They are difficult to shatter, for they perpetuate the popular belief that the nation has always enjoyed universal democracy, honesty, and opportunity. The New England Town, however, deserves more than a mythical place in American history. In this industrial village society, the unique American experience had its beginnings.In his highly original and controversial study. Professor Lockridge traces the origins of Dedham, Massachusetts, carefully examining its establishment as a utopia in 1636, the changes that occurred during the first four generations of its settlement, and the kind of community it had become by the mid-eighteenth century. In bringing to life this peculiarly American town he creates a view of all New England towns, so vital to an understanding of how the American character and society were shaped. He also gives answers to the basic questions shrouded by the myths: Was the New England Town democratic? Was it equalitarian? Was opportunity great? was society mobile? was it static or dynamic? Who had power, and who wanted it? In examining these questions Professor Lockridge has gone to the heart of the controversy surrounding the New England Town experience, finding some truth, and not a little irony, in the myth.This enlarged edition includes an updated bibliography and an afterword in which Lockridge addresses two questions about the story of Dedham: What does it tell us about the impulses that led to American independence? The answers to these questions suggest the connections between the "new" social history and the broad political themes of the revolutionary period.

    Since then, this idea has been constantly propagated for the benefit of the international community. For many living in the vast country, however, the old Chinese adage holds true: “the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.” Few Westerners make it far beyond the major cities—the Chinese government has made it difficult to do so. David Eimer undertook a dangerous journey to China’s unexplored frontiers (it borders on fourteen other countries), to the outer reaches where Beijing's power has little influence. His chronicle shines new light on the world’s most populous nation, showing clearly that China remains in many ways a divided state. Traveling through the Islamic areas of Xinjiang province, into the forbidden zone of Tibet and across Route 219, which runs the rough boundary shared with India, the only disputed frontier in China, Eimer exposes the country’s inner conflict. All the tensions in China today—from its war against drugs and terrorism and the unstable relationships it maintains with Russia and Korea to its internal social issues—take on new meaning when seen from China’s most remote corners. A brilliant melding of journalism and history, The Emperor Far Away is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary China.

    Written in the racy, readable prose for which the author is famous, this is colourful, character-driven history at its most enjoyable.This magnificent undertaking tackles a vast subject — vast in time (from the oldest surviving pyramid to the First World War); vast in geography (from Gibraltar to Jerusalem); and vast in culture, including as it does the civilizations of the Phoenicians, the Ancient Egyptians, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Byzantium, as well as the Borgias and the Medicis, Mohammed and El Cid, Napoleon and Nelson, Moslems, Jews and Christians.The Middle Sea is not a dry record of facts; it is a rackety read about historical figures — dissolute Popes and wily Emperors, noble-hearted Generals and beautiful Princesses. But his greatest strength is naval and military history: from the Crusades to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain; from Trafalgar to Gallipoli. Towns are besieged and sacked, Kingdoms are won and lost. The narrative covers the glories of Constantinople and Venice, and the stirring history of the islands of the Mediterranean — Malta, Sicily, Crete and Cyprus.The Middle Sea is the culmination of John Julius Norwich’s long and distinguished career as one of the greatest enthusiasts for anecdotal history, and the highways and byways of scholarship.

    This book is not for the squeamish. It blends the intrinsic pathos and humor peculiar to war with face-to-face combat in the bush and death at point-blank range. Now, here is your chance to read what several critics have called the best book on the Rhodesian War ever written.

    Challenging societal beliefs, this volume rethinks African and world history from an Afrocentric perspective.

    Their armies threatened states as far flung as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time. How this collection of Arabian tribes was able to engulf so many empires, states, and armies in such a short period has perplexed historians for centuries. Most accounts of the Arab invasions have been based almost solely on the early Muslim sources, which were composed centuries later to illustrate the divinely chosen status of the Arabs. Robert Hoyland's groundbreaking new history assimilates not only the rich biographical information of the early Muslim sources but also the many non-Arabic sources, contemporaneous or near- contemporaneous with the conquests.In God's Path begins with a broad picture of the Late Antique world prior to the Prophet's arrival, a world dominated by two superpowers: Byzantium and Sasanian Persia. In between these empires, emerged a distinct Arabian identity, which helped forge the inhabitants of western Arabia into a formidable fighting force. The Arabs are the principal actors in this drama yet, as Hoyland shows, the peoples along the edges of Byzantium and Persia--the Khazars, Bulgars, Avars, and Turks--all played critical roles in the remaking of the old world order. The new faith propagated by Muhammad and his successors made it possible for many of the conquered peoples to join the Arabs in creating the first Islamic Empire. Well-paced, comprehensive, and eminently readable, In God's Path presents a sweeping narrative of a transformational period in world history.

    These nomadic peoples from central Asia briefly held sway over an empire that stretched across Asia to the frontiers of Germany and the shores of the Adriatic. Surprisingly little has been written on this vast and immensely influential empire, known chiefly through the charismatic leaders, Chingis Khan and Kublai Khan.J. J. Saunders's landmark book, first published in 1972, is a carefully documented introductory history of the rise and fall of the great Mongol empire. Saunders sets the historical stage with a discussion of nomad groups and cultures at the dawn of the second millennium, and then traces the rise of the Mongol conquests through the earlier Turkish expansion into Asia between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Beginning in the early 1200s, the Mongols led by Chingis Khan began their insatiable assault on all the kingdoms and peoples around them, erasing whole cities, killing entire populations, forcing mass migrations, and permanently changing the distribution of the world's major religions. The Mongols were finally checked along the edges of Europe and forced out of the Middle East by rejuvenated Muslim factions.As Saunders concludes, one of the major legacies of the Mongol conquests was the transfer of intellectual and scientific primacy of the Old World from Islamic societies to Western Europe, paving the way for the Renaissance.

