History

This book brings together interdisciplinary scholars from history, theology, folklore, ethnology and meteorology to examine how David Cranz’s Historie von Grönland (1765) resonated in various disciplines, periods and countries. Collectively the contributors demonstrate the reach of the book beyond its initial purpose as a record of missionary work, and into secular and political fields beyond Greenland and Germany. The chapters also reveal how the book contributed to broader discussions and conceptualizations of Greenland as part of the Atlantic world. The interdisciplinary scope of the volume allows for a layered reading of Cranz’s book that demonstrates how different meanings could be drawn from the book in different contexts and how the book resonated throughout time and space. It also makes the broader argument that the construction of the Artic in the eighteenth century broadened our understanding of the Atlantic.

This book focuses on the history of the provision of legal aid and legal assistance to the poor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in eight different countries. It is the first such book to bring together historical work on legal aid in a comparative perspective, and allows readers to analogise and contrast historical narratives about free legal aid across countries. Legal aid developed as a result of industrialisation, urbanization, immigration, the rise of philanthropy, and what were viewed as new legal problems. Closely related, was the growing professionalisation of lawyers and the question of what duties lawyers owed society to perform free work. Yet, legal aid providers in many countries included lay women and men, leading at times to tensions with the bar. Furthermore, legal aid often became deeply politicized, creating dramatic conflicts concerning the rights of the poor to have equal access to justice.

This book highlights new and innovative approaches to archaeological research using computational modeling while focusing on the Neolithic transition around the world.

Computational modeling techniques such as those described above represent a critical next step in providing archaeological analyses that are important for understanding human prehistory around the world.  Given its scope, this book will appeal to the many interdisciplinary scientists and researchers whose work involves archaeology and computational social science. 

Chapter “The Spread of Agriculture: Quantitative Laws in Prehistory?” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via springer.com.

This textbook explores the mystery of human origins in the Arabian Peninsula, the lost Southern Crescent where humanity took its first steps toward civilization. Under Arabia’s surface of sand and stone lies a primordial realm of rolling grasslands, freshwater lakes, and river floodplains. This book aims to restore a critical missing chapter in the prehistory of our species that played out in this forgotten place of plenty.

The author has carried out more than twenty years of fieldwork in Yemen and Oman, weaving his research together  into an unorthodox tapestry of archaeology, environmental science, genetics, and Middle Eastern mythology. This volume peers beneath Arabia’s abandoned deserts, revealing a land that once served as a bridge between prehistoric worlds. This textbook is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students as well as all readers who are interested in learning about Arabian prehistory.

This book explores the uses of the past in foreign policy-making. It outlines why and how political leaders refer to historical events in contemporary foreign policy discourses; the goals they hope to achieve; and the sometimes unintended foreign policy consequences of their (ab)use of historical memory. Furthermore, it looks at how political leaders shape domestic collective memories in pursuit of their international agendas, and highlight historical events leaders forget, reinterpret or obscure through selective narratives.

The collection originated in the section entitled ‘Exploring the Link between Historical Memory and Foreign Policy’ at the annual Pan-European Conference of the European International Studies Association (EISA) 2018 held in Prague, the Czech Republic.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of pupils attended boarding schools in various places across the globe. Their experiences were vastly different, yet they all had in common that they were separated from their families and childhood friends for a period of time in order to sleep, eat, learn and move within the limited spatial sites of the boarding school. This book frames these ‘boarding schools’ as a global and transcultural phenomenon that is part of larger political and social developments of European imperialism, the Cold War, and independence movements. Drawing together case studies from colonial South Africa, colonial India, Dutch Indonesia, early twentieth-century Nigeria, Fascist Spain, Ghana, Nazi Germany, nineteenth-century Ireland, North America and the Soviet Union, this edited collection examines the ways in which boarding schools extracted pupils from their original social background in order to train, mold and shape them so that they could fit intothe perceived position in broader society. The book makes the broader argument that framing boarding schools as a global phenomenon is imperative for a deepened understanding of the global and transnational networks that linked people as well as ideas and practices of education and childhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.   

