History (R0)

The diverse developments in textile research of the last decade, along with the increased recognition of the importance of textile studies in adjacent fields, now merit a dedicated, full-length publication entitled “Ancient Textile Production from an Interdisciplinary Perspective: Humanities and Natural Sciences Interwoven for our Understanding of Textiles”. With this volume, the authors and the editors wish to illustrate to the current impact of textile archaeology on the scholarly perception of the past (not limited to archaeology alone). The volume presents new insights into the consumption, meaning, use and re-use of textiles and dyes, all of which are topics of growing importance in textile research. As indicated by the title, we demonstrate the continued importance of interdisciplinarity by showcasing several ‘interwoven’ approaches to environmental and archaeological remains, textual and iconographic sources, archaeological experiments and ethnographic data, from a large area covering Europe and the Mediterranean, Near East, Africa and Asia. The chronological span is deliberately wide, including materials dating from c. 6th millennium BCE to c. mid-14th century CE.

The volume is organised in four parts that aim to reflect the main areas of the textile research in 2020. After the two introductory chapters (Part I: About this Volume and Textile Research in 2020), follow two chapters referring to dyes and dyeing technology in which analytical and material-based studies are linked to contextual sources (Part II: Interdisciplinarity of Colour: Dye Analyses and Dyeing Technologies). The six chapters of Part III: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Textile Tools discuss textiles and textile production starting from the analyses of tools, whether functional or as representative of technological developments or user identity. Archaeological and cultural contexts as well as textile traditions are the main topics of the six chapters in Part IV: Traditions and Contexts: Fibres, Fabrics, Techniques, Uses and Meanings. The two final chapters in Part V: Digital Tools refer to the use of digital tools in textile research, presenting two different case studies. 

This book explores the central role that gender has historically played in violent far-right movements and groups, in a time of increasing political polarisation and rising extremism. The author examines the way neo-Nazis and white supremacists have constructed gender, and how this has impacted on the practical role of men and women on the global extreme right between 1969 and 2009, giving valuable insight into the inner workings of the extremist fringe today. In the context of rising violent ultra-nationalism in the UK, Eastern Europe, the USA, India and Russia, this transnational history of racist extremist movements offers a very necessary glimpse into the intimate, personal politics of organised hate, and into the ideological and organisational roots of our current moment. 

In order to fully understand the extreme right, it is essential to develop an awareness of the deep social foundations that underlie it. By exposing the gendered basis of racist extremism in theUSA and UK, this book makes a necessary intervention in the field of far-right studies, shedding new light on the shadowy corners of the political spectrum and ultimately opening new avenues for countering hate on the personal, political and academic level. The book seeks to explain the intricate relationship between organised racist extremism and ideological misogyny, and explores the fundamental contradictions and inconsistencies that underlie women’s far-right activism. Offering historical context to the current social and political moment in which white supremacist and far-right terror presents an immediate threat to security and stability in both the USA and the UK, this book provides useful insights for those researching the history of fascism and the far-right, violent social movements and political activism, as well as women’s history and gender studies.

This book provides a new perspective on the study of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its monarchy – its political leadership and decisions. Moreover, it analyzes how that decision-making evolved before, during, and after the Arab–Israeli War of 1973, and the subsequent Arab oil embargo that followed; the run-up to and aftermath of the 1975 murder of King Faysal; discussions over the oil weapon; and Saudi responses to the Carter presidency in the United States. Through the prism of tribal decision-making, this book sheds new light on a number of important political events, which have shaped the political leadership in Saudi Arabia, and explores the behind-the-scenes workings of the Saudi royal family.

Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.

Winner of The 2024 Natalie Zemon Davis Prize.

“What to do about women (and sometimes, men) who gruesomely murdered children because of their own “weariness with life?” This was a dilemma faced by elites in German-speaking lands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and engaged by Kathy Stuart in this strikingly original monograph. A pervasive, if not largely forgotten behavioral pattern featured women who wished to end their lives but feared the doctrine held by Catholics and Protestants alike, that their souls would then face certain damnation. Instead, they would murder a child: their own, someone else’s, even one chosen at random, and immediately turn themselves into the authorities. This form of “suicide by proxy,” as Stuart terms it, resulted in their execution to be sure, but gave them a chance to repent beforehand. To elucidate this troubling history, she mines an impressive array of primary sources from archives throughout Germany and Austria, as well as broadsheets and other forms of art. She draws penetrating insights from law, gender studies, religion, and medicine. To her sophisticated use of empirical research and interdisciplinary perspectives Stuart adds a sense of compassion for these desperate women and the parents of the children murdered during this time of religious and social upheaval.”

