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One Tiny Bubble: The Story of Our Last Universal Common Ancestor
By Karen Krossing. 2022
The graves are walking: The great famine and the saga of the irish people
By John Kelly. 2012
It started in 1845 and lasted six years. Before it was over, more than one million men, women, and children…
starved to death and another million fled the country. Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was one of the worst disasters in the nineteenth century-it claimed twice as many lives as the American Civil War. A perfect storm of bacterial infection, political greed, and religious intolerance sparked this catastrophe. But even more extraordinary than its scope were its political underpinnings, and The Graves Are Walking provides fresh material and analysis on the role that nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism played in shaping British policies and on Britain's attempt to use the famine to reshape Irish society and character.Perhaps most important, this is ultimately a story of triumph over perceived destiny: for fifty million Americans of Irish heritage, the saga of a broken people fleeing crushing starvation and remaking themselves in a new land is an inspiring story of exoneration.Based on extensive research and written with novelistic flair, The Graves Are Walking draws a portrait that is both intimate and panoramic, that captures the drama of individual lives caught up in an unimaginable tragedy, while imparting a new understanding of the famine's causes and consequencesNormal women: Nine hundred years of making history
By Philippa Gregory. 2024
"Lively, timely and gloriously energetic. Each page bursts with life, and every chapter swirls with personalities left out of traditional…
narratives of Britain's past. Philippa Gregory has produced something rare and wonderful: a genuinely new history of [Britain], with women at its beating heart." —Dan Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Plantagenets "Stunning. . . . Full of surprises. . . . A brilliant, essential read." —The Independent (UK) The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus—a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history and "should be included in every history lesson" (Glamour UK) Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they'd evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory's Normal Women. In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, she tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women—some fifty per cent of the population—center stage. Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records, newspapers, and journals to find highwaywomen and beggars, murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The "normal women" you will meet in these pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills and houses. They committed crimes or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted. A lot. A landmark work of scholarship and storytelling, Normal Women chronicles centuries of social and cultural change—from 1066 to modern times—powered by the determination, persistence, and effectiveness of womenThe case for miracles: A journalist investigates evidence for the supernatural
By Lee Strobel. 2018
New York Times bestselling author Lee Strobel trains his investigative sights on the hot-button question: is it really credible to…
believe God intervenes supernaturally in people's lives today? This provocative book starts with an unlikely interview in which America's foremost skeptic builds a seemingly persuasive case against the miraculous. But then Strobel travels the country to quiz scholars to see whether they can offer solid answers to atheist objections. Along the way, he encounters astounding accounts of healings and other phenomena that simply cannot be explained away by naturalistic causes. The book features the results of exclusive new scientific polling that shows miracle accounts are much more common than people think. What's more, Strobel delves into the most controversial question of all: what about miracles that don't happen? If God can intervene in the world, why doesn't he do it more often to relieve suffering? Many American Christians are embarrassed by the supernatural, not wanting to look odd or extreme to their neighbors. Yet, The Case for Miracles shows not only that the miraculous is possible, but that God still does intervene in our world in awe-inspiring ways. Here's a unique book that examines all sides of this issue and comes away with a passionate defense for God's divine action in lives today. Also available: The Case for Miracles Spanish edition, kids' edition, and student editionEvery Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
By Jason Roberts. 2024
From the bestselling author of A Sense of the World comes this dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific…
rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth.In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible—how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet and on humanity itself. The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called "apostles" (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and homo sapiens—but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn.With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, featuring appearances by Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.Environment as a Weapon considers how the confluence of war and nature from the time of the Agricultural Revolution (10,000…
