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Yale University Press

List of publications for
2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006

Earlier publications can be accessed by using the History On-Line Search Page



1688
The First Modern Revolution
Steve Pincus

For two hundred years historians have viewed England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 as an un-revolutionary revolution - bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all, sensible. In this brilliant new interpretation Steve Pincus refutes this traditional view. By expanding the interpretive lens to include a broader geographical and chronological frame, Pincus demonstrates that England's revolution was a European event, that it took place over a number of years, not months, and that it had repercussions in India, North America, the West Indies, and throughout continental Europe. His rich historical narrative, based on masses of new archival research, traces the transformation of English foreign policy, religious culture, and political economy that, he argues, was the intended consequence of the revolutionaries of 1688-1689. James II developed a modernization programme that emphasized centralized control, repression of dissidents, and territorial empire. The revolutionaries, by contrast, took advantage of the new economic possibilities to create a bureaucratic but participatory state. The post-revolutionary English state emphasized its ideological break with the past and envisioned itself as continuing to evolve. All of this, argues Pincus, makes the Glorious Revolution - not the French Revolution - the first truly modern revolution. This wide-ranging book reenvisions the nature of the Glorious Revolution and of revolutions in general, the causes and consequences of commercialization, the nature of liberalism, and ultimately the origins and contours of modernity itself.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300115475 - £28 - October 2009

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1948
A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
Benny Morris

This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side - where the archives are still closed - is illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials.Morris stresses the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war's military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a byproduct of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great Powers - Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union - in shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the successive battles that resulted in the emergence of the State of Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world, a humiliation that underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300151121 - £14.99 - April 2009

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Alger Hiss and the Battle for History
Susan Jacoby

Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have laboured to uncover the facts behind Chambers' shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948 - that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage. In this highly original work, Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. Unfettered by political axe-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the left and the right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post - Cold War era.With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the post - World War II era and then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300121339 - £16.99 - April 2009

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Anti-Imperial Choice (The)
The Making of the Ukrainian Jew
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

This book is the first to explore the Jewish contribution to, and integration with, Ukrainian culture. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern focuses on five writers and poets of Jewish descent whose literary activities span the 1880s to the 1990s. Unlike their East European contemporaries who disparaged the culture of Ukraine as second-rate, stateless, and colonial, these individuals embraced the Russian- and Soviet-dominated Ukrainian community, incorporating their Jewish concerns in their Ukrainian-language writings.The author argues that the marginality of these literati as Jews fueled their sympathy toward Ukrainians and their national cause. Providing extensive historical background, biographical detail, and analysis of each writer's poetry and prose, Petrovsky-Shtern shows how a Ukrainian-Jewish literary tradition emerged. Along the way, he challenges assumptions about modern Jewish acculturation and Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300137316 - £45 - May 2009

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Arab Center
The Promise of Moderation
Marwan Muasher

Marwan Muasher, a prominent Jordanian diplomat, has participated in high-level Middle East peace efforts for nearly twenty years. He served as Jordan's first ambassador to Israel and was also ambassador to the United States, spokesperson at peace talks in Madrid and Washington, minister of foreign affairs, and deputy prime minister in charge of reform. In this enlightening book he recounts the behind-the-scenes details of diplomatic ventures over the past two decades, including such recent undertakings as the Arab Peace Initiative and the Middle East Road Map.Muasher's insights into internal Arab politics and the successes and failures of the Arab Center (Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) are uniquely informed and deeply felt. He assesses how the middle road approach to reform is faring and explains why current tactics used by the West to deal with Islamic groups are doomed to failure. Part memoir and part analysis, Muasher's book reveals the human side of the Arab-Israeli conflict while also examining why the Arab Center has made so little progress and which Arab, Israeli, and American policies need rethinking. This book is essential reading for all who share the hope that moderate, pragmatic Arab voices will be heard in today's vitriolic debates over how to achieve an enduring peace in the Middle East.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300151145 - £12.99 - June 2009

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Atmosphere of Heaven (The)
The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and His Sons of Genius
Mike Jay