This book examines the relatively unknown English late-Victorian educational pioneer, Constance Louisa Maynard (1849-1935), whose innovative London-based Westfield College produced the first female BAs in the mid-1880s. An atypical and powerful woman, Maynard is also notable for her unique knowledge of psychology and patriotic Evangelicalism, both of which profoundly shaped her ambitions and passions. In contrast to most history about an individual’s life, this book builds a fascinating life story based upon evidence and clues from minutia. The focus is on nine enigmatic actions motivated by Maynard in her quests for educational leadership, global conversion, and same-sex love. Maynard’s acts that she called “mistakes,” caused deep enmities with administrators and college women. Yet amid her trials and conflicts Maynard made key decisions about her public and private life. Moreover, her so-called mistakes reveal astonishing new insights into a past mindset and the rapidly changing world in which Maynard lived.

This book traces the origins, life and death of Administrative Science in Italy as an academic discipline between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so by combining the study of ideas, institutional history, intellectual history and social history. The Faculty of Law first introduced Administrative Science in 1875, with the aim of providing the elite with the necessary tools to distribute wealth more equally, to take care of the population and, thus, to make the young Italian State more legitimate in the eyes of the emerging masses. Law and social sciences were merged with the aim of increasing reforms, including that of creating a State of Happiness for all citizens. Throughout its 70-year existence, Administrative Science was deprived of its contents and scientific independence, and academically overshadowed by Administrative and Public law. Finally, although the liberal elites discarded the reformer project of Administrative Science even before Fascism turned everything upside down, most of the original traits of this knowledge were absorbed into Fascist corporate and totalitarian structures.

This Handbook addresses the role of women in communism as a global, social and political movement for the first time, exploring their lives, forms of activism, political strategies and transnational networks. Comprising twenty-five chapters, based on new and primary research, the book presents the lives of self-identified communist women from a truly international perspective and outlines their struggles against fascism and colonialism, and for women’s emancipation and national liberation. By using the lens of transnational political biography, the chapters capture the broader picture of these women’s lives, unpacking the links between the so-called public and private, the power structures and inequalities of their societies, the formal networks and politics in which they were involved, and the informal connections and friendships that supported their activism both at the national and international level. Challenging androcentric and Eurocentric narratives about communism, this Handbook reveals the active and significant roles of women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century communist movements and regimes, and highlights the importance of communist women in shaping the agenda for women’s rights worldwide.

This volume covers Kenya’s history, society, culture, economics, politics, and environment from precolonial times through the first years of independence. The book comprises twenty-one chapters divided into two parts. Part I focuses on the long precolonial moment, detailing the nature of precolonial Kenyan societies and their economics, politics, gender dynamics, and social organization. Part II examines Kenyan societies’ encounters with British colonialism, critically outlining the impact and implications of these encounters. The volume concludes with an examination of political consolidation after the country’s attainment of political independence and the subsequent foundations for political authoritarianism.

This volume is a bold attempt to address a comprehensive range of themes and issues relating to contemporary Kenya. It covers independent Kenya’s history, society, culture, economics, politics, and environment with great breadth and depth, comprising thirty-four chapters divided into three parts. Part I focuses on independence and the political economy of development, followed by Part II on environment, globalization, gender, and society. Part III examines the external context’s impact and implications for Kenya and the role of Kenya in the global political economy.

This Palgrave Pivot examines the history of the largely urban offence once known as vitriol throwing because the substance most commonly used was strong sulphuric acid, oil of vitriol. A relatively rare form of assault, it was motivated largely by revenge or jealousy and, because it was specifically designed to blind and mutilate, commonly targeted the victim’s face. The incidence of what was thus widely acknowledged to be an exceptionally cruel crime plateaued in the period 1850–1930 amid a sometimes surprisingly lenient legal response, before declining as a result of post-war social changes. In examining the factors that influenced both the crime and its punishment, the book makes an important contribution to criminal justice history by illuminating the role of gender, law and emotion from the perspective of both victim and perpetrator.