BCE) to our present day has been represented in works of history, geography, and literature. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Torah and Greco-Roman myths, warfare is a trope commensurate with environmental disasters, extreme climate, and plague. In the medieval age myths the Táin, and Beowulf environments become allies and enemies. The equestrian steppeland as foundation of Genghis Khan’s and his heirs Pax Mongolica is chronicled in The Secret History of the Mongols and The Travels of Marco Polo. The West African Griot legend of Sundiata and the Little Ice Age wreck of the Spanish Armada in 1588 speak to oceanic and atmospheric dimensions of warfare. American Revolution political pamphlets, poetry, diaries and weather logs, reflect the severe weather and terrain deployed by George Washington’s early campaigns in the war of independence. Napoleon’s midwifing of Total War is captured in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Charles Minard’s Carte figurative carto-graph of the disastrous 1812 French invasion of Russia. The U.S. Civil War and the organic-industrial assembles of its battles, arguably the first Anthropocene War, is parsed by the clarifying poetry of Emily Dickinson. Geopolitik and geo-hazards of flood and fire feature in the Global War works of Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut and James Dickey. The literature of Vietnamese and American war combat veterans reveals how North Vietnam’s Environmental Military Complex stalled the American Military Industrial Complex in the jungles, and R&R districts of southwestern Asia. Finally, he sci-fi of H.G. Wells’ World Set Free and David Mitchell’s Cloud-Atlas frame Oppenheimer’s sub-atomic deployments at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ and U.S. military discourses situating global warming as a national security threat to America. Indeed, Environment and War ironically resonates with U.N. Secretary General António Guterres proclamation that “seventy-five years ago, the world emerged from a series of cataclysmic events: two successive world wars, genocide, a devastating influenza pandemic . . . Our founders gathered in San Francisco promising to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Thus, a holistic approach to studying and mitigating the human and environmental impacts of warfare, must integrate methods from the arts, humanities and sciences. This involves understanding how the historical geographies of the Earth’s planetary systems have been perceived, deployed and emerged as agents of warfare, with the lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere and atmosphere transformed as arsenals against anthropogenic global warming. This book will be of interest to geographers, historians, and scholars in environmental studies, climate change, literature and military studies, as well as the broader environmental humanities.This open access book provokes critical thinking regarding the most ambitious Chinese project since the founding of the People’s Republic…
of China, The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The book presents extensive quality research and original insights in assessing the status of China’s outbound investment and construction projects under the BRI umbrella. Referring to case studies and projects of selected countries from Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, the author sheds new light on the issues and problems associated with the BRI's implementation and discusses both the readjustments and prospects for the BRI. Finally, this book demarcates the limits and potential of the world’s second largest economy in pushing for the BRI, which is challenged by enormous domestic tensions and external pressures. It also identifies and analyzes potential new collaboration areas between the Belt and Road countries and China under the BRI framework in the context of the post-COVID-19 era. It provides an outstanding reference for academics, students, policymakers, and the business community working in areas of international affairs and Asian economics and development, particularly those interested in Sino-relations and Chinese power dynamics in the global world order.Place Experience of the Sacred: Silence and the Pilgrimage Topography of Mount Athos
By Christos Kakalis. 2024
This book explores the topography of Mount Athos, emphasizing the significance of silence and communal ritual in its understanding. Mount…
Athos, a mountainous peninsula in northern Greece, is a valuable case study of sacred topography, as it is one of the world’s largest monastic communities and an important pilgrimage destination. Its phenomenological examination highlights the importance of embodiment in the experience of religious places. Combining interdisciplinary insights from architectural theory, philosophy, theology and anthropology with archival and ethnographic materials, the book brings a fresh contribution to both Athonite studies and scholarship on sacred space. By focusing on the interrelation between silence and communal ritual, it offers an alternative to the traditional art historical, objectifying approaches. It reintroduces the phenomenological understanding of place, investigating also how this is expressed through a number of narratives, such as travel literature, maps and diaries.New Approaches to the Archive in the Middle Ages: Collecting, Curating, Assembling (ISSN)
By Emily N. Savage. 2024