At the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, founded in the closing years of the eighteenth century, dramatic experiments with gases precipitated not only a revolution in scientific medicine but also in the history of ideas. Guided by the energy of maverick doctor Thomas Beddoes, the Institution was both laboratory and hospital - the first example of a modern medical research institution, but when its members discovered the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, their experiments devolved into a pioneering exploration of consciousness with far-reaching and unforeseen effects.This riveting book is the first to tell the story of Dr. Beddoes and the brilliant circle who surrounded him: Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who supported his ideas; James Watt, who designed and built his laboratory; Thomas Wedgwood, who funded it; and, his dazzling young chemistry assistant, Humphry Davy, who identified nitrous oxide and tested it on himself, with spectacular results. Medical historian Mike Jay charts the chaotic rise and fall of the Institution in this fast-paced account, and reveals its crucial influence - on modern drug culture, attitudes toward objective and subjective knowledge, the development of anaesthetic surgery, and the birth of the Romantic movement.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300124392 - £20 - April 2009

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Bannockburn
the Triumph of Robert the Bruce
David Cornell

Few battles resonate through British history as strongly as Bannockburn. On June 24, 1314, the Scots under the leadership of Robert the Bruce unexpectedly trounced the English, leaving thousands dead or wounded. The victory was one of Scotland's greatest, the more so because the Scottish army was outnumbered by about three to one. The loss to the English, fighting under Edward II, was staggering.In this groundbreaking account of Bannockburn, David Cornell sets the iconic battle in political and military context and focuses new attention on the roles of Robert and Edward in the events leading to the buildup of their armies. The author brings the two-day battle to life and reassesses both the crucial melee fought on the second day and the casualties suffered by the English. Filled with colourful detail and fresh insights, the book throws new light on the battle itself, the character of the English defeat, the effect of that defeat on the course of the Anglo-Scottish wars, and the powerful impact of the battle's legacy on English and Scottish national identity.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300145687 - £25 - March 2009

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Behind Closed Doors
At Home in Georgian England
Amanda Vickery

In this brilliant new work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion; bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lodgings; genteel spinsters keeping up appearances in two rooms with yellow wallpaper; and, servants with only a locking box to call their own. Vickery makes ingenious use of upholsterer's ledgers, burglary trials, and other unusual sources to reveal the roles of house and home in economic survival, social success, and political representation during the long 18th century. Through the spread of formal visiting, the proliferation of affordable ornamental furnishings, the commercial celebration of feminine artistry at home, and the currency of the language of taste, even modest homes turned into arenas of social campaign and exhibition.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300154535 - £18.99 - October 2009

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Blood and Mistletoe
The History of the Druids in Britain
Ronald Hutton

Crushed by the Romans in the first century A.D., the ancient Druids of Britain left almost no reliable evidence behind. Because of this, historian Ronald Hutton shows, succeeding British generations have been free to reimagine, reinterpret, and reinvent the Druids. Hutton's captivating book is the first to encompass two thousand years of Druid history and to explore the evolution of English, Scottish, and Welsh attitudes toward the forever ambiguous figures of the ancient Celtic world.Druids have been remembered at different times as patriots, scientists, philosophers, or priests; sometimes portrayed as corrupt, bloodthirsty, or ignorant, they were also seen as fomenters of rebellion. Hutton charts how the Druids have been written in and out of history, archaeology, and the public consciousness for some 500 years, with particular focus on the romantic period, when Druids completely dominated notions of British prehistory. Sparkling with legends and images, filled with new perspectives on ancient and modern times, this book is a fascinating cultural study of Druids as catalysts in British history.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300144857 - £30 - May 2009

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Blood and Soil
a World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
Ben Kiernan

For thirty years, Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book, the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times, is among his most important achievements.Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin's mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.

paper - ISBN: 9780300144253 - £14.99 - April 2009

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Britons
Forging the Nation 1707-1837
Linda Colley

How was Great Britain made? And what does it mean to be British? This brilliant and seminal book examines how a more cohesive British nation was invented after 1707 and how this new national identity was nurtured through war, religion, trade, and empire. Lavishly illustrated and powerful, 'Britons' remains a major contribution to our understanding of Britain's past, and continues to influence ongoing controversies about this polity's survival and future. This edition contains an extensive new preface by the author.

paper - ISBN: 9780300152807 - £10.99 - March 2009

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Brittle Thread of Life (The)
Backcountry People Make a Place for Themselves in Early America
Mark Williams

The colonists who settled the backcountry in eighteenth-century New England were recruited from the social fringe, people who were desperate for land, autonomy, and respectability and who were willing to make a hard living in a rugged environment. Mark Williams' microhistorical approach gives voice to the settlers, proprietors, and officials of the small colonial settlements that became Granby, Connecticut, and Ashfield, Massachusetts. These people - often disrespectful, disorderly, presumptuous, insistent, and defiant - were drawn to the ideology of the Revolution in the 1760s and 1770s that stressed equality, independence, and property rights. The backcountry settlers pushed the emerging nation's political culture in a more radical direction than many of their leaders or the Founding Fathers preferred and helped put a democratic imprint on the new nation. This accessibly written book will resonate with all those interested in the social and political relationships of early America.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300139228 - £35.00 - September 2009

