Now, a former Senior Editor for "Maxim gives a crash course on the men behind our favorite labels, including:

    Its focus on the basics of source criticism, rather than on how to find references or on the process of writing, makes it an invaluable guide for all students of history and for anyone who must extract meaning from written and unwritten sources.Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier explore the methods employed by historians to establish the reliability of materials; how they choose, authenticate, decode, compare, and, finally, interpret those sources. Illustrating their discussion with examples from the distant past as well as more contemporary events, they pay particular attention to recent information media, such as television, film, and videotape.The authors do not subscribe to the positivist belief that the historian can attain objective and total knowledge of the past. Instead, they argue that each generation of historians develops its own perspective, and that our understanding of the past is constantly reshaped by the historian and the world he or she inhabits.A substantially revised and updated edition of Prevenier's Uit goede bron, originally published in Belgium and now in its seventh edition, From Reliable Sources also provides a survey of western historiography and an extensive research bibliography.

    Elton's classic account of the Reformation, revealing the issues & preoccupations central to the age & portraying its leading figures with vigor & realism. Table of Contents/MapsPreface to the 1st Edition 1. LutherThe Attack on Rome The State of Germany 2. Charles V3. Years of Triumph The Progress of Lutheranism ZwingliThe Wars of Charles V 4. The Radicals5. Outside Germany The SouthThe West The North The East 6. The Formation of Parties The Emergence of Protestantism The Search for a Solution7. The Revival of RomeCatholic ReformCounter-Reformation The Jesuits & the New Papacy 8. CalvinThe Meaning of Calvinism The Reformation in Geneva The Spread of Calvinism9. War & PeaceThe Triumph of Charles V The Defeat of Charles V The End of an Age10. The AgeThe Religious Revolution Art, Literature & Learning The Nation StateSocietyThe Expansion of Europe Afterword 2nd Edition-Andrew Pettegree NotesFurther Reading Index

    But that year, at age forty-two, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn—King Lear—then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.It was a memorable year in England as well—and a grim one, in the aftermath of a terrorist plot conceived by a small group of Catholic gentry that had been uncovered at the last hour. The foiled Gunpowder Plot would have blown up the king and royal family along with the nation’s political and religious leadership. The aborted plot renewed anti-Catholic sentiment and laid bare divisions in the kingdom.It was against this background that Shakespeare finished Lear, a play about a divided kingdom, then wrote a tragedy that turned on the murder of a Scottish king, Macbeth. He ended this astonishing year with a third masterpiece no less steeped in current events and concerns: Antony and Cleopatra.The Year of Lear sheds light on these three great tragedies by placing them in the context of their times, while also allowing us greater insight into how Shakespeare was personally touched by such events as a terrible outbreak of plague and growing religious divisions. For anyone interested in Shakespeare, this is an indispensable book.

    J. M. Blaut persuasively argues that this doctrine is not grounded in the facts of history and geography, but in the ideology of colonialism. Blaut traces the colonizer's model of the world from its 16th-century origins to its present form in theories of economic development, modernization, and new world order.

    They illuminate the political, social and personal assumptions which have governed and sustained historical practice and theory. The book also brings into focus the key historiographic trends since World War Two. Key themes which are highlighted include: - The role of sources - The nation - Marxism - Radicalism - Structural history - Gender - Race - Statistics and economics Ranging widely from the earlier traditions and schools to the wake of postmodernism, authors represented include Braudel, Zeldin, Elton Carr, Hobsbawm, Joyce and Evans. This Reader provides the core reading for all History and Theory courses and will promote further debate across cognate disciplines including philosophy and literature."

    . . a marvelous source for the social history of Russian peasant society in the years before the revolution. . . . The translation is superb." —Steven Hoch" . . . one of the best ethnographic portraits that we have of the Russian village. . . . a highly readable text that is an excellent introduction to the world of the Russian peasantry." —Samuel C. RamerVillage Life in Late Tsarist Russia provides a unique firsthand portrait of peasant family life as recorded by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, an ethnographer and painter who spent four years at the turn of the twentieth century observing the life and customs of villagers in a central Russian province. Unusual in its awareness of the rapid changes in the Russian village in the late nineteenth century and in its concentration on the treatment of women and children, Semyonova's ethnography vividly describes courting rituals, marriage and sexual practices, childbirth, infanticide, child-rearing practices, the lives of women, food and drink, work habits, and the household economy. In contrast to a tradition of rosy, romanticized descriptions of peasant communities by Russian upper-class observers, Semyonova gives an unvarnished account of the harsh living conditions and often brutal relationships within peasant families.

    This book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and wonder, from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as objects of natural inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders of nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is simultaneously a history of the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists. Pursued in tandem, these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than opposed to one another.--From the IntroductionWonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions--these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.

