The popular image of the Viking as a horn-helmeted berserker plying the ocean in a dragon-headed long boat is firmly fixed in history. Imagining Viking "conquerors" as much more numerous, technologica
The 17 figurines published here are but a small sample of the objects excavated more than 100 years ago at the Bronze Age necropolis at the site of Ayia Paraskevi in Cyprus. Vassos Karageorghis introd
The Sachsenspiegel, or Saxon Mirror, compiled in 1235 by Eike von Repgow, may be said to mark the beginning of vernacular German jurisprudence. For the first time, Maria Dobozy offers an English trans
Selected by Choice magazine as a Outstanding Academic Book for 2000Nelson Mandela once said, "Human rights have become the focal point of international relations." This has certainly become true in Am
In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine c
Rites of Power provides a sweeping overview of the symbolism of power from tenth-century France to modern Britain. Approaching their topic from an eclectic range of intellectual traditions, the author
When Great Britain abolished slavery in 1833, sugar planters in the Caribbean found themselves facing the prospect of paying working wages to their former slaves. Cheaper labor existed elsewhere in th
Through a series of Western texts—folkloric, photographic, literary, and historical—Dorst outlines another pattern of looking west, one characterized by optical distortion, faulty
The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe focuses on the ways in which culture is moved from one generation or group to another, not by exact replication but by accretion or revision. The con
When Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895, a reporter for the National Observer wrote that there was "not a man or a woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a
Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse
This stunning catalogue includes color photographs of more than 230 objects excavated in the 1930s by the renowned British archaeologist, Sir Leonard Woolley, at the third millennium B.C. Sumerian cit
In 1623 Ben Jonson touted Shakespeare as the soul of his age; three centuries later, a newspaper advertisement used Shakespeare's reputation to market Budweiser, "The King of All Bottled Beers.&q
Seldom heard from in modern times, those on the margins of Medieval Europe have much to tell us about the society that defined them. More than just a fascinating cast of characters, the visionaries an
Once there was a village in Palestine called Ein Houd. By the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, all the Abu al-Hayjas of Ein Houd had been dispersed or exiled or had gone into hiding, although their h
Women have been tricking men for thousands of years, and female tricksters have been appearing in classic and popular texts at least since theThousand and One Nights. While there are many studies of t
Was Athens an imperialistic state, deserving all the reputation for exploitation that adjective can imply, or was the Athenian alliance, even at its most unequal, still characterized by a convergence
Peggy McCracken offers a feminist historicist reading of Guenevere, Iseut, and other adulterous queens of Old French literature, and situates romance narratives about queens and their lovers within th
The Sister Carrie edition that was published in 1900, long regarded as a watershed work in American fiction, was actually a censored misrepresentation of Drieser's original story. When, 80 years later
Benedictin was prescribed to more than thirty-five million American women from its introduction in 1956 until 1983, when it was withdrawn from the market. The drug's manufacturer, Merrill Dow Pharmace
On the day following the guillotining of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange lamented the loss of the man commonly considered the father of modern chemistry. "It took them o
Visitors to the Blalock Building at the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center are greeted by portraits of two great men. One, of renowned heart surgeon Alfred Blalock, speaks for itself. The other,
This book brings together several new ways of thinking about pigs in the past, creating a dialogue by drawing on several kinds of approaches—from geography, ethnography, zoology, history, an
The vampire is one of the nineteenth century's most powerful surviving archetypes, due largely to Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula, the Bram Stoker creation. Yet the figure of the vampire has underg
A Different Kind of War Story takes us to the frontlines of one of the most brutal wars in recent history. The setting is Mozambique during the fifteen-year war of terror that took a million lives&
Why is the law notoriously unclear, arcane, slow to change in the face of changing circumstances? In this sweeping comparative analysis of the lawmaking process from ancient Rome to the present day, A
Desjarlais shows us not anonymous faces of the homeless but real people. While it is estimated that 25 percent or more of America's homeless are mentally ill, their lives are largely unknown to us. Wh
As the study of literature has extended to cultural contexts, critics have developed a language all their own. Yet, argues Mark Bauerlein, scholars of literature today are so unskilled in pertinent s
Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynd
An examination of the life of Richard Seager is important for two reasons. First, it provides a glimpse of a character of a member of the second generation of researchers to work in Cretan archaeology
Mark C. Bartusis opens an extraordinary window on the Byzantine Empire during its last centuries by providing the first comprehensive treatment of the dying empire's military.A History Book Club sele
The volume reports the results of four seasons of excavation at Tell es-Sweyhat, an Early Bronze Age urban center located on the margins of the dry-farming zone in Syria. A goal of the project has bee
During the 1960s, in such works as Man the Hunter, scholars constructed a model of cultural evolution in which men were characterized as "cooperative hunters of big game." Women fit neatly into this m
The Book of Chivalry is the most pragmatic of all surviving chivalric manuals. Written at the height of the Hundred Years War, it includes the essential commonplaces of knighthood in the mid-fourteent
About seventy years after the conquest of Mexico, a native scholar recast a Spanish Holy Week play in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Like its extant Spanish model, the Nahuatl text dramatizes Ch
Issues of universal human rights are critically important topics in education today. Educators, scholars, and activists urge schools to promote awareness and understanding of human rights in their cur
The collections of the Mediterranean Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum are among the finest in the United States. This book presents an overview of the new permanent exhibition. The obj
A report that presents the results of excavations from 1987 through 1990 at Combe-Capelle Bas, a Middle Paleolithic site in the Couze Valley in the Perigord region of southern France. The report is or
From accounts of the Holocaust, to representations of AIDS, to predictions of environmental disaster; from Hal Lindsey's fundamentalist 1970s bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, to Francis Fukuyam
Women in the Presence is a study of the religious lives of middle-class laywomen. Focusing on the ways that the members of one Bible study group for women at a suburban Presbyterian church articulate