This volume brings together scholars of history, manuscript studies, and art and architectural history to examine in conversation the varieties…
of medieval archival acts, the heterogeneity of collections, and the motivations of collectors. It is united by the historically flexible concept of the archive, and contributors examine material from Seville to Prague, from the early Christian period through the Reformation.Premodern collections and archival practices are increasingly becoming the subject of academic inquiry. Chapter authors investigate how institutional, communal, and familial identity accrued to material culture, including illuminated manuscripts, ecclesiastic vestments, ancient sarcophagi, and reliquaries. Others examine the social impulses behind the documentation of such collections, namely through the creation of inventories, but also in the production, management, and use of parchment records, including cartularies, estate records, and legal documents. Finally, contributors question how medieval people evaluated historical age and outmoded artistic styles; shaped and promoted collective memory through preservation, display, and ritual; and attached value, both monetary and symbolic, to their collections.The volume is cross-disciplinary and will appeal to a variety of readers, both in and out of academia. Curators, librarians, and archivists working with medieval collections will find it valuable, as will heritage professionals and charities involved in the care of properties which presently or formerly contained medieval treasuries, libraries, and archives.Voices from the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook
By Lisa Kaborycha. 2024
The Italian Renaissance was a period of intense cultural transformations when the ancient world was being rediscovered and a New…
World had been literally discovered. Between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries, traditional beliefs were being challenged as people across the Italian Peninsula explored new ways of thinking about religion, politics, and society and introduced startling innovations in the arts.This book contains more than hundred selections of primary sources—the historian’s raw material in the form of memoirs, letters, treatises, sermons, stories, poems, drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Here are eyewitness accounts of cold-blooded murders, lavish court pageants, the Sack of Rome, and the Black Death; first views of Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes and glimpses of the surface of the moon through Galileo’s telescope. These sources bring the reader into direct contact with the creators of the great Renaissance works of art, literature, philosophy, and science, as well as lesser-known people, who in their own words express emotions of love, loss, and spiritual yearning.Selected to accompany and supplement A Short History of Renaissance Italy, the primary sources in this book make it an ideal course reader for students of history or art history. Yet this volume can be equally read well on its own; each selection is clearly introduced, annotated, and provided with references for further reading. These sources reach out to an audience beyond the classroom—the general reader, or the traveler to Italy—anyone curious to learn more about the Italian Renaissance will find themselves swept into conversation with these vibrant voices from the past.Nineteenth-Century British Perspectives on Spanish America: Volume I: Romanticism and Revolutions
By Marisa Palacios Knox. 2024
The sources in this volume focus on Great Britain’s moral, financial, and diplomatic interventions and ambitions in Latin America. It…
begins during the wars of independence spanning 1810-1825, when Foreign Secretary George Canning prematurely declared, "Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English." The independence movements of the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, as well as their ancient past, inspired Romantic writers such as Anna Letitia Barbauld and spurred British military support and political debate, as attested by mercenary Richard Vowell’s Campaigns and Cruises in Venezuela and James Mill's "Emancipation of Spanish America."The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman
By John Gabriel Stedman. 2024
"Jared Ross Hardesty's new critical edition, The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman, makes an important and necessary intervention into…
the study of eighteenth-century Caribbean travel writing and natural history by foregrounding the previously unpublished diary entries Stedman authored in Suriname, rather than focusing solely on his writings printed in the metropoles of Europe. Hardesty's edition is especially useful because it includes both a transcription of Stedman's Suriname diary and a detailed appendix tracking key discrepancies between the diary and Stedman's heavily revised printed natural history. This focus on genre and the editorial process in the production of Anglophone transatlantic writing is an excellent resource for students and scholars of the eighteenth-century Caribbean and the Atlantic World. I can see this being a helpful resource in an early American or eighteenth-century history or literature course, as it would enable students to easily compare differing editions of Stedman's Suriname writings. What Hardesty's edition of The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman offers is a more accessible study of how eighteenth-century writing on maroonage, slavery, science, and abolition was heavily mediated in the print and production process, as this compiled edition offers critical insight into the gendered and racial politics of life in the colonial Caribbean as well as how printers in the metropole attempted to alter the writing of colonizing authors like Stedman." —Elizabeth Polcha, Drexel UniversityThis powerful encyclical is Pope Francis' "cry from the heart" to all people of the earth to see beyond their…