This book tackles the difficult challenge of uncovering the pathogenic cause, epidemiological mechanics and broader historical impacts of an extremely deadly third-century ancient Roman pandemic. The core of this research is embodied in a novel systems synthesis methodology that allows for ground-breaking historical-scientific problem-solving. Through precise historical and scientific problem-solving, analysis and modelling, the authors piece together a holistic puzzle portrait of an ancient plague that is fully consistent, in turn, with both the surviving ancient evidence and the latest in cutting edge twenty-first-century modern medical and molecular phylogenetic science. Demonstrating the broader relevance of the crisis-beset world of the third-century Roman Empire in providing guiding and cautionary historical lessons for the present, this innovative book provides fascinating insights for students and scholars across a range of disciplines.

This book features all the women inducted in the first fifty years of the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. Each entry first provides a biography of the inductee and then goes on to describe one or more of their major inventions with descriptions that are accessible to those with little or no formal training in science. The evolution of the opportunities available to women in education and the professions becomes evident as the reader moves chronologically through biographies and inventions of the woman. Later inductees have received Nobel Prizes for their work and have become members of academies such as the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. Others have received the National Medal of Science or the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. As an important part of the Women in Science and Engineering book series, the work highlights the contributions of women inventors, inspiring women and men, and girls and boys, in a variety of scientific fields.

This book explores the social roots, character, and consequences of paramilitary violence in Europe in the 1940s. Paramilitarism had an impact on the lives of millions of Europeans, yet knowledge about this important topic is partial and fragmented.

The general perception of European paramilitary violence in the 1940s derives almost entirely from the resistance/collaboration paradigm. This dichotomous analytical framework makes a clear distinction between politically motivated violence and social violence, such as sexual, criminal, and structural violence. By contrast, in this book, Gareth Pritchard and Vesna Drapac recognise the mutual dependence of all kinds of violence. Their interpretative model, the Regimes of Violence paradigm, which takes account of the changing relationship between state, society, and organised violence, allows us to observe paramilitarism in the round. The Regimes of Violence framework reveals the interconnectedness of paramilitarism with other forms of violence during this period of unprecedented brutality.

Today, paramilitary violence is a global phenomenon. It has resulted in the undermining of the rule of law and the erosion of civil society in many different countries on different continents, while at the same time traumatising the countless numbers of innocent people who are caught in its crossfire. With their compelling and timely study, Pritchard and Drapac provide an historical context and present a novel approach for understanding why paramilitarism shows no sign of abating.

This book analyses the liberation struggles that took place in the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cabo Verde, and São Tomé e Príncipe during the second half of the twentieth century, highlighting how they unravelled and challenged colonialism in the international sphere. Activists established headquarters and training camps in various exile settings that were instrumental in their struggle for independence. Exile settings were places where the liberation movements worked with host countries, accessed representatives of foreign countries, made connections with nonstate actors and networks of support, and received political and military training. The complex networks of support formed by protestors around the globe operated on a transnational scale, using urban centres as sites of activism and arenas to promote a multiplicity of connections. Bringing together contributions from a range of skilled authors, the book explores selected hubs around the globe including those based in Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam, Cairo, Moscow, Beijing, New York, London, Paris, and São Paulo. Taking a comparative approach, this collection sheds light on the infrastructures of solidarity that were established by activists around the world, and highlights the transnational circulation of ideas around anticolonialism.

This book is an in-depth study of the influence of evangelical Nonconformity on the evolving journalism of W. T. Stead, one of the leading British newspaper editors of the late-nineteenth century. While Stead’s Christian beliefs have been examined alongside and complementary to his journalism, no long study has yet interrogated the way in which Protestant Dissent helped to shape the development of his press practice. This study explores the stimulating interconnections in Stead’s ‘New Journalism’ between late-nineteenth century evangelicalism, radical politics, and social reform, and the modes and formats of his writing.