    Most people who hold these beliefs are Christian and assume they are the age-old teachings of the Bible. But eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament and are not what Jesus or his disciples taught. So where did the ideas come from? In clear and compelling terms, Bart Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. He discusses ancient guided tours of heaven and hell, in which a living person observes the sublime blessings of heaven for those who are saved and the horrifying torments of hell for the damned. Some of these accounts take the form of near death experiences, the oldest on record, with intriguing similarities to those reported today. One of Ehrman’s startling conclusions is that there never was a single Greek, Jewish, or Christian understanding of the afterlife, but numerous competing views. Moreover, these views did not come from nowhere; they were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. Only later, in the early Christian centuries, did they develop into the notions of eternal bliss or damnation widely accepted today. As a historian, Ehrman obviously cannot provide a definitive answer to the question of what happens after death. In Heaven and Hell, he does the next best thing: by helping us reflect on where our ideas of the afterlife come from, he assures us that even if there may be something to hope for when we die, there is certainly nothing to fear.

    Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade.Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths.Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.

     These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten.  Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation.  In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over.  Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed.  Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved.  Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe.  Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities.Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s.  Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.

    It is more than just a topic of intellectual interest: it has become part of a moral and political heritage. But after two centuries, this central event in French history has usually been thought of in much the same terms as it was by its contemporaries. There have been many accounts of the French Revolution, and though their opinions differ, they have often been commemorative or anniversary interpretations of the original event. The dividing line of revolutionary historiography, in intellectual terms, is therefore not between the right and the left, but between commemorative and conceptual history, as exemplified respectively in the works of Michelet and Tocquevifle. In this book, Fran�ois Furet analyses how an event like the French Revolution can be conceptualised, and identifies the radically new changes the Revolution produced as well as the continuity it provided, albeit under the appearance of change. This question has become a riddle for the European left, answered neither by Marx nor by the theorists of our own century. In his analysis of the tragic relevance of the Revolution, Furet both refers to contemporary experience and discusses various elements in the work of Alexis de Tocclueville and that of Augustin Cochin, which has never been systematically applied by historians of the Revolution. Furet's book is based on the complementary ideas of these two writers in an attempt to cut through the apparent and misleading clarity of various contradictory views of the Revolution, and to help decipher some of the enigmatic problems of revolutionary ideology. It will be of value to historians of modern Europe and their students; to political, social and economic historians; to sociologists; and to students of political thought.

    Famed for his military successes and domestic reforms, his campaigns were a watershed in the history of Europe - securing Prussia's place as a continental power and inaugurating a new pattern of total war that was to endure until 1916. However, much myth surrounds this enigmatic man - his personality and his role as politician, warrior and king. Showalter's cleverly written book provides a refreshing, multidimensional depiction of Frederick the Great and an objective, detailed reappraisal of his military, political and social achievements.Early chapters set the scene with an excellent summary of 18th century Europe - The Age of Reason; an analysis of the character, composition and operating procedures of the Prussian army; and explore Frederick's personality as a young man. Later chapters examine his stunning victories at Rossbach and Leuthen, his defeats at Prague and Kolin and Prussia's emergence as a key European power.Written with style and pace, this book offers brilliant insights into the political and military history of the 18th century, and one of history's most famous rulers.

    For this second edition, George Huppert has added a new chapter on the incessant warfare of the age and thoroughly updated the bibliographical essay.

    Names of Kings and major political/military persons have been updated and major typographical errors found with the previous Kindle edition have been corrected. Combined with copious illustrations, maps and images, the newly revised Dark Ages is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand a critical period in Western history that saw the transition from Roman Imperial rule to conquest-driven tribal rule and, ultimately, a flowering into the High Middle Ages. Oman provides one of the best historical examinations and explanations about the period widely known as the Dark Ages, when the end of total and complex Roman Imperial rule over Europe and the Mediterranean collapsed, taking the institutions that provided so much cultural sophistication and stability with it. Very much a work about how Europe, and the Western Tradition, survived after the Roman collapse. The Dark Ages has also been split into three books, mainly for ease of reading; the original book published in 1893 was a massive tome that covered the period from 476 CE to 918 CE. This first book in the new edition covers the period from 476 CE to 603 CE:ODOACER AND THEODORIC 476-493THEODORIC KING OF ITALY 493-526THE EMPERORS AT CONSTANTINOPLE 476-527CLOVIS I AND THE FRANKS IN GAUL 481-511JUSTINIAN AND HIS WARS 528-540JUSTINIAN 540-565 CETHE EARLIER FRANKISH KINGS 511-561THE VISIGOTHS IN SPAIN 531-603