Deth in the New World

cross-cultural encounters, 1492-1800

Reminders of death were everywhere in the New World, from the epidemics that devastated Indian populations and the mortality of slaves working the Caribbean sugar cane fields to the unfamiliar diseases that afflicted Europeans in the Chesapeake and West Indies. According to historian Erik R ...

Buddhism and Islam on the silk road

In the contemporary world the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is most often imagined as one of violent confrontation. Indeed, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 seemed not only to reenact the infamous Muslim destruction of Nalanda monastery in the thirteenth ...

Fictions of well-being

sickly readers and vernacular medical writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain

From the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries in Spain, health- related information in the vernacular began to circulate widely in treatises, compendiums, manuals, plague tracts, summaries, encyclopedias, and recipe collections. These were often the work of concerned physicians who attempted to refashion medical information to ...

Through the history of the Cold War

the correspondence of George F. Kennan and John Lukacs

Ed. John Lukacs. In September 1952, John Lukacs, then a young and unknown historian, wrote George Kennan (1904-2005), the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, asking one of the nation's best-known diplomats what he thought of Lukacs's own views on Kennan's ...

Conflict and compliance

state responses to international human rights pressure

International human rights pressure has been applied to numerous states with varying results. In Conflict and Compliance, Sonia Cardenas examines responses to such pressure and challenges conventional views of the reasons states do-or do not-comply with international law. Data from disparate bodies of research suggest ...

The international struggle for new human rights

Ed. Clifford Bob. In recent years, aggrieved groups around the world have routinely portrayed themselves as victims of human rights abuses. Physically and mentally disabled people, indigenous peoples, AIDS patients, and many others have chosen to protect and promote their interests by advancing new human ...

International Human Rights

an introduction

For more than half a century, the world community has sought to codify a series of fundamental precepts intended to prevent such abuses of human rights as torture, discrimination, starvation, and forced eviction. The United Nations, other international organizations, regional institutions, and governments have developed ...

Augustine's manichaean dilemma

1. Conversion and apostasy, 373-388 C.E.

Augustine of Hippo is history's best-known Christian convert. The very concept of conversio owes its dissemination to Augustine's Confessions, and yet, as Jason BeDuhn notes, conversion in Augustine is not the sudden, dramatic, and complete transformation of self we likely remember it to ...

Electing the President, 2008

the insiders´ view

Edited by Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Accompanying DVD. Just weeks after the November 2008 election, the Annenberg Public Policy Center's Kathleen Hall Jamieson and FactCheck.org's Brooks Jackson gathered top strategists and consultants for postelection analysis. Nicolle Wallace, Ambassador Mark Wallace, Jon Carson, Steve ...

Exotic nation

maurophilia and the construction of early modern Spain

In Exotic Nation, Barbara Fuchs explores the paradoxes in the cultural construction of Spain in relation to its Moorish heritage through an analysis of Spanish literature, as well as costume, language, architecture, and chivalric practices.

Paris in the middle ages

Paris in the Middle Ages was home to royalty, mountebanks, Knights Templar, merchants, prostitutes, and canons. Bursting outward from the encompassing wall, it was Europe's largest, most cosmopolitan city. Simone Roux chronicles the lives of Parisians over the course of a dozen generations as ...

Reading the Qur'an in latin christendom, 1140-1560

Most of what we know about attitudes toward Islam in the medieval and early modern West has been based on polemical treatises against Islam written by Christian scholars preoccupied with defending their own faith and attacking the doctrines of others. Christian readings of the Qur ...

Barbarian tides

the migration age and the Later Roman Empire

The Migration Age is still envisioned as an onrush of expansionary "Germans" pouring unwanted into the Roman Empire and subjecting it to pressures so great that its western parts collapsed under the weight. Further developing the themes set forth in his classic Barbarians and Romans ...

Marriage and violence

the Early Modern legacy

Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what - or who - must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? In "Marriage and Violence", Frances E. Dolan reveals the contradiction that lies at the very heart of modern marriage. We ...

Michelangelo

the man and the myth

This exhibition catalog explores multiple facets of Michelangelo's life, art, and reputation. Beginning with portraits of the artist, examples of his literary works, editions of his poetry, and modern music inspired by his sonnets, the book then shows representative examples of his work as ...

Creating East and West

Renaissance humanists and the Ottoman turks

As the Ottoman Empire advanced westward from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, humanists responded on a grand scale, leaving behind a large body of fascinating yet understudied works. These compositions included Crusade orations and histories; ethnographic, historical, and religious studies of the Turks; epic ...

A kingdom of priests

ancestry and merit in ancient judaism

According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19:6). The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is ...

Border lines

the partition of judaeo-crhistianity

The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a ...

Gentile tales

the narrative assault on late medieval jews

Hebraica veritas?

christian hebraists and the study of judaism in Early Modern Europe