This book makes Aram Andonian's The Great Crime available for English language readers. The Great Crime served as the first systematic documentation of the Armenian Genocide, introducing the memoir of an Ottoman bureaucrat that contained handwritten copies of approximately 52 Ottoman documents, including direct orders to kill Armenians. It therefore holds immense historical significance, as it provides irrefutable evidence of the Armenian Genocide using original Ottoman documents.

In 1983, the Turkish government published a book claiming that Andonian’s work was fraudulent by presenting three arguments: 1. That the Ottoman bureaucrat named did not exist; 2. A non-existent person cannot have a memoir and, if it exists, you must show the handwritten manuscripts; 3. The allegedly fake telegrams have 12 different reasons for their inauthenticity. Based on these, Andonian’s book and the official Ottoman documents it contained were discredited as a historical source. Taner Akçam's previous book with Palgrave Macmillan, Killing Orders, was a response to the Turkish government’s attempt to discredit Andonian’s book and documents, and rehabilitated their status as valuable materials in the study of the Armenian Genocide.

The Great Crime stands as an immortal testament to historical truth, and this version of it includes a detailed preface written by Akçam, incorporating his new findings and information that has come to light since the publication of Killing Orders, along with additional explanatory notes.

This book provides a general guide to stone-structures of the pre-colonial period called zimbabwes. This is a name which denotes their usage as prestige buildings and that a particular quality of masonry with frequent application of wall decoration patterns was required, which distinguishes them from many other stone structures of coarse workmanship. At least 300 sites are known within the borders of Zimbabwe alone, while a few more are found in Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique. However, recent findings have indicated that stone buildings in southern Angola of similar typology also carry decoration patterns that suggests a much wider distribution in the region than was previously thought.

The word Zimbabwe is of historical origin which has been customized to refer to a specific typology of stone walls and to distinguish them from the rest of low-grade buildings which number several hundred. In the 16^th century, it denoted royal and chiefly settlements built in stone and it was used figuratively to imply the presence there of such important political figures. In this guide, zimbabwe (lower case and in italics) refers to stone walls whereas when in upper case it refers either to Great Zimbabwe or Zimbabwe the modern country. 

This work is the first comprehensive volume to act as a guide to the archaeological stone wall structures. Zimbabwe sites are the only immovable cultural remains of substantial physical form that have been inherited from a pre-colonial past. In a post-colonial state, they are extremely valuable as tangible evidence of the historical continuity of indigenous populations with a pre-colonial past. Their history implies an inheritance for present and future generations and entrust ownership to the public. Religious activities connected with the sites imply not just vestigial importance, but embody cosmological values that bind people together. A descriptive inventory such as this guidebook serves two purposes, i.e. a heritage register to support conservation programmes and as a popular study guide to interest both local and international visitors.

This book reorients our understanding of the history of modern male homosexuality by focusing on Europe's 'internal Other': Italy. Spanning from the tail-end of the Grand Tour to the mid-fascist years, it argues that Italy was a time/space in which competing epistemologies of homosexuality confronted one another – precisely what characterizes 'modern' male same-sex love and attraction. Turning our understanding of the history of male homosexuality on its head, it proposes that Italy was not primitive, pre-modern, or under-developed but modern in a way that Europe and the US were not. It also highlights the frequently overlooked role working-class men and boys played in the so-called invention of modern male homosexuality. The new scientific epistemologies of sexuality; a pan-European Hellenic revival; a tradition of fostering male same-sex intimacies that cut across age, class, and nationality; Italy's lack of anti-sodomy legislation and specific place in the capitalist world system, including the late entry of bourgeois women into its public sphere; changing understandings of sexuality and gender that resulted from industrialization -- all combined to produce a same-sex sex tourism industry that juxtaposed competing understandings of male same-sex love. These epistemologies were inflected in complex and contradictory ways by issues of gender, class, ethnicity, locality, age and race, such differences not simply 'intersecting' but being constituted alongside one another – particularly given Italy’s ambiguous racial identity, somewhere 'between' the binaries of black and white. Adopting a queer Marxist approach that focuses on both capitalism's long durée and its combined and uneven development, rather than center a history of modern homosexuality on the white bourgeois men who visited Italy, this book seeks to glimpse the lives of their Italian lovers. To this end, it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that examines a wide archive including not only works of literature by privileged white bourgeois traveling gentlemen but also Italian sexology; same-sex sex scandals and their treatment in the Italian press; anthropological work on Italian homosexualities; travel diaries; and police records.

