of the natural world Eyewitness accounts and biographies of key figures A comprehensive timeline chronicling the key events of the countries of the world

Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947


Christopher Clark - 2006
    Iron Kingdom traces Prussia's involvement in the continent's foundational religious and political conflagrations: from the devastations of the Thirty Years War through centuries of political machinations to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, from the enlightenment of Frederick the Great to the destructive conquests of Napoleon, and from the "iron and blood" policies of Bismarck to the creation of the German Empire in 1871, with all that implied for the tumultuous twentieth century.

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World


David Brion Davis - 2006
    His books have won every major history award--including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award--and he has been universally praised for his prodigious research, his brilliant analytical skill, and his rich and powerful prose. Now, in Inhuman Bondage, Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in what Stanley L. Engerman calls "a monumental and magisterial book, the essential work on New World slavery for several decades to come." Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character of the Atlantic slave trade and the roles of the American judiciary, the presidency, the media, and of both black and white abolitionists. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive internal, long-distance slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations (discussing the classical and biblical justifications for chattel bondage) and also traces the long evolution of anti-black racism (as in the writings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, among many others). Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it illuminates the meaning of nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts, with a detailed comparison with 3 major revolts in the British Caribbean. It connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics and stresses that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation--not a marginal enterprise. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling narrative that links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism. It is the ultimate portrait of the dark side of the American dream. Yet it offers an inspiring example as well--the story of how abolitionists, barely a fringe group in the 1770s, successfully fought, in the space of a hundred years, to defeat one of human history's greatest evils.

The Cartoon History of the Modern World Part 1: From Columbus to the U.S. Constitution


Larry Gonick - 2006
    It is essentially a complete and up–to–date course in college level Modern World History, but presented as a graphic novel. In an engaging and humorous graphic style, Larry Gonick covers the history, personalities and big topics that have shaped our universe over the past five centuries, including the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the evolution of political, social, economic, and scientific thought, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, the Cold War, Globalization––and much more.Volume I of the Cartoon History of the Modern World picks up from Gonick's award winning Cartoon History of the Universe Series. That series began with the Big Bang and ended with Christopher Columbus sailing for the New World. This book starts off with peoples that Columbus "discovered" and ends with the U.S. Revolution.

The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire


John Newsinger - 2006
    But what about Britain's role in the world? A People's History of the British Empire challenges the claim that the British Empire was a kinder, gentler empire and suggests that the description of 'Rogue State' is more fitting. How many people today know about Britain's deep involvement in the opium drug trade in China, or that Tony Blair's hero Gladstone devoted his maiden parliamentary speech to defending his family's slave plantation in Jamaica?John Newsinger has written a wonderful popular history of key episodes in British imperial history. He pays particular attention to the battles of the colonised to free themselves of its baleful rule, including Rebellion in Jamaica; The Irish Famine; The Opium Wars; The Great Indian Rebellion; The Conquest of Egypt; Palestine in Revolt; 'Quit India' and the struggle for Independence; Suez; Malaya; Kenya and Rhodesia; and, Britain and American Imperialism.

The Lost Men: The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton's Ross Sea Party


Kelly Tyler-Lewis - 2006
    This crew of explorers landed on the opposite side of Antarctica from the Endurance with a mission to build supply depots for Shackleton’s planned crossing of the continent. But their ship disappeared in a gale, leaving ten inexperienced, ill-equipped men to trek 1,356 miles in the harshest environment on earth. Drawing on the men’s own journals and photographs, The Lost Men is a masterpiece of historical adventure, a book destined to be a classic in the vein of Into Thin Air.

War in Human Civilization


Azar Gat - 2006
    In the process, the book generates an astonishing wealth of original and fascinating insights on all major aspects of humankind's remarkable journey through the ages, engaging a wide range of disciplines.

Weapon: A Visual History of Arms and Armor


Richard Holmes - 2006
    From the stone axes of the earliest warfare to the heavy artillery of today''s modern armies,this awe-inspiring book portrays for the first time the entire spectrum of weaponry. Illustrations explain key features and working mechanisms of important weapons Beautifully photographed and richly cataloged-often in actual size Details weapons that changed the face of warfare, from the sword to the Gatling gun.

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind


Justin Pollard - 2006
    It was the marvel of its age?legendary for its vast palaces, safe harbors, and magnificent lighthouse. But it was most famous for the astonishing intellectual fluorescence it fostered and the library it produced. If the European Renaissance was the ?rebirth? of Western culture, then Alexandria, Egypt, was its birthplace. It was here mankind first discovered that the earth was not flat, originated atomic theory, invented geometry, systematized grammar, translated the Old Testament into Greek, built the steam engine, and passed their discoveries on to future generations via the written word. Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Jewish scholars, Greek philosophers, and devout early Christians all play a part in the rise and fall of the city that stood ?at the conjunction of the whole world.? Compulsively readable and sparkling with fresh insights into science, philosophy, culture, and invention, this is an irresistible, eye-opening delight.

The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West


Niall Ferguson - 2006
    In it, he grapples with perhaps the most challenging questions of modern history: Why was the twentieth century history's bloodiest by far? Why did unprecedented material progress go hand in hand with total war and genocide? His quest for new answers takes him from the walls of Nanjing to the bloody beaches of Normandy, from the economics of ethnic cleansing to the politics of imperial decline and fall. The result, as brilliantly written as it is vital, is a great historian's masterwork.

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe


Gérard Prunier - 2006
    In this extraordinary history of the recent wars in Central Africa, Gerard Prunier offers a gripping account of how one grisly episode laid the groundwork for a sweeping and disastrous upheaval. Prunier vividly describes the grisly aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when some two million refugees--a third of Rwanda's population--fled to exile in Zaire in 1996. The new Rwandan regime then crossed into Zaire and attacked the refugees, slaughtering upwards of 400,000 people. The Rwandan forces then turned on Zaire's despotic President Mobutu and, with the help of a number of allied African countries, overthrew him. But as Prunier shows, the collapse of the Mobutu regime and the ascension of the corrupt and erratic Laurent-D�sir� Kabila created a power vacuum that drew Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and other African nations into an extended and chaotic war. The heart of the book documents how the whole core of the African continent became engulfed in an intractible and bloody conflict after 1998, a devastating war that only wound down following the assassination of Kabila in 2001. Prunier not only captures all this in his riveting narrative, but he also indicts the international community for its utter lack of interest in what was then the largest conflict in the world.Praise for the hardcover: The most ambitious of several remarkable new books that reexamine the extraordinary tragedy of Congo and Central Africa since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.--New York Review of BooksOne of the first books to lay bare the complex dynamic between Rwanda and Congo that has been driving this disaster.--Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times Book ReviewLucid, meticulously researched and incisive, Prunier's will likely become the standard account of this under-reported tragedy.--Publishers Weekly

Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction


Adam Jones - 2006
    The book examines the differing interpretations of genocide from psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science and analyzes the influence of race, ethnicity, nationalism and gender on genocides. In the final section, the author examines how we punish those responsible for waging genocide and how the international community can prevent further bloodshed.

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989


Frederick Taylor - 2006
    Within days the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: it became an imposing 103-mile-long wall guarded by three hundred watchtowers. A physical manifestation of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American capitalism—totalitarianism and freedom—that would stand for nearly thirty years, the Berlin Wall was the high-risk fault line between East and West on which rested the fate of all humanity. Many brave people risked their lives to overcome this lethal barrier, and some paid the ultimate price.In this captivating work, sure to be the definitive history on the subject, Frederick Taylor weaves together official history, archival materials, and personal accounts to tell the complete story of the Wall's rise and fall, from the postwar political tensions that created a divided Berlin to the internal and external pressures that led to the Wall's demise. In addition, he explores the geopolitical ramifications as well as the impact the wall had on ordinary lives that is still felt today. For the first time the entire world faced the threat of imminent nuclear apocalypse, a fear that would be eased only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison breached it on the historic night of November 9, 1989.Gripping and authoritative, The Berlin Wall is the first comprehensive account of a divided city and its people in a time when the world seemed to stand permanently on the edge of destruction.

Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle for Britain: A New History in the Words of the Men and Women on Both Sides


Joshua Levine - 2006
    Hitler's troops had overrun Holland, Belgium and France in quick succession, and the British people anticipated an invasion would soon be upon them. From July to October, they watched the Battle of Britain play out in the skies above them, aware that the result would decide their fate. Over the next nine months, the Blitz killed more than 43,000 civilians. For a year, the citizens of Britain were effectively front-line soldiers in a battle which united the country against a hated enemy.We hear from the soldiers, airmen, fire-fighters, air-raid wardens and civilians, people in the air and on the ground, on both sides of the battle, giving us a thrilling account of Britain under siege. With first-hand testimonies from those involved in Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, Black Saturday on 7th September 1940 when the Luftwaffe began the Blitz, to its climax on the 10th May 1941, this is the definitive oral history of a period when Britain came closer to being overwhelmed by the enemy than at any other time in modern history.

The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History


Raymond H. Kévorkian - 2006
    In this major new history, Raymond Kévorkian provides a long-awaited authoritative account of origins, events, and consequences of the years 1915 and 1916. Kévorkian explains and analyses the debates that occurred within the elite circles of the Young Turks, and traces the roots of the violence that would be raged upon the Ottoman Armenians. Uniquely, this is also a geographical account of the Armenian genocide, documenting its course region by region, including a complete account of the deportations, massacres and resistance that occurred._x000D__x000D_Kévorkian considers the role that the Armenian Genocide played in the construction of the Turkish nation state and Turkish identity, as well as exploring the ideologies of power, rule, and state violence, presenting an important contribution to the understanding of how such destruction could have occurred. Thus, Kévorkian examines the history of the Young Turks and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as they came into conflict with one another, taking into consideration the institutional, political, social and even psychological mechanisms that culminated in the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Beginning with an exploration of the origins of the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, Kévorkian analyses the decision making process which led to the terrible fate of those who were deported to the concentration camps of Aleppo and along the Euphrates._x000D__x000D_Crucially, 'The Armenian Genocide' also examines the consequences of the violence against the Armenians, the implications of the expropriation of property and assets, and deportations, as well as the attempts to bring those who committed atrocities to justice. This covers the documents from the Mazhar Governmental Commission of Inquiry and the formation of courts martial by the Ottoman authorities, and the findings of the March 1920 Committee for the Protection of the Minorities in Turkey, created by the League of Nations._x000D__x000D_Kévorkian offers a detailed and meticulous account of the Armenian Genocide, providing an authoritative analysis of the events and their impact upon the Armenian community itself, as well as the development of the Turkish state. This important book will serve as an indispensable resource to historians of the period, as well as those wishing to understand the history of genocidal violence more generally.

Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality


Elizabeth Ewen - 2006
    In this groundbreaking exploration of the growth of stereotyping amidst the rise of modern society, authors Ewen & Ewen demonstrate "typecasting" as a persistent cultural practice. Drawing on fields as diverse as history, pop culture, racial science, and film, and including over one hundred images, many published here for the first time, the authors present a vivid portrait of stereotyping as it was forged by colonialism, industrialization, mass media, urban life, and the global economy.

The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11 & the Loss of Liberty


Jim Marrs - 2006
    The only question is whose conspiracy it was. According to the government, the conspiracy involved about nineteen suicidal Middle Eastern Muslim terrorists, their hearts full of hatred for American freedom and democracy, who hijacked four airliners, crashing two into the Twin Towers of New York City's World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon, near Washington, DC. The fourth airliner reportedly crashed in western Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to overcome the hijackers. To add insult to injury, this whole incredible Mission Impossible operation, which defeated a fortybilliondollar defense system, was under the total control of a devout Muslim cleric using a computer while hiding in a cave in Afghanistan.Primarily using mainstream media and government reports, Marrs has crafted the definitive journalistic account exposing the likely complicity of the Bush administration in the 9/11 attacks, providing a history of the overt and covert causes of the events. However, his analysis goes far beyond 9/11, enabling us to understand the motivation behind American foreign policy, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as primary examples of the US government's secret agenda.

World Art: The Essential Illustrated History


Mike O'Mahony - 2006
    Organized by era, the reader is taken from Giotto, through Monet, to Pollock to reveal the development of art over the centuries. Supplemented with sections on Art Movements and Painting Techniques, this is the definitive reference for art enthusiasts of any level of knowledge and understanding.

National Geographic Concise History of the World: An Illustrated Time Line


Neil Kagan - 2006
    Few references are as invaluable, all-inclusive, and satisfying to browse. For readers of all ages, world history is easily accessible, depicted as never before—so that events occurring simultaneously around the world can be viewed at-a-glance together. For example, Texas Instruments launched the pocket calculator the same year the Soviet Union launched the first manned space station, in 1971. Columbus sailed from Spain the year Martin Behaim constructed a terrestrial globe in Nuremberg. The California Gold Rush followed the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s, and the Greek dictatorship of Papadopoulos is overthrown the same year Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is deposed and U.S. president Nixon resigns, in 1974. The book's innovative time line truly sets it apart, allowing readers to scan across a spread and explore a single area or compare contemporary societies across the globe. This remarkable resource also contains dozens of maps; scores of sidebars; hundreds of illustrations; and thousands of events, milestones, personalities, ideas, and inventions. Throughout, vivid illustrations depict artworks, artifacts, portraits and dramatic scenes, while sidebar topics range from local customs and lifestyles to the effect of climate change on human migration. Drawing on National Geographic's vast resources, this concise yet comprehensive, one-of-a-kind work is as rewarding as it is compulsively readable.

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions


Karen Armstrong - 2006
    Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all secondary flowerings of the original Israelite vision. Now, in The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong reveals how the sages of this pivotal "Axial Age" can speak clearly and helpfully to the violence and desperation that we experience in our own times. Armstrong traces the development of the Axial Age chronologically, examining the contributions of such figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. All of the Axial Age faiths began in principled and visceral recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. Despite some differences of emphasis, there was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. With regard to dealing with fear, despair, hatred, rage, and violence, the Axial sages gave their people and give us, Armstrong says, two important pieces of advice: first there must be personal responsibility and self-criticism, and it must be followed by practical, effective action. In her introduction and concluding chapter, Armstrong urges us to consider how these spiritualities challenge the way we are religious today. In our various institutions, we sometimes seem to be attempting to create exactly the kind of religion that Axial sages and prophets had hoped to eliminate. We often equate faith with doctrinal conformity, but the traditions of the Axial Age were not about dogma. All insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering. In each Axial Age case, a disciplined revulsion from violence and hatred proved to be the major catalyst of spiritual change.

Mitrokhin Archive: The Kgb In Europe And The West


Christopher Andrew - 2006
    Working from Vasili Mitrokhin's archive and his own unrivalled expertise in the history of intelligence, Christopher Andrew has created an extraordinary picture of a USSR committed to covert activity at home and abroad to maintain Communism. From technological espionage to the cultivation of agents of influence, the KGB's methods ranged from financial inducements through sexual blackmail to assassination as they pursued their aims. What emerges is a state apparatus devoted to - even obsessed by - gathering information yet quite incapable of analysing it realistically.

In the Shadow of Papillon: Seven Years of Hell in Venezuela's Prison System


Frank Kane - 2006
    In desperation, he agreed to smuggle cocaine out of Venezuela. Almost inevitably, he and his girlfriend, Sam, were caught.The price they paid was a ten-year sentence in the hell of the overcrowded Venezuelan prison system, notorious for official corruption and abuse, and rife with weapons and gangs. At one point, Frank was held in the remote El Dorado prison, better known for being the one-time home of Henri Charrière, or Papillon. He witnessed countless murders as gang leaders fought for power, and he had to become as ruthless as his fellow inmates in order to survive. In an attempt to dull the reality of the horrendous conditions, he succumbed to drugs.After enduring years of systematic beatings by the guards and attempts on his life by inmates, Frank suffered more than one breakdown. He lost over four stone and was riddled with disease, but somehow he found the strength within himself to survive and was eventually released in 2004 after serving over seven years of his sentence. During the long walk back from hell, Frank decided to tell his story.