This book focuses on the rise of Kurdish nationalism in northwestern Iran in the context of the emergence of the Kurdish leader, Ismail Agha Simko, who organized a movement to establish a Kurdish state between 1918 and 1922 The rise of Simko is analyzed in the historical framework of the collapse of the Russian and Ottoman empires, as well as the disappearance of Iranian governmental authority in various provinces of the country during and after the end of the First World War. The book also investigates the impact of Iranian, Turkish, and Assyrian nationalisms on Simko and his movement. Drawing upon original documents, the author provides an in-depth analysis of the political, and socio-economic causes for the rise of proto-Kurdish nationalism in northwestern Iran during and after the Great War.

This book focuses on two commercial radio stations, Radio Luxembourg and Europe n°1, which were popular institutions in Western Europe throughout the Long Sixties, working across media and broadcasting transnationally. It argues that the existence of an overarching ‘dispositif ’ of commercial radio stations enabled them to operate on various dimensions and differentiated them from other broadcasters. The book therefore answers current calls in media history to look beyond national and single-medium borders and contributes to the cultural and media history of Western Europe.

This is the first academic history of the FA England women’s national football team. Based on unprecedented access to FA data, it details the careers of the 227 women who debuted for England from 1972 to 2022. England won the UEFA Women’s Euros in 2022, and Jean worked with Sarina Wiegman and the squad, on the Legendary Lionesses from 1972.

Forty years after Ronald Reagan’s successful re-election campaign, this book explores the significance of the year 1984 in the making of Reagan’s presidential record and the shaping of his legacy. The authors examine the broader context of how Reagan impacted the nature of the US presidency and international relations during the Cold War, and how this in turn interacted with American popular culture. Serving as an introduction to academics, students and the interested public into what is a rapidly increasingly Reagan scholarship, this book will also appeal to anyone interested in US elections, the evolving nature of the US presidency, and American culture more generally.

The South African economy has largely performed below its potential. Although the size of the South African economy has significantly increased since 1994, its performance has lagged behind other comparable economies, and has even been overtaken by Nigeria as the largest economy in Africa. Unemployment, income inequality, and poverty have remained high since 1994. In the past decade, South African economic performance has been so poor that is has resulted in declining per capita incomes.

In this study, Vusi Gumede and his co-authors offer a comprehensive analysis of the South African economy since 1994, dealing with many important issues, ranging from its history to its political travails in an effort to provide better understanding and find possible solutions to ensuring inclusive growth.

This book examines the legacy of one of the most influential members of Spanish society in the seventeenth-century Philippines, Dominican scholar Juan de Paz. Using a unique manuscript from the collections of the Archivo de la Universidad de Santo Tomás in Manila, the authors provide a window into the concerns, problems, and entanglements of people of different ethnicities, occupations, and stations in life. Paz’s writings resolving conflicts and weighing in on questions (consultas) have not previously been translated into English. The transcriptions, translations, and editorial introductions collected in this volume therefore make it an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in the cultural and social history of the Philippines and the Spanish empire.

This book is a testament to the importance of historical institutional analysis for understanding the reform of Africa’s institutions. As an entry point, Raymond Atuguba examines the regulations of public order and alcohol by the police in Ghana, outlining an interplay of changing ideological and interest formations on the one hand and changing institutional forms on the other. The study reveals not only new forms of oppressive institutional orderings that descend from colonialism; but also new institutional forms that produce possibilities and countervailing technologies of power, capable of meeting and assailing the ways in which the power of post-modern colonialism mobilizes itself.

In sum, this book explores the themes of institutional continuities, hegemonic practices, and institutional reform. It discusses how the British political, economic and legal infrastructure penetrated and disrupted pre-existing regulation of public order and alcohol that was conducive to a particular political economy and various social practices. It emphasizes the enduring character of the new institutions created around public order and alcohol, and how they crystallized at independence and were perpetuated in the post-independence era.

This book provides the hitherto disregarded development of the principle of angular momentum, and aims at reconstructing its inception by analyzing Euler's relevant publications and correspondence, and using his unpublished manuscripts and notebook records. The derivation of the equations of motion for rigid body rotation is one of Euler's main achievements in mechanics and celestial mechanics. It enabled the foundation of later developments that became known as the angular momentum theorem or, as it is called here, the principle of angular momentum (PAM). Along with Euler's first mathematical formulation of “Newton's law of motion,” called the linear momentum theorem or the principle of linear momentum (PLM), modern historiography of science assigned these principles to Euler, honoring him by calling them “Euler's principles or laws of mechanics.” However, the history behind these principles, in particular the developing and establishing processes of PAM, remained in darkness until now. This is probably why Euler's achievements commonly are still subsumed in “Newtonian physics” or even labeled with it. A good deal of Euler's original documents relevant for unearthing these processes are presented and translated here for the first time.