This book paints a vivid picture of caregiving for the elderly throughout history, using the innovative concept of a 'carerscape'. Inspired by Appadurai's 'ethnoscape', this framework highlights diverse aspects of caregiving across time and cultures. From kin and household members to spiritual, legal, and community-based systems, the book explores the evolution of care. Chapters delve into prehistoric caregiving practices, drawing on paleontological findings, and examine the roles of spirituality and legality in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The communal spirit of early Christianity and parish care in medieval times are explored, alongside personal narratives from nineteenth-century America. The book also considers representations of ageing and care in folklore, fiction, and media. Concluding with a discussion on modern caregiving, the 'carerscape' is reimagined through the lens of these historical insights, culminating in a reflection on how different countries now recognise the vital role of caregivers. This comprehensive book is essential for scholars of history, anthropology, and social care, as well as practitioners and policy-makers interested in the evolution of caregiving. It offers a rich tapestry of insights for anyone seeking to understand the complex dynamics of care across cultures and eras.

This book deploys the analytic model of centres and peripheries to study medieval southwestern Europe and, more specifically, the Iberian Peninsula. Here, the reader will find engaging, up-to-date scholarship on the monastic management of landscapes and hydric resources; the diffusion of fishing techniques; the roles of epigraphy and consecrations in establishing territorial, cultural, and jurisdictional boundaries; the symbolic aspects of royal legitimacy in late antiquity; the identitarian and memorialistic strategies deployed by trans-national aristocratic dynasties; the expansion of corso-piracy in the Mediterranean; and the transformation in the organization of feudal landscapes. 

Within this diversity of themes, the intrinsic tension between centres and peripheries serves as a common thread. This inherently comparative approach facilitates the construction of geographical and political systems, inter-regional hierarchies and connections, and, ultimately, a more comprehensive view of past societies. Indeed, medieval societies, territories, and cultures are particularly well-suited for these approaches due to the fragmented and highly localized nature of power, development of diverse languages and cultural systems, and exploitative nature of economic relations.

This book explores the historical and legal importance of two principles, Quod Omnes Tangit, and Tianxia Wei Gong, which have played significant roles in European and Chinese political and legal history. While Quod Omnes Tangit has been thoroughly researched, Tianxia Wei Gong has not been systematically examined. This thesis fills this void and connects these two principles for the first time. 

Quod Omnes Tangit was initially introduced in Justinian's Codex Civil, while Tianxia Wei Gong originated from Liji, one of the books in a key series of works by Confucius. Liji is comparable to the Thora in the Old Testament and is considered as important as law in Chinese legal history. Both principles have undergone comparable developmental processes, with scholars contributing to their reinterpretation. 

This book thoroughly examines the interpretations of individual scholars, with particular attention given to Liang Qichao, who is the only one to have mentioned both Tianxia Wei Gong and Quod Omnes Tangit. The book also provides an explanation for the original discrepancies in their concepts, particularly their methodologies in distributing and legitimizing rights. 

This research will be of interest to legal philosophers and historians in both the Western and Eastern worlds, legal practitioners and policymakers, and researchers seeking to explain current events and explore fundamental differences between the East and West.