In the Ancient Near East, cutting off someone’s head was a unique act, not comparable to other types of mutilation, and therefore charged with a special symbolic and communicative significance. This b
The rulers of the overseas empires summoned the Society of Jesus to evangelize their new subjects in the ‘New World’ which Spain and Portugal shared; this book is about how two different missions, in
This book provides a rich picture of what everyday life was like for women in Soviet times by presenting the life stories of eight women who were born in the interwar period. The life stories are told
Crime in England 1688-1815 covers the ‘long’ eighteenth century, a period which saw huge and far-reaching changes in criminal justice history. These changes included the introduction of transportation
Two phenomena are of central interest in the nine contributions that make up this volume: one is the question of power and its multiple forms, and the other is that geographical, political and cultura
Mochtar Lubis was one of Indonesia’s best-known newspaper editors, authors and cultural figures, with a national, regional and international prominence that he retained from the early 1950s until his
The Akhbar al-dawla al-saljuqiyya is one of the key primary documents on the history of Western Persia and Iraq in the 11th and 12th centuries. This book provides an accessible English translation and
China suffers frequently from many types of natural disasters, which have affected the lives of many millions of Chinese. The steps which the Chinese state has taken to prevent disasters, mitigate the
This book charts British and American approaches to Burma between the country's independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 and the military coup that ended civilian government in 1962. It analyses
The sent-down youth movement, a Maoist project that relocated urban youth to remote rural areas for 're-education', is often viewed as a defining feature of China's Cultural Revolution and emblematic of the intense suffering and hardship of the period. Drawing on rich archival research focused on Shanghai's youth in village settlements in remote regions, this history of the movement pays particular attention to how it was informed by and affected the critical issue of urban-rural relations in the People's Republic of China. It highlights divisions, as well as connections, created by the movement, particularly the conflicts and collaborations between urban and rural officials. Instead of chronicling a story of victims of a monolithic state, Honig and Zhao show how participants in the movement - the sent-down youth, their parents, and local government officials - disregarded, circumvented, and manipulated state policy, ultimately undermining a decade-long Maoist project.
This is a ground-breaking history of the British monarchy in the First World War and of the social and cultural functions of monarchism in the British war effort. Heather Jones examines how the conflict changed British cultural attitudes to the monarchy, arguing that the conflict ultimately helped to consolidate the crown's sacralised status. She looks at how the monarchy engaged with war recruitment, bereavement, gender norms, as well as at its political and military powers and its relationship with Ireland and the empire. She considers the role that monarchism played in military culture and examines royal visits to the front, as well as the monarchy's role in home front morale and in interwar war commemoration. Her findings suggest that the rise of republicanism in wartime Britain has been overestimated and that war commemoration was central to the monarchy's revered interwar status up to the abdication crisis.
Demonology – the intellectual study of demons and their powers – contributed to the prosecution of thousands of witches. With recent scholarship having abandoned the link between the two fields, this