differences work with their differences and begin to grow together to build a new and peaceful world. This remarkable document comes from a pastor's heart, setting forth Francis' vision for a new church and new world, against the backdrop of a catastrophic pandemic that has spared nothing and altered everything. Returning again and again to themes he has developed throughout his papacy, Pope Francis speaks of the need for equality and justice for all, cooperation, caring for the most vulnerable, doing the hard work of learning to listen to and accompany others, and caring for the earth that nurtures and sustains us all. Read slowly and reflectively, Pope Francis' message here is full of divine and human wisdom for every person.Women and Redemption: A Theological History
By Rosemary Radford Ruether. 2012
Rosemary Radford Ruether's authoritative, award-winning critique of women's unequal standing in the church, which explored the complex history of redemption…
in evaluating conflict over the fundamental meaning of the Christian gospel for gender relations, is now in an updated and expanded edition. Ruether highlights women theologians' work to challenge the patriarchal paradigm of historical theology and present redemption linked to women's liberation. Ruether turns her attention to the situation of women globally and how the growing plurality of women's voices from multicultural and multireligious contexts articulates feminist liberation theology today.Joseph White Musser: A Mormon Fundamentalist (Introductions to Mormon Thought)
By Cristina M. Rosetti. 2024
In 1921, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints excommunicated Joseph White Musser for his refusal to give up…
plural marriage. Cristina M. Rosetti tells the story of how a Church leader followed his beliefs into exile and applied the religious thought he began to develop in the mainline faith to become a foundational theologian of Mormon fundamentalism. Musser’s devotion to Joseph Smith’s vision and the faith’s foundational texts reflected a widespread uneasiness with, and reaction against, changes taking place across society. Rosetti analyzes how Musser’s writing and thought knit a disparate group of outcast LDS believers into a movement. She also places Musser’s eventful life against the backdrop of a difficult period in LDS history, when the Church strained to disentangle itself from plural marriage and leaders like Musser emerged to help dissident members make sense of their lives outside the mainstream. The first book-length account of the Mormon thinker, Joseph White Musser reveals the figure whose teachings helped mold a movement.An innovative analysis that traces the continuity of the state&’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion in the Middle…
East and North Africa In The Making of the Modern Muslim State, Malika Zeghal reframes the role of Islam in modern Middle East governance. Challenging other accounts that claim that Middle Eastern states turned secular in modern times, Zeghal shows instead the continuity of the state&’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. Drawing on intellectual, political, and economic history, she traces this custodianship from early forms of constitutional governance in the nineteenth century through post–Arab Spring experiments in democracy. Zeghal argues that the intense debates around the implementation and meaning of state support for Islam led to a political cleavage between conservatives and their opponents that long predated the polarization of the twentieth century that accompanied the emergence of mass politics and Islamist movements.Examining constitutional projects, public spending, school enrollments, and curricula, Zeghal shows that although modern Muslim-majority polities have imported Western techniques of governance, the state has continued to protect and support the religion, community, and institutions of Islam. She finds that even as Middle Eastern states have expanded their nonreligious undertakings, they have dramatically increased their per capita supply of public religious provisions, especially Islamic education—further feeding the political schism between Islamists and their adversaries. Zeghal illuminates the tensions inherent in the partnerships between states and the body of Muslim scholars known as the ulama, whose normative power has endured through a variety of political regimes. Her detailed and groundbreaking analysis, which spans Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, makes clear the deep historical roots of current political divisions over Islam in governance.Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies
By N. T. Wright, Michael F. Bird. 2024
An urgent call for Christians everywhere to explore the nature of the kingdom amid the political upheaval of our day.Should…