This SpringerBrief examines emotions in the past through contemporary archaeological materials. The author explores this topic using the context of a former working-class neighbourhood in northern Finland that existed during the Cold War era (1947-1987). Finland offers an interesting context to examine this because of the twofold emotional frames; the Cold War and capitalism versus the nascent welfare state. The push and pull between the values emphasizing universal care and compassion against the hardline militarisation and financial competition results in accessing different and, sometimes, contradictory emotions. It also affords a gendered view into the past and such an angle could be attempted in the context of the deep past as well. 

This book offers several examples on how emotions could be accessed in the deep past and draws parallels between the examples from a contemporary 'western' country and various archaeological cultures and contexts. Emotions can be a bridge to access the secrets of human behavior. Such bridging is the core strength of archaeological education, but rarely are emotions acknowledged in the process. Lastly, this book underlines the role of emotions, specifically empathy, in archaeological education and in destabilizing contemporary political notions on social norms and contracts.

This book provides the first major transatlantic history of Irish serving women, drawing on four years of archival research in Dublin, Belfast, New York, Boston, London and Liverpool. Domestic service was the largest source of employment for generations of women who left Ireland in the decades after the Great Famine. The perceived difficulty of managing Irish servants became a prominent feature of cultural discourse in the United States and England, where countless cartoons, editorials and literary works caricatured the figure of ‘Bridget’. Irish maids and cooks were a canvas on which to project fears not only about Irish politics and immigration but also changing class and gender roles.  Existing scholarship on the Irish experience of domestic service has typically focused on socio-economic conditions, but such approaches tend not to capture the complex ways in which Irish female immigrants were encountered both in private households and in wider society. Irish servants were framed through discourses that could involve nostalgia and guilt as well as amusement and disgust: more complex scripts, in general, than those used to describe Irish immigrant men. The period covered in the book allows for a diverse range of cultural sources – including romance novels and Hollywood films depicting working Irish women – to be examined, moving beyond the Victorian-era caricatures typically emphasised in earlier work on the Irish in domestic service.

This book is a new and original study of High Church activism in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the church union movement, it describes and explains unprecedented levels of clerical-lay cooperation in campaigns of Church defense, responses to contemporary pressures inside the Church, and efforts to mitigate problems in Church-state relations. It explores the leadership role of the London Union on Church Matters and the main factors that shaped its activities, especially Tractarianism, the sense that the Church did not have a sufficiently strong representative voice in debates about questions that directly affected it, and political and social developments that threatened the status and influence of the Church.

This is the first book to address theory and practice in Applied Bioarchaeology—a term used to describe bioarchaeological research which addresses matters of relevance today, and which actively engages people in the research process in ways that are respectful and relevant to the studied population, their communities, and their descendants. This book provides examples of best practice; identifies challenges and opportunities for developing the field of Applied Bioarchaeology; and illustrates the role of bioarchaeology in effecting change through advocacy and activism.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part, ‘Using Past Experience to Inform Modern Behaviour and Health’, demonstrates how bioarchaeology has the potential to contribute towards better appreciation of the diverse factors that influence behaviour and health, and how this information can shape, inform, and empower future decision-making, from individuals to wider health policies. The second part, ‘Developing Community-Led Research’, focuses on developing active community engagement in bioarchaeological research, with chapters arguing for community-led research designed to empower a wide range of peoples that have been marginalized (or even ignored) in traditional archaeological practice. The third part, ‘Bioarchaeology and the Arts’, illustrates how Applied Bioarchaeology is enhanced by cross-disciplinary teamwork, and how the arts can be used to create safe spaces to explore difficult issues, to aid us in critically reflecting on our practices, to interrogate gaps in knowledge, and to develop new ideas and ways of thinking, learning, and creating knowledge. The final part, ‘A Way Forward’, is a personal reflection written by Lorna Tilley, which argues the case for developing the field of Applied Bioarchaeology and suggests some possible approaches for achieving this goal. 

The rationale of this book is to provide carefully selected images from Google Earth, to discuss what they show, and to provide references to the heritage sites portrayed so that readers can go deeper if they wish. Taking examples from all over the world, this book aims to demonstrate their value for understanding heritage landscapes and for appreciating their aesthetics. It is organised around different types of landscape and the processes that created them, rather than regionally or on the basis of age. It includes a large number of archaeological sites that have been designated as UNESC0 World Heritage Sites. Google Earth has proved to be important for demonstrating some of the threats that major sites have been exposed to, including during recent wars in the Middle East.  The landscapes discussed are those of Water Management, Agricultural Management, War, Burial, Mines, Quarries and Salterns, Cities and Settlements, Tells, Theatres, Amphitheatres, and Hippodromes, Churches, Temples, Pagodas, and Mosques, and Geoglyphs.