    But in the last decades of the century, the spread of science and technology, industrialism, urbanization, immigration, and economic depressions eroded this world-view. In The Search for Order, Robert Wiebe depicts the Progressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as a search for organizing principles around which a new viable social order could be constructed in the new, modern, largely impersonal world. This subtle and sophisticated study combines the virtues of historical narrative, sociological analysis, and social criticism.

    One invention of particular import, writes White, was the stirrup, which in turn introduced heavy, long-range cavalry to the medieval battlefield. The development thus escalated small-scale conflict to "shock combat." Cannons and flamethrowers followed, as did more peaceful inventions, such as watermills and reapers.

    David Morgan explains how the vast Mongolian Empire was organized and governed, examing the religious and policital character of the steppe nomadic society.

    The Jewish kingdom, composed of ethnic Arabs who had converted to Judaism more than a century before, had launched a bloody pogrom against Christians in the region. The ruler of Ethiopia, who claimed descent from the union of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and even was rumored to possess an object no less venerable than the Ark of the Covenant, aspired both to protect the persecuted Christians and to restore Ethiopian control in the Arabian Peninsula. Though little known today, this was an international war that involved both the Byzantine Empire, who had established Christian churches in Ethiopia beginning in the fourth century, and the Sasanian Empire in Persia, who supported the Jews in a proxy war with Byzantium. Our knowledge of these events derives mostly from an inscribed throne at the Ethiopian port of Adulis seen and meticulously described by a Christian merchant known as Cosmos in the sixth century. Trying to decipher and understand this monument takes us directly into religious conflicts that occupied the nations on both sides of the Red Sea in late antiquity. Using the writings of Cosmas and archaeological evidence from the period, historian G. W. Bowersock offers a narrative account of this fascinating but overlooked chapter in pre-Islamic Arabian history. The extraordinary story told in Throneof Adulis provides an important and much neglected background for the rise of Islam as well as the collapse of the Persian Empire before the Byzantines.

    Africans have been pioneers struggling against disease and nature, and their social, economic and political institutions have been designed to ensure their survival. In the context of medical progress and other twentieth-century innovations, however, the same institutions have bred the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen. The history of the continent is thus a single story binding living Africans to their earliest human ancestors. John Iliffe was Professor of African History at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of St. John's College. He is the author of several books on Africa, including A modern history of Tanganyika and The African poor: A history, which was awarded the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association of the United States. Both books were published by Cambridge University Press.

    Bennison contradicts the common assumption that Islam somehow interrupted the smooth flow of Western civilization from its Graeco-Roman origins to its more recent European and American manifestations. Instead, she places Islamic civilization in the longer trajectory of Mediterranean civilizations and sees the ‘Abbasid Empire (750–1258 CE) as the inheritor and interpreter of Graeco-Roman traditions.At its zenith the ‘Abbasid caliphate stretched over the entire Middle East and part of North Africa, and influenced Islamic regimes as far west as Spain. Bennison’s examination of the politics, society, and culture of the ‘Abbasid period presents a picture of a society that nurtured many of the “civilized” values that Western civilization claims to represent, albeit in different premodern forms: from urban planning and international trade networks to religious pluralism and academic research. Bennison’s argument counters the common Western view of Muslim culture as alien and offers a new perspective on the relationship between Western and Islamic cultures.

    For more than a century, Algeria had been legally and administratively part of France; after the bloody war that concluded in 1962, it was other--its eight million Algerian residents deprived of French citizenship while hundreds of thousands of French pieds noirs were forced to return to a country that was never home. This rupture violated the universalism that had been the essence of French republican theory since the late eighteenth century. Shepard contends that because the amputation of Algeria from the French body politic was accomplished illegally and without explanation, its repercussions are responsible for many of the racial and religious tensions that confront France today. In portraying decolonization as an essential step in the inexorable tide of history, the French state absolved itself of responsibility for the revolutionary change it was effecting. It thereby turned its back not only on the French of Algeria--Muslims in particular--but also on its own republican principles and the 1958 Constitution. From that point onward, debates over assimilation, identity, and citizenship--once focused on the Algerian province/colony--have troubled France itself. In addition to grappling with questions of race, citizenship, national identity, state institutions, and political debate, Shepard also addresses debates in Jewish history, gender history, and queer theory.

    He talked to presidents and guerrilla leaders, university professors and witch doctors. He bounced from wars to coups oceans apart, catching midnight flights to little-known countries where supposedly decent people were doing unspeakable things to one another. In the tradition of John Gunther's Inside Africa, The Africans is an extraordinary combination of analysis and adventure. Part travelogue, part contemporary history, it is a portrait of a continent that sometimes seems hell-bent on destroying itself, and of people who are as courageous as they are long-suffering.