The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant


Michael Axworthy - 2006
    But suspicion and avarice led him to persecute the Persian people as savagely as any foreign conqueror had done. This book recreates the story of a remarkable, ruthless man, and includes much new research which will prove indispensable to historians and students.

Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism


Greg Grandin - 2006
    But America’s imperial identity was actually shaped much closer to home. In a brilliant excavation of long-obscured history, Empire’s Workshop shows how Latin America has functioned as a proving ground for American strategies and tactics overseas. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States’ imperial operations from Jefferson’s aspirations for an “empire of liberty” in Cuba and Spanish Florida to Reagan’s support for brutally oppressive but U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He traces the origins of Bush’s current policies back to Latin America, where many of the administration’s leading lights first embraced the deployment of military power to advance free market economics and enlisted the evangelical movement in support of their ventures.With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against U.S. domination, Grandin asks: If Washington failed to bring prosperity and democracy to Latin America—its own backyard “workshop”—what are the chances it will do so for the world?

Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science Two-Volume Set


Margaret A. Boden - 2006
    It brings together psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, computing, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology in the project of understanding the mind by modelling its workings. Oxford University Press now presents a masterful history of cognitive science, told by one of its most eminent practitioners.

Animals at War


Isabel George - 2006
    Their stories are as compelling and tragic as those of the soldiers they served.

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive


Carlo Ginzburg - 2006
    It looks deeply into questions raised by decades of post-structuralism: What constitutes historical truth? How do we draw a boundary between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between history and memory? How do we grapple with the historical conventions that inform, in different ways, all written documents? In his answers, Ginzburg peels away layers of subsequent readings and interpretations that envelop every text to make a larger argument about history and fiction. Interwoven with compelling autobiographical references, Threads and Traces bears moving witness to Ginzburg’s life as a European Jew, the abiding strength of his scholarship, and his deep engagement with the historian’s craft.

Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe


Jan-Werner Müller - 2006
    Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired.Müller pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age.

Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia


Margaret Schaus - 2006
    Moving beyond biographies of famous noble women of the middles ages, the scope of this important reference work is vast and provides a comprehensive understanding of medieval women's lives and experiences. Masculinity in the middle ages is also addressed to provide important context for understanding women's roles. Entries that range from 250 words to 4,500 words in length thoroughly explore topics in the following areas:- Art and Architecture- Countries, Realms, and Regions- Daily Life- Documentary Sources- Economics- Education and Learning- Gender and Sexuality- Historiography- Law- Literature- Medicine and Science- Music and Dance- Persons- Philosophy- Politics- Political Figures- Religion and Theology- Religious Figures- Social Organization and StatusWritten by renowned international scholars, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe is the latest in the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages. Easily accessible in an A-to-Z format, students, researchers, and scholars will find this outstanding reference work to be an invaluable resource on women in Medieval Europe.

Mao's Last Revolution


Roderick MacFarquhar - 2006
    In this book, the authors explain Mao's Machiavellian role in masterminding it, documenting the Hobbesian state which ensued.

Dr. Oma: The Healing Wisdom of Countess Juliana Von Stolberg


Ethel L. Herr - 2006
    Her granddaughter, Maria, tells the story of this remarkable woman who believes people should not be martyred for their beliefs.

The Encyclopedia of Tanks and Armored Fighting Vehicles: From World War I to the Present Day


Chris Bishop - 2006
    • This big, illustrated volume examines all of the significant tanks and armored vehicles of the world, from the very first tanks of World War One to modern combat engineer vehicles.• Divided into three easy-to-use sections, you're sure to find the information you're looking for quickly. Select from World War One and World War Two, The Cold War, and The Modern Era.• Each section is meticulously arranged by type: Tanks, armored vehicles, light vehicles, amphibious vehicles and half tracks.• Roll across Europe in a relentless Panther! Defend the Iron Curtain in a Russian T-10! Conduct modern warfare in the Gulf from a tough Bradley M2!• Also included are profiles of famous military transport like Tiger and Sherman Tanks, Rolls-Royce armored cars, and Scorpion recon tanks.

Lonely Planet The Cities Book


Lonely Planet - 2006
    Fully revised and updated, it's a celebration of 200 of the world's most exciting urban destinations, beautifully photographed and packed with trip advice and recommendations from our experts - making it the perfect companion for any traveller deciding where to visit next. - Highlights and itineraries help travellers plan their perfect trip - Urban tales reveal unexpected bites of history and local culture - Discover each city's strengths, best experiences and most famous exports - Includes the top ten cities for beaches, nightlife, food and more - Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler shares his all-time favourite cities - Fully revised and updated with the best cities to visit right now About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world's number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we've printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You'll also find our content online, on mobile, video and in 14 languages, 12 international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more. TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia)

In Search of the Lost Feminine: Decoding the Myths That Radically Reshaped Civilization


Craig S. Barnes - 2006
    Here, for the first time, an author weaves together threads that explain the mysterious disappearance of ancient cultures in which women and the environment were at the center, a loss that has dramatically influenced 3,500 years of Western history.

China: A New Cultural History


Cho-yun Hsu - 2006
    Unlike most historians, Hsu resists centering his narrative on China's political evolution, focusing instead on the country's cultural sphere and its encounters with successive waves of globalization. Beginning long before China's written history and extending through the twentieth century, Hsu follows the content and expansion of Chinese culture, describing the daily lives of commoners, their spiritual beliefs and practices, the changing character of their social and popular thought, and their advances in material culture and technology. In addition to listing the achievements of emperors, generals, ministers, and sages, Hsu builds detailed accounts of these events and their everyday implications. Dynastic change, the rise and fall of national ambitions, and the growth and decline of institutional systems take on new significance through Hsu's careful research, which captures the multiple strands that gave rise to China's pluralistic society. Paying particular attention to influential relationships occurring outside of Chinese cultural boundaries, he demonstrates the impact of foreign influences on Chinese culture and identity and identifies similarities between China's cultural developments and those of other nations.

The Beast of Gevaudan: La Bete Du Gevaudan


Pierre Pourcher - 2006
    She killed about one hundred people. Prowling Catholic pre-Revolutionary France, she spread terror among the aristocrats and peasants of the beautiful Auvergne countryside. Her story beats most mystery novels in false trails, horror and atmosphere. The big difference is La Bte was real, not fiction, and leaves for ever the unanswered question, "What was she?" All efforts to stop her failed and she became infamous throughout France. The king - Louis XV - took a personal interest in her activities and how to destroy her. Many explanations - alien, prehistoric beast, mutant etc. - were put forward at the time and during the two centuries since but none have ever been widely accepted. A mass of evidence remains that La Bte did exist and was not just a legend. Compared with other monster mysteries she is unique, leaving graves, witnessed parish records, and archives of official documents, many of them included in this book, proving her real and guilty beyond doubt. Read Pourcher's book carefully and draw your own conclusions. Even if you arrive at a conventional solution to the mystery, doubts might linger as darkness falls. If twigs crack, don't whistle.

African Sky


Tony Park - 2006
    Paul Bryant hasn't been able to get back in a plane since a fatal bombing mission over Germany. So, instead, the Squadron Leader is flying a desk at a pilot training school at Kumalo Air Base. But one of his trainees has just been reported missing.

Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present


John W. Cooper - 2006
    This belief system explains that "all is in God"; as a soul is related to a body, so God is related to the world. In "Panentheism--The Other God of the Philosophers," philosopher and theologian John Cooper traces the growth and evolution of this intricate theology from Plotinus to Alfred North Whitehead to the present. This landmark book--the first complete history of panentheism written in English--explores the subject through the lens of various thinkers, such as Plato, Jurgen Moltmann, Paul Tillich, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Charles Hartshorne, and discusses how panentheism has influenced liberation, feminist, and ecological theologies. Cooper not only sketches the evolution of panentheism but also critiques it; ultimately, he offers a defense of classical theism. This book is for readers who care deeply about theology and think seriously about their faith.

Maori Peoples of New Zealand =: Nga Iwi O Aotearoa


Te Ara - 2006
    - publisher's description

Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer


Alexander Maitland - 2006
    The author of Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs and The Life of my Choice, he was a legend in his own lifetime but his character and motivations have remained an intriguing enigma.In this authorized biography - written with Thesiger’s support before he died in 2003 and with unique access to the rich Thesiger archive - Alexander Maitland investigates this fascinating figure’s family influences, his wartime experiences, his philosophy as a hunter and conservationist, his writing and photography, his friendships with Arabs and Africans amongst whom he lived, and his now-acknowledged homosexuality.

The Emergence Of A Scientific Culture: Science And The Shaping Of Modernity, 1210-1685


Stephen Gaukroger - 2006
    Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners.The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development--and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.

From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States


Sadao Asada - 2006
    Hailed by the British Admiralty, Theodore Roosevelt, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, the international bestseller also was endorsed by the Japanese Naval Ministry, who took it as a clarion call to enhance their own sea power. That power, of course, was eventually used against the United States. Sadao Asada opens his book with a discussion of Mahan�s sea power doctrine and demonstrates how Mahan�s ideas led the Imperial Japanese Navy to view itself as a hypothetical enemy of the Americans. Drawing on previously unused Japanese records from the three naval conferences of the 1920s�the Washington Conference of 1921-22, the Geneva Conference of 1927, and the London Conference of 1930�the author examines the strategic dilemma facing the Japanese navy during the 1920s and 1930s against the background of advancing weapon technology and increasing doubt about the relevance of battleships. He also analyzes the decisions that led to war with the United States�namely, the 1936 withdrawal from naval treaties, the conclusion of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, and the armed advance into south Indochina in July 1941�in the context of bureaucratic struggles between the army and navy to gain supremacy. He concludes that the "ghost" of Mahan hung over the Japanese naval leaders as they prepared for war against the United State and made decisions based on miscalculations about American and Japanese strengths and American intentions.

Good-bye to the Mermaids: A Childhood Lost in Hitler's Berlin


Karin Finell - 2006
    It is the story of World War II as it affected three generations of middle-class German women: Karin, six years old when the war began, who was taken in by Hitler’s lies; her mother, Astrid, a rebellious artist who occasionally spoke out against the Nazis; and her grandmother Oma, a generous and strong-willed woman who, having spent her own childhood in America, brought a different perspective to the events of the time. It tells of a convoluted world where children were torn between fear and hope, between total incomprehension of events and the need to simply deal with reality.            In one of the relatively few recollections of the war from a German woman’s perspective, Finell relates what was for her a normal part of growing up: participating in activities of the Hitler Youth, observing Nazi customs at Christmas, and once being close enough to the Führer at a rally to make eye contact with him. She tells of how she first became aware of the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear, and of being asked to identify corpses from a bombed apartment house. She also depicts the lives of people tainted by Hitler’s influence: her half-Jewish relatives who gave in to the strain of trying to remain unnoticed; a favorite aunt who was gassed because she was old and had broken her hip; and a friend of the family who was involved in the abortive putsch against Hitler and hanged as a traitor.            When American and British forces intensified air raids on Berlin in 1943, Finell observed the stoical valor of women during the bombings, firestorms, and mass evacuations. Not yet a teenager, she witnessed the battle for Berlin and the mass rapes perpetrated by conquering Russian and Mongolian troops. Order was restored after the American and British troops arrived. The Marshall Plan jump-started an economic recovery for West Germany, provoking the Russians to blockade Berlin. From 1948 to 1949 the Americans and British kept Berlin’s residents alive with the airlift. But even though food was flown in, the people of Berlin continued to go hungry. Deprivation forced Berliners to look inward and face their collective guilt as they withstood the threat of Soviet occupation during these postwar years.            This eloquent and touching story tells how a decent people were perverted by Hitler and how a young girl ultimately came to recognize the father figure Hitler for the monster he was. From a time of innocence, Karin Finell takes readers along a nightmarish journey in which fantasies are clung to, set aside, and at last set free. Good-bye to the Mermaids presents us with the revelation that human beings can survive such times with their souls intact.

A Genius for Failure: The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon


Paul O'Keeffe - 2006
    * His second attempt also failed: a deep slash across his throat left a large pool of blood at the entrance to his studio, but he was still able to reach his easel on the opposite side of the room. *Only his third attempt, another cut to the throat which sprayed blood across his unfinished canvas, was successful. He died face-down before the bespattered 'Alfred and the First British Jury', his final bid 'to improve the taste of the English people' through the High Art of historical painting.* Such intensity, struggle and near-comic inability to succeed encapsulate Haydon's career. Thirty years before his death his huge, iconic paintings had made him the toast of early 19th-century London, drawing paying crowds to the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for months and leading to nationwide tours. * However, his attempt to repeat such success three months before his death was to destroy him: barely a soul turned up, leaving the desperate painter alone, humiliated, and facing financial ruin. * In A Genius for Failure Paul O'Keeffe makes clear that the real tragedy of Haydon lay in the extent to which his failures were unwittingly engineered by his own actions - his refusal to resort to the painting of fashionable portraits, for example, and his self-destructively acrimonious relationship with the RA.* The company he kept - Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, among many others - and the momentous events he lived through - The Battle of Waterloo, the Coronation of George IV, and the passing of the first Parliamentary Reform Bill - make A Genius for Failure not only the definitive biography of this fascinating and tragic painter, but a stirring portrayal of an age.

Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary


Aleksandr Fursenko - 2006
    In Khrushchev's Cold War, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, authors of the Cuban missile crisis classic "One Hell of a Gamble," bring to life head-to-head confrontations between Khrushchev and Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Drawing from their unrivaled access to Politburo and Soviet intelligence materials, they reveal for the first time three moments when Khrushchev's inner circle restrained him from plunging the superpowers into war. Combining new insights into the Cuban crisis, startling narratives on the hot spots of Suez, Iraq, Berlin, and Southeast Asia, and vivid portraits of leaders in the developing world who challenged Moscow and Washington, Castro, Lumumba, Nasser, and Mao Khrushchev's Cold War provides one of the most gripping and authoritative studies of the crisis years of the Cold War.

Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences v. 2


Vaclav Smil - 2006
    The history of the 20th century is rooted in amazing technical advances of 1871-1913, but the century differs so remarkably from the preceding 100 years because of several unprecedented combinations. The 20th century had followed on the path defined during the half century preceding the beginning of World War I, but it has traveled along that path at a very different pace, with different ambitions and intents. The new century's developments elevated both the magnitudes of output and the spatial distribution of mass industrial production and to new and, in many ways, virtually incomparable levels. Twentieth century science and engineering conquered and perfected a number of fundamental challenges which remained unresolved before 1913, and which to many critics appeared insoluble. This book is organized in topical chapters dealing with electricity, engines, materials and syntheses, and information techniques. It concludes with an extended examination of contradictory consequences of our admirable technical progress by confronting the accomplishments and perils of systems that brought liberating simplicity as well as overwhelming complexity, that created unprecedented affluence and equally unprecedented economic gaps, that greatly increased both our security and fears as well as our understanding and ignorance, and that provided the means for greater protection of the biosphere while concurrently undermining some of the key biophysical foundations of life on Earth. Transforming the Twentieth Century will offer a wide-ranging interdisciplinary appreciation of the undeniable technical foundations of the modern world as well as a multitude of welcome and worrisome consequences of these developments. It will combine scientific rigor with accessible writing, thoroughly illustrated by a large number of appropriate images that will include historical photographs and revealing charts of long-term trends.

Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond


Theodore Levin - 2006
    As performers from Tuva and other parts of inner Asia have responded to the growing worldwide popularity of their music, Levin follows them to the West, detailing their efforts to nourish global connections while preserving the power and poignancy of their music traditions. A DVD/CD video/music disk is included.

Fire and Sword in the Sudan


Rudolf C. von Slatin - 2006
    Under the leadership of their leader known as the Mahdi, a vast native army arose to throw off their Egyptian overlords and cast out its foreign governors. Suddenly what had seemed to Slatin like a well-ordered military career in a quiet back water became a savage struggle of survival between natives and foreigners. Slatin was captured and enslaved. Gordon was surrounded at his capital in Khartoum and beheaded. England eventually arose in outrage and sent out an army to retaliate. But it did not arrive before the young Austrian had undergone a series of adventures, survived cruelties too numerous to mention and escaped across the desert one step ahead of his enraged captors. Fire and Sword in the Sudan records the life story of one of the 19th century's most gallant soldiers, a man who after escaping from brutal slavery, was awarded military honours by Queen Victoria and returned to the Sudan to assist the very people who had held him in captivity. Amply illustrated, this timeless account remains one of the most important and captivating tales of the Sudan ever written.

Ships of the White Star Line


Richard P. De Kerbrech - 2006
    Its origins lay in Liverpool in the early 19th century, chartering sailing ships to Australia, but financial difficulties led to its takeover by Thomas Ismay in the 1860s. He was the founding father of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, the official name of the White Star Line. Despite a number of disasters with heavy loss of life, the company grew quickly to dominate the North Atlantic route, with famous ships such as Britannic and Germanic taking the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing several times in the late 19th century.At the turn of the century the company established an unrivalled standard of luxury in its new quartet of ships known as the Big Four, which led to the construction of the Olympic Class, which included Titanic. Despite the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, the Olympic had a long and successful career as the flagship of the White Star Line before the financial pressures of the Depression in the 1930s forced the merger of White Star with its rival Cunard.Ships of the White Star Line is the fruit of years of research by maritime historian Richard de Kerbrech. In it he tells the story of the company through all 89 ships that served the shipping line, each of which is illustrated with photographs, along with detailed technical information and vivid accounts of voyages and incidents.

Diasporic Africa: A Reader


Michael A. Gomez - 2006
    By incorporating Europe and North Africa as well as North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this reader shifts the discourse on the African diaspora away from its focus solely on the Americas, underscoring the fact that much of the movement of people of African descent took place in Old World contexts. This broader view allows for a more comprehensive approach to the study of the African diaspora.The volume provides an overview of African diaspora studies and features as a major concern a rigorous interrogation of identity. Other primary themes include contributions to western civilization, from religion, music, and sports to agricultural production and medicine, as well as the way in which our understanding of the African diaspora fits into larger studies of transnational phenomena.

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years


S. Fred Singer - 2006
    Instead, the mild warming seems to be part of a natural 1,500-year climate cycle that goes back at least one million years. Here, the authors present their case for this claim.

Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe


Stephen Brumwell - 2006
    Yet in 1759, Wolfe's victory, bought at the cost of his life, ensured that English, not French, would become the dominant language in North America. But was there more to James Wolfe than a celebrated death? This book seeks to answer that question.

Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade


Avner Greif - 2006
    Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. This book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration.

History of Civilizations of Central Asia: The Crossroads of Civilizations: A.D. 250 to 750


R. Shabani Samghabadi - 2006
    Waves of nomadic migrations and the formation of steppe empires left their mark on political and social life. This multiethnic society had its roots in the great religious traditions of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Christianity and Shamanism. The Islamization of a great part of the region brought fundamental changes to all aspects of life. Intensive trade along the Silk Route encouraged cultural and scientific exchanges, making this period one of impressive artistic and intellectual creativity.

Scottish Voices from the Great War


Derek Young - 2006
    Scotland's response to the Great War has, up until now, largely been marginalized or ignored. With a proportionally higher number of volunteers than any other home nation, Scotland's youth played a significant part in Britain's war effort. Here is the first study of Scotland's response to the call to arms; the true story behind the raising, the training, life in the trenches, and the sacrifices faced by those battalions raised in Scotland. This book focuses on the experiences of those who served in the Scottish divisions. Charting the course of emotions from initial enthusiasm in August 1914 through to outright disillusionment with the continuation of the war in 1917, the author clearly shows how life at the front line produced both physical and emotional changes in those caught up in the horrors of trench warfare.

The Flood Myths Of Early China


Mark Edward Lewis - 2006
    These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481-221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC-AD 220) China.In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire.

Diamonds in the Marsh: A Natural History of the Diamondback Terrapin


Barbara Brennessel - 2006
    But, as she buriesherself in the mud every night to sleep, the diamondback terrapinknows none of this. The size of a dinner plate, she can live at leastforty years and is the only turtle in North America who can live inbrackish and salty waters. The diamondback terrapin is named for thebeautiful concentric rings on its shell. Its habitat ranges from Cape Codto Corpus Christi, Texas, with seven subspecies identified along theAtlantic and Gulf coasts.

John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man


John Heilpern - 2006
    This startling biography—the first informed by the secret notebooks in which he recorded his otherwise hidden anguish and immobilizing depression—reveals Osborne in all his heartrending complexity.Osborne was born in rented rooms in South London, in 1929, to a tubercular father and a barmaid mother. An ailing child, he learned to box and was later expelled from school for hitting his headmaster. At fifteen, he began as a lowly journalist for Gas World but soon fled to join a repertory theater company. The craft he learned—as an actor and dramatist—would change his life, creating the means of both self-expression and self-concealment. Through five marriages—to actresses Pamela Lane, Mary Ure and Jill Bennett, and critics Penelope Gilliatt and Helen Dawson—his private life generated its own tumult and drama, farce and pathos. An impossible father, he denounced his teenage daughter as smug and suburban, threw her out of the house and never spoke to her again. When he died, on Christmas Eve, 1994, his last written words were “I have sinned.”This impeccably researched biography includes personal interviews with Osborne’s estranged daughter, scores of friends and enemies, and a bombshell of a confession from his alleged male lover. Heilpern, a theater critic himself, presents a contradictory genius—a hopelessly romantic English melancholic, a defiant individualist neither of the right nor of the left, an ogre with charm, a radical who hated change, a patriot who defended national values of language, music and custom. This is an essential, unorthodox, moving and extraordinarily frank portrait of the artist, the man and his times.

Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge


Linda Nash - 2006
    With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of “ecological” ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California’s Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.

The Oxford Companion to the Garden


Patrick Taylor - 2006
    It combines a survey of the world's gardens, biographies of garden designers, nurserymen, and others, and entries on the worlds of horticulture and plantsmanship, with articles on a range of topics from garden visiting to garden elements and styles, and from scientific issues to the social history of gardens.Sumptuous color photographs by some of the world's best garden photographers, and elegant engravings of historical subjects give a vivid impression of what it is like to be in these inspirational gardens. Every type of garden is covered, from palace gardens such as Versailles to private gardens of outstanding design or plant interest, public gardens, botanic gardens and arboreta, late 20th-century land art, and contemporary gardens everywhere. Central to the book are the garden cultures of Italy, Britain, France, China, Japan, and the USA--unquestionably the most significant in the world--but the geographical coverage is worldwide, including such far-flung regions as Turkey, Peru, and Bali.

The Creeds of Christendom, Vol 1.1: History of the Creeds


Philip Schaff - 2006
    The differences in belief between Calvinists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians, for example, can often be subtle, so a thorough examination of the particulars as well as an explanation for how those different beliefs result in a different worldview is necessary. Volume One: Part I covers: . creeds in general . the Ecumenical creeds . the creeds of the Greek Church . the creeds of the Roman Church . the creeds of the Evangelical Churches . the creeds of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches . the creeds of the Evangelical Reformed Churches. This volume contains the table of contents for all of Volume One. Swiss theologian PHILIP SCHAFF (1819-1893) was educated in Germany and eventually came to the United States to teach at the German Reformed Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He wrote a number of books and hymnals for children, including History of the Christian Church and The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches.