Christians be politically withdrawn, avoiding participation in politics to maintain their prophetic voice and to keep from being used as political pawns? Or should Christians be actively involved, seeking to utilize political systems to control the levers of power?In Jesus and the Powers, N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird call Christians everywhere to discern the nature of Christian witness in fractured political environments. In an age of ascending autocracies, in a time of fear and fragmentation, amid carnage and crises, Jesus is king, and Jesus&’s kingdom remains the object of the church's witness and work.Part political theology, part biblical overview, and part church history, this book argues that building for Jesus's kingdom requires confronting empire in all its forms. This approach should orient Christians toward a form of political engagement that contributes to free democratic societies and vigorously opposes political schemes based on autocracy and nationalism. Throughout, Wright and Bird reflect on the relevance of this kingdom-oriented approach to current events, including the Russian-Ukraine conflict, the China-Taiwan tension, political turmoil in the USA, UK, and Australia, and the problem of Christian nationalism.Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt
By Mona Oraby. 2024
Why the pursuit of state recognition by seemingly marginal religious groups in Egypt and elsewhere is a devotional practiceOver the…
past decade alone, religious communities around the world have demanded state recognition, exemption, accommodation, or protection. They make these appeals both in states with a declared religious identity and in states officially neutral toward religion. In this book, Mona Oraby argues that the pursuit of official recognition by religious minorities amounts to a devotional practice. Countering the prevailing views on secularism, Oraby contends that demands by seemingly marginal groups to have their religious differences recognized by the state in fact assure communal integrity and coherence over time. Making her case, she analyzes more than fifty years of administrative judicial trends, theological discourse, and minority claims-making practices, focusing on the activities of Coptic Orthodox Christians and Baháʼí in modern and contemporary Egypt.Oraby documents the ways that devotion is expressed across a range of sites and sources, including in lawyers&’ offices, administrative judicial verdicts, televised media and film, and invitation-only study sessions. She shows how Egypt&’s religious minorities navigated the political and legal upheavals of the 2011 uprising and now persevere amid authoritarian repression. In a Muslim-majority state, they assert their status as Islam&’s others, finding belonging by affirming their difference; and difference, Oraby argues, is the necessary foundation for collective life. Considering these activities in light of the global history of civil administration and adjudication, Oraby shows that the lengths to which these marginalized groups go to secure their status can help us to reimagine the relationship between law and religion.Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church
By Stephen O. Presley. 2024
How to keep faith in a culture hostile to Christianity In an increasingly secular world, Christians are often pulled…
in two directions. Some urge us to retreat and build insular communities. Others call upon us to wage a culture war, harnessing the government to shore up Christian cultural power. But there is another way—and it&’s as old as the church itself. Stephen O. Presley takes us back to the first few centuries AD to show us how the first Christians approached cultural engagement. Amid a pagan culture that regarded their faith with suspicion, early Christians founded a religious movement that transformed the ancient world. Looking to great theologians like Augustine, Origen, and Tertullian, Presley shows how the early church approached politics, family, public life, and more. From these examples, he draws lessons for practicing authentic, pious discernment in how we engage with the wider culture. The Christians who came before us endured persecution to share a vision of human flourishing that changed the world. Following in their footsteps, we can sanctify our society through social witness. Readers anxious about shifting cultural tides will be left with hope in the already-present kingdom of God and the promised resurrection.The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps
By Dan Healey. 2024
A pioneering history of medical care in Stalin&’s Gulag—showing how doctors and nurses cared for inmates in appalling conditions …
A byword for injustice, suffering, and mass mortality, the Gulag exploited prisoners, compelling them to work harder for better rations in shocking conditions. From 1930 to 1953, eighteen million people passed through this penal-industrial empire. Many inmates, not reaching their quotas, succumbed to exhaustion, emaciation, and illness. It seems paradoxical that any medical care was available in the camps. But it was in fact ubiquitous. By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics—about 40 percent of whom were prisoners. Dan Healey explores the lives of the medical staff who treated inmates in the Gulag. Doctors and nurses faced extremes of repression, supply shortages, and isolation. Yet they still created hospitals, re-fed prisoners, treated diseases, and &“saved&” a proportion of their patients. They taught apprentices and conducted research too. This groundbreaking account offers an unprecedented view of Stalin&’s forced-labour camps as experienced by its medical staff.