A Different Kind of War: The Un Sanctions Regime in Iraq


Hans C. von Sponeck - 2006
    It should be mandatory reading for all those politicians and their foreign-policy advisors who continue to consider sanctions an effective form of policy. The author not only offers us a critical, lucid, and well-informed survey of political developments in Iraq, but also a heart-rending account of the suffering of the Iraqi people. It was they who bore the brunt of the 13-year's sanctions, while the members of Saddam's regime continued to live in luxury and accumulate huge fortunes.H.-C. von Sponeck, the former -UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, - explores the UN's sanction policies against Iraq, their consequences, and the domestic conditions during this period. His extensive research is based on previously unpublished internal UN documents and discussions with UN decision makers (such as General Secretary Kofi Annan), Iraqi officials and politicians (including Saddam Hussein), and ordinary Iraqis. The author's findings question who really benefited from the program, what role the UN Security Council and its various member states played, and whether there were then and are today alternatives to the UN's Iraq policies.

World War I: The "Great War" Part 1 of 3, The Great Courses, Lecture Transcript and Course Guidebook Only


University of Tennessee Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius - 2006
    

Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet


Donald Larocca - 2006
    Many of these cultures left behind helmets, armor for men and horses, saddles, swords, archery equipment, and other arms, some of which are unique examples of previously unknown types. Dating from the 13th to the 19th century, they include masterly examples of pierced ironwork embellished with gold and silver, skillfully crafted swords and sword blades, and extremely rare examples of decorated leatherwork. This richly illustrated book explores each type in turn and features essays by leading scholars. Also included is the first glossary of Tibetan arms and armor terms as well as a selection of excerpts from some of the few surviving Tibetan texts relating to this subject.

The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 18th Century


Nigel Penn - 2006
    But there was an earlier frontier in which the conflict between Dutch colonists and these indigenous herders and hunters was in many ways more decisive in its outcome, more brutal and violent in its manner, and just as significant in its effects on later South African history. This was the frontier north of Cape Town, where Dutch settlers began advancing into the interior. By the end of the eighteenth century, the frontier had reached the Orange (Gariep) River. The indigenous Khoisan people, after initial resistance, had been defeated and absorbed as an underclass into the colonial world or else expelled beyond it, to regions where new creole communities emerged. Nigel Penn is a master storyteller who brings a novelist’s sensitivity to plot and character and a command of the archival record to bear in recovering this epic and forgotten story. Filled with extraordinary personalities and memorable episodes, and set in the often harsh landscape of the Western and Northern Cape, The Forgotten Frontier will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of history.

In the Name of Heaven: 3000 Years of Religious Persecution


M.J. Engh - 2006
    In the Name of Heaven is a wide-ranging historical survey of religious persecution encompassing three millennia and a great diversity of cultures worldwide. Defining religious persecution as "repressive actions initiated or condoned by authorities against their own people on religious grounds," author Mary Jane Engh begins with ancient Egypt, followed by the biblical history of Israel with its accounts of divinely ordered genocides and capital punishment for worshipers of other deities.Chapters are devoted to ancient Greece (Socrates, Alcibiades, and Aristotle, among others, clashed with the religious establishment); the Roman Empire (persecutions of Jews, Christians, and Manichaeans, and the later persecution of pagans and heretics by a Christianized Rome); the Islamic Empire (persecutions of polytheists and dissident Muslims); and medieval and Reformation Europe (where Protestants and Catholics persecuted each other and both persecuted heretics).The twenty-two chapters also cover Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific area. In an epilogue Engh reviews the new forms of religious persecution from the 20th century to the present—from major genocides and militant forms of polytheism to persecution of all religion by atheistic governments. Complete with references to further reading, this sobering but factually indisputable survey of religion’s dark side enlightens while serving as a warning for the future.

The Soldier's Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle


Ray E. Boomhower - 2006
    When he died, Pyle's popularity and readership was worldwide, with his column appearing in 400 daily and 300 weekly newspapers. Written by award-winning author and historian Ray E. Boomhower, The Soldier's Friend: A Life of Ernie Pyle, a biography aimed at young readers, explores the reporter's legendary career from his days growing up in the small town of Dana, Indiana, to his life as a roving correspondent with the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, to his growing fame as a columnist detailing the rigors of combat faced by the average G.I. during World War II. The book also features numerous illustrations, samples of Pyle's World War II columns, a detailed bibliography of World War II sources, and an index.

Oxford Handbook of Medical Sciences


Robert Wilkins - 2006
    The Oxford Handbook of Medical Sciences has been written by biomedical scientists and clinicians to explain the fundamental scientific principles that underpin clinical medicine, and to provide students with a firm grounding in the basic sciences. Frequent cross-referencing with the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine helps to highlight the clinical relevance of specific issues. Deliberately divided into systems-based sections that mirror modern medical teaching strategies, this handbook begins with a clear, easily digestable account of basic cell physiology and biochemistry. It then moves on to an investigation of the traditional piers of medicine (anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pathology, and pharmacology) integrated in the context of each of the major systems relevant to the human body. Well illustrated with clear diagrams and color images, it will prove especially useful for students on problem-based learning courses who are in need of a concise and user-friendly book, and will also serve as a refresher for those doing membership exams.

Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean (Jaguar Books on Latin America)


Darién J. DavisJason Stanyek - 2006
    In a rich set of essays, the volume explores the multiple ways that Africans have affected political, economic, and cultural life throughout the region. The contributors engage readers interested in the African diaspora in a series of vigorous debates ranging from agency and resistance to transculturation, displacement, cross-national dialogue, and popular culture. Documenting the array of diverse voices of Afro-Latin Americans throughout the region, this interdisciplinary book brings to life both their histories and contemporary experiences.

Understanding The Holocaust


David Engel - 2006
    When it was over, two-thirds of Europe's Jews, some 5.8 million people, had died - and their deaths had occurred amid the most gruesome of circumstances.Engel explores the reasons behind the Holocaust and attempts to enter into the minds of the participants. From the origins of the idea behind the killing campaign to the notions of modernity that many blame for creating the possibility for such a happening, Engel offers an illuminating analysis of the twentieth century's great tragedy.Lecture 1 What Is "The Holocaust" and What Can Be Learned by Studying Its History?Lecture 2 The Origins of a Murderous IdeaLecture 3 Why Germany?Lecture 4 From Idea to Action: The Twisted Road to AuschwitzLecture 5 Facing PersecutionLecture 6 The Ghetto RegimeLecture 7 Killing BeginsLecture 8 Organizing DeathLecture 9 German Successes and FailuresLecture 10 Fighting Death: The Problem of ConsciousnessLecture 11 Strategies for Living and DyingLecture 12 Their Brothers' Keepers?Lecture 13 While Six Million DiedLecture 14 The Holocaust and the Modern Condition

A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics


Paul Waldau - 2006
    Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including Thomas Berry (cultural history), Wendy Doniger (study of myth), Elizabeth Lawrence (veterinary medicine, ritual studies), Marc Bekoff (cognitive ethology), Marc Hauser (behavioral science), Steven Wise (animals and law), Peter Singer (animals and ethics), and Jane Goodall (primatology) consider how major religious traditions have incorporated animals into their belief systems, myths, rituals, and art. Their findings offer profound insights into humans' relationships with animals and a deeper understanding of the social and ecological web in which we all live.Contributors examine Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, Confucianism, African religions, traditions from ancient Egypt and early China, and Native American, indigenous Tibetan, and Australian Aboriginal traditions, among others. They explore issues such as animal consciousness, suffering, sacrifice, and stewardship in innovative methodological ways. They also address contemporary challenges relating to law, biotechnology, social justice, and the environment. By grappling with the nature and ideological features of various religious views, the contributors cast religious teachings and practices in a new light. They reveal how we either intentionally or inadvertently marginalize "others," whether they are human or otherwise, reflecting on the ways in which we assign value to living beings.Though it is an ancient concern, the topic of "Religion and Animals" has yet to be systematically studied by modern scholars. This groundbreaking collection takes the first steps toward a meaningful analysis.

Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1945-60


Charles McMoran Wilson Moran - 2006
    

Vietnam: A Natural History


Eleanor Jane Sterling - 2006
    This book is the first comprehensive account of Vietnam’s natural history in English. Illustrated with maps, photographs, and thirty-five original watercolor illustrations, the book offers a complete tour of the country’s plants and animals along with a full discussion of the factors shaping their evolution and distribution.Separate chapters focus on northern, central, and southern Vietnam, regions that encompass tropics, subtropics, mountains, lowlands, wetland and river regions, delta and coastal areas, and offshore islands. The authors provide detailed descriptions of key natural areas to visit, where a traveler might explore limestone caves or glimpse some of the country’s twenty-seven monkey and ape species and more than 850 bird species. The book also explores the long history of humans in the country, including the impact of the Vietnam-American War on plants and animals, and describes current efforts to conserve Vietnam’s complex, fragile, and widely threatened biodiversity.

Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita--The Artist Caught Between East & West


Phyllis Birnbaum - 2006
    Acclaimed writer and translator Phyllis Birnbaum not only explores Foujita's fascinating, tumultuous life but also assesses the appeal of his paintings, which, in their mixture of Eastern and Western traditions, are memorable for their vibrancy of form and purity of line.

The Oxford Companion to World Exploration


David Buisseret - 2006
    This coverage includes biographies, including Lewis and Clark, Ferdinand Magellan, Cheng Ho, Hern�n Cort�s, Ibn Battuta, Vitus Bering, and Christopher Columbus; national expeditions, including Portuguese, British, French, Chinese, Dutch, and Spanish; and navigational and marine sciences, such as navigational techniques, ancient and medieval navigation, ocean currents and winds, longitude, cartography, and aerial surveys. The Companion's temporal scope ranges from the ancient cultures of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Byzantium, China, Polynesia, and Rome, through to modern space exploration. The articles have been written by leading scholars from across the globe, utilizing the most current scholarship in the field of exploration studies.The Companion contains 800 entries, supplemented by 150 black-and-white and 50 full-color photographs and maps. Annotated primary source materials, such as travel logs and personal letters, supplement select biographies. Each entry is signed by a leading scholar in the field, contains a bibliography for further reading, and is cross-referenced to other useful points of interest within the Companion. Published in association with the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Companion reproduces more than 100 images from that institution's world-renowned collection.

Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples


Stephen F. Teiser - 2006
    For nearly two thousand years, artists have painted it onto the porches of Buddhist temples; preachers have used it to explain karmic retribution; and philosophers have invoked it to illuminate the contrast between ignorance and nirvana. In Reinventing the Wheel, noted scholar Stephen F. Teiser explores the history and varied interpretations of the Wheel of Rebirth, a circle divided into sections depicting the Buddhist cycle of transmigration.Combining visual evidence with textual sources, Reinventing the Wheel shows how the metaphor of the wheel has been interpreted in divergent local traditions, from India to Tibet, Central Asia, and China. Teiser deftly shows how written and painted renditions of the wheel have animated local architectural sites and religious rituals, informing concepts of time and reincarnation and acting as an organizing principle in the cosmology and daily life of practicing Buddhists.Engaging and accessible, this uniquely pan-Buddhist tour will appeal to anyone interested in Buddhist culture, as well as to scholars of religious studies, art history, architecture, philosophy, and textual studies.

Between the Lines: A History of Poetry in Letters, Part II: 1962-2002


Joseph Parisi - 2006
    What happened before and after this remarkable gift is now revealed in Between the Lines, edited by Poetry's longtime editor Joseph Parisi and its former senior editor Stephen Young. It is a concluding episode in the book that follows on the editors' Dear Editor (2002), which chronicled Poetry's first fifty years through its poignant, hilarious, and brutally frank correspondence with its contributing poets. Dear Editor told the story of Poetry's central role in the Modernist movement and its rise to a position as the acknowledged "magazine of verse." Between the Lines carries the narrative through the second revolution in American poetry, set against the backdrop of the restive early sixties, the tumultuous era of the Vietnam War, and the social upheavals of the last four decades. Virtually all of the close to five hundred letters in the book have never been printed before. In them, famous and aspiring authors tell Poetry's editors of their artistic aspirations, rivalries, problems and successes, unvarnished opinions, and reactions to events of the day, unfolding the improbable tale of how perennially impoverished Poetry survived to make literary--and financial--history. The book is abundantly illustrated with candid photographs, drawings, posters, programs, and clippings from newspapers and magazines.

The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730


Robert Markley - 2006
    Robert Markley explores the significance of attitudes to the wealth and power of East Asia in rethinking conceptions of national and personal identity in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English literature. Alongside works by canonical English authors, this study examines the writings of Jesuit missionaries, Dutch merchants, and English and continental geographers, who directly contended with the challenges that China and Japan posed to visions of western cultural and technological superiority. Questioning conventional Eurocentric histories, in this 2006 book Markley examines the ways in which the writings of Milton, Dryden, Defoe and Swift deal with the complexities of a world in which England was marginalised and which, until 1800, was dominated - economically at least - by the empires of the Far East.

Count Your Way Through Kenya


James Haskins - 2006
    Children learn about many of the countries' unique features from cultural to industrial and architectural landmarks.

An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque


Krista A. Thompson - 2006
    Surprisingly, the origins of those images can be traced back to the roots of the islands’ tourism industry in the 1880s. As Krista A. Thompson explains, in the late nineteenth century, tourism promoters, backed by British colonial administrators, began to market Jamaica and the Bahamas as picturesque “tropical” paradises. They hired photographers and artists to create carefully crafted representations, which then circulated internationally via postcards and illustrated guides and lectures.Illustrated with more than one hundred images, including many in color, An Eye for the Tropics is a nuanced evaluation of the aesthetics of the “tropicalizing images” and their effects on Jamaica and the Bahamas. Thompson describes how representations created to project an image to the outside world altered everyday life on the islands. Hoteliers imported tropical plants to make the islands look more like the images. Many prominent tourist-oriented spaces, including hotels and famous beaches, became off-limits to the islands’ black populations, who were encouraged to act like the disciplined, loyal colonial subjects depicted in the pictures.Analyzing the work of specific photographers and artists who created tropical representations of Jamaica and the Bahamas between the 1880s and the 1930s, Thompson shows how their images differ from the English picturesque landscape tradition. Turning to the present, she examines how tropicalizing images are deconstructed in works by contemporary artists—including Christopher Cozier, David Bailey, and Irénée Shaw—at the same time that they remain a staple of postcolonial governments’ vigorous efforts to attract tourists.

Global History and Geography (Barron's Regents Exams and Answers Books)


Martin & Streitwieser Lefton - 2006
    These ever popular guides contain study tips, test-taking strategies, score analysis charts, and other valuable features. They are an ideal source of practice and test preparation. The detailed answer explanations make each exam a practical learning experience.

The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression


Christine Ross - 2006
    In The Aesthetics of Disengagement Christine Ross shows how contemporary art is a powerful yet largely unacknowledged player in the articulation of depression in Western culture, both adopting and challenging scientific definitions of the condition. Ross explores the ways in which contemporary art performs the detached aesthetics of depression, exposing the viewer's loss of connection and ultimately redefining the function of the image. Ross examines the works of Ugo Rondinone, Rosemarie Trockel, Ken Lum, John Pilson, Liza May Post, Vanessa Beecroft, and Douglas Gordon, articulating how their art conveys depression's subjectivity and addresses a depressed spectator whose memory and perceptual faculties are impaired. Drawing from the fields of psychoanalysis as well as psychiatry, Ross demonstrates the ways in which a body of art appropriates a symptomatic language of depression to enact disengagement - marked by withdrawl, radical protection of the self from the other, distancing signals, isolation, communication ruptures, and perceptual insufficiency. Most important, Ross reveals the ways in which art transforms disengagement into a visual strategy of disclosure, a means of reaching the viewer, and how in this way contemporary art puts forth a new understanding of depression.

Lost Cities from the Ancient World


Maria Teresa Guaitoli - 2006
    Superb photographs and careful reconstructions of their urban layout help the reader to understand the cities importance to the civilizations that built them: Knossos and Athens, the elegant cities of southern Italy, imperial Rome, Leptis Magna, Thebes the powerful, splendid Palmyra, the megalopolis of Babylon, Ur and Persepolis, the ancient capitals of the Chinese empire, magical Angkor, Teotihuacán, Chichén Itzá, Cuzco and Machu Picchu.The journey through the cites of ancient civilizations could go on forever; new discoveries continue to shed further light on the existence of ancient peoples, whose obscure past gradually becomes more visible through the work of archaeologists. This book is a tribute to the great cities of the past, masterpieces of urban construction, treasure chests of art and history and, not least, the places where human kind cultivated the social roots and developed the multiethnic and cosmopolitan societies that today govern the destiny of our planet.

Towards an Era of Development: The Globalization of Socialism and Christian Democracy, 1945 1965


Peter Van Kemseke - 2006
    For the first time, theories and policies designed to eradicate underdevelopment became prominent on the agenda of the United Nations. This international evolution inevitably had a dramatic impact on socialism and Christian democracy, two major ideologies with their roots in Western Europe. Both became part of the global political dialogues taking place beyond Europe's borders. The result was a sometimes violent clash of Western and non-Western belief systems.In Towards an Era of Development, Peter Van Kemseke explores the questions of whether political ideologies were being used as vehicles for promoting national interests and if socialism and Christian democracy were forced on developing nations or naturally spread to new parts of the globe. Van Kemseke also offers an assessment of the success of these ideologies in their new territories.

Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism


Gene W. Heck - 2006
    Heck explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europe s twelfth century commercial renaissance. Determining that Europe s medieval feudal interregnum was largely caused by indigenous governmental business regulation and not by shifts in international trade patterns, he demonstrates how Islamic economic precepts provided the ideological rationales that empoweredmedieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in Dark Age economics in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism."

City Trees: A Historical Geography from the Renaissance Through the Nineteenth Century


Henry W. Lawrence - 2006
    Lawrence provides a comprehensive and handsome guide to the history of trees in urban landscapes. Covering four centuries of development in the cities of Europe and America, this book shows how trees became integral to urban landscapes by looking at the historical evolution of the spaces in which they were planted and how these spaces were used.Reflecting on the impact trees have had on what many consider to be the fundamental aspects of city life--people, buildings, social and economic activity--Lawrence draws on graphic materials, written descriptions, local histories, and archival research to provide a unique look at the tree's role in urban landscape history. Primarily concerned with aesthetics, power, and national traditions, Lawrence reflects on the differing impacts city trees have had on multiple aspects of culture, from their roles as symbols and their representation of economic prosperity to the differing ways nations planted their trees, which gradually blended into an international style of urban planting.Complete with fascinating illustrations, City Trees will appeal to those interested in urban history and geography as well as the general public interested in cities, cultural history, and landscape design.

Beluga Whales


Ann O. Squire - 2006
    The Charateristics of Organisms: a. Organisms have basic needs.- C-2. Life Cycle of Organisms: a. Plants and animals have life cycles that include being born, developing into adults, reproducing, and eventually dying.- C-3. Organisms and the Environment: c. All organisms cause changes in the environments where they live.

Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez, and Decolonization


William Roger Louis - 2006
    Louis traces the British Empire from the scramble for Africa, the turbulent imperial history of the Second World War in Asia, and the mid-20th century rush to independence to the Suez crisis, the icon of empire's end. It forms the ideal platform from which to examine the aims and outcome of empire. This authoritative and highly engaging history appears at a time when interest in the history of the British Empire has, ironically, never been stronger, making Ends of British Imperialism a must-read item for both scholar and general reader.

China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World


John W. Garver - 2006
    China remains one of Iran's strongest allies on the Security Council, and also its most likely supplier of technology and assistance, built on decades of close economic and military relations. Iran is enjoying strong new influence in the Middle East and Asia following record oil profits and Shi'i victories in Iraqi parliamentary elections. Like Iran, China fought for decades to increase its self-reliance and geopolitical influence after painful experiences under European colonialism, which spurred nationalist revolutions.With China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World, John Garver breaks new ground on the relationship between the People's Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Grounding his survey in the twin concepts of civilization and power, Garver explores the relationship between these two ancient and proud peoples, each of which consider the other a peer and a partner in their mutual determination to build a post-Western-dominated Asia. Successive governments of both China and Iran have recognized substantial national capabilities in each other, capabilities that allow the countries to achieve their own national interests through cooperation. These interests have varied - from countering Soviet expansionism to resisting U.S. unilateralism - but the cooperative relationship between the two nations has remained constant.In his compelling analysis, Garver explores the evolution of Sino-Iranian relations through several phases, including Iran under the shah and before the 1979 revolution; from the 1979 revolution to 1989, a year marked both by the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the beginning of conflict in Sino-U.S. relations; and from 1989 to 2004. China and Iran includes discussion of the current debates at the International Atomic Energy Agency over Iran's nuclear programs and China's role in assisting these programs and in supporting Iran in international debates. Garver examines China's involvement in Iran's efforts to modernize its military, including China's offer of weapons, capital goods, and engineering services in exchange for Iranian oil, suggesting links between this energy exchange and China's support for Iran in political arenas.In today's political climate, where China is recognized as a rising and increasingly influential global power and Iran as one of the most powerful nations in the Middle East, this book presents a crucial analysis of a topic of utmost importance to scholars and the general public today.

If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade


Eric Robert Taylor - 2006
    As Eric Robert Taylor shows, though most revolts were crushed quickly, others raged on for hours, days, or weeks and, occasionally, the Africans captured the vessel and returned themselves to freedom. In recounting these rebellions, Taylor suggests that certain factors, like geographic location, the involvement of women and children, and the timing of a shipboard revolt, determined the difference between success and failure. The author also explores issues like aid from other ships, punishment of slave rebels, and treatment of sailors captured by the Africans. If We Must Die expands the historical view of slave resistance, revealing a continuum of rebellions that spanned the Atlantic as well as the centuries. These uprisings, Taylor argues, ultimately helped limit and end the traffic in enslaved Africans and also served as crucial predecessors to the many revolts that occurred subsequently on plantations throughout the Americas.

Pizarro


Stuart Stirling - 2006
    In 1530, at the age of fifty-four, he set out on his successful and bloody conquest of Peru, thus changing the future of a continent and its peoples forever. It was a long way from his humble beginnings as an illiterate, illegitimate pig-herder. Within these pages Stuart Stirling tells the story of adversity and tragedy which was the life of Francisco Pizarro. By the standards of the time, Pizarro was an elderly man when he conquered Peru. He had served as a foot soldier in Spain's Italian wars and later earned a living as an Indian fighter and slaver. Audacious, ruthless and cruel, Pizarro had a surprising and almost fatalistic belief in the Indies as an escape from his illegitimacy. Luck also played a major part in his invasion of Peru - Pizarro's 200 men should not have been able to defeat the indigenous army of more than 30,000, but they did. However, the Spanish conquest saw few happy endings, even for Pizarro, who was now rich beyond his wildest dreams. Eleven years after the conquest, he was assassinated by his one-time Spanish allies. Stuart Stirling's researches in the Archives of the Indies in Seville enable him to present an accurate portrait of Pizarro as a man of his time, and to place even his most infamous act - the killing of the Inca king Atahualpa - within context. This book brings the man to life against a turbulent background of exploration, discovery, empire building and a clash of cultures.