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Bugs and the Victorians
John F. McDiarmid Clark

In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the impulse to name and classify the natural world accelerated, and insects presented a particularly inviting challenge. This lively book explores how science became increasingly important in nineteenth-century British culture and how the systematic study of insects permitted entomologists to engage with the most pressing questions of Victorian times: the nature of God, mind, and governance, and the origins of life.By placing insects in a myriad of contexts - politics, religion, gender, and empire - John F. McDiarmid Clark demonstrates the impact of Victorian culture on the science of insects and on the systematic knowledge of the natural world. Through engaging accounts of famous and eccentric innovators who sought to define social roles for themselves through a specialist study of insects - among them a Tory clergyman, a banker and member of Parliament, a wealthy spinster, and an entrepreneurial academic - Clark highlights the role of insects in the making of modern Britain and maintains that the legacy of Victorian entomologists continues to this day.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300150919 - £25 - April 2009

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Caviar and Ashes
Marci Shore

'In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a cafe called Ziemianska.' Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the fin-de-siecle. They sat in Cafe Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. 'Caviar and Ashes' tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically.Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestoes and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafes to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.

paper - ISBN: 9780300143287 - £16 - February 2009

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Church, Society and Religious Change in France
1580-1730
Joseph Bergin

This wide-ranging and authoritative book is the first to fully synthesize the French experience of religious change in the period stretching between the Reformation and the early Enlightenment. The traumatic experiences of the wars of religion and the continuing challenge of Protestantism, made France an unusually potent site for significant religious upheavals and developments. The country was a crucible for theological doctrines and inventive practitioners, which generated considerable conflict but also stimulated religious reform and innovation. The dynamism of the French version of the Catholic Reformation surpassed anything elsewhere in Europe.Vividly rendering the religious history of France through its social, institutional and cultural contexts, Joseph Bergin explores the different agents, instruments and techniques employed to engineer religious transformations. Through a comprehensive examination of a huge volume of didactic religious literature, he shows how new religious ideas and practices were disseminated across French society in the hopes of shaping a new kind of devout Catholic. Assured, nuanced, and ground-breaking, this book illuminates the continually developing interaction between church and society in France, and uncovers the religiosity of the seventeenth century.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300150988 - £35 - June 2009

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Civil Society and Empire
Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic world
James Livesey

James Livesey traces the origins of the modern conception of civil society - an ideal of collective life between the family and politics - not in England or France, as many of his predecessors have done, but in the provincial societies of Ireland and Scotland in the eighteenth century. Livesey shows how civil society was first invented as an idea of renewed community for the provincial and defeated elites in the provinces of the British Empire and how this innovation allowed them to enjoy liberty without directly participating in the empire's governance, until the limits of the concept were revealed. The concept of civil society continues to have direct relevance for contemporary political theory and action. Livesey demonstrates how western governments, for example, have appealed to the values of civil society in their projections of power in Bosnia and Iraq. Civil society has become an object central to current ideological debate, and this book offers a thought-provoking discussion of its beginnings, objectives, and current nature.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300139020 - £35 - October 2009

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Czechoslovakia
The State that Failed
Mary Heimann

This book, the most thoroughly researched and accurate history of Czechoslovakia to appear in English, tells the story of the country from its founding in 1918 to partition in 1992 - from fledgling democracy through Nazi occupation, Communist rule, invasion by the Soviet Union to - at last - democracy again. The common Western view of Czechoslovakia has been that of a small nation which was sacrificed at Munich in 1938, betrayed to the Soviets in 1948 and which rebelled heroically against the repression of the Soviet Union during the Prague Spring of 1968. Mary Heimann dispels these myths and shows how intolerant nationalism and an unhelpful sense of victimhood led Czech and Slovak authorities to discriminate against minorities, compete with the Nazis to persecute Jews and Gypsies and pave the way for the Communist police state. She also reveals Alexander Dubcek, held to be a national hero and standard-bearer for democracy, as an unprincipled apparatchik. Well written, revisionist and accessible, this groundbreaking book should become the standard history of Czechoslovakia for years to come.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300141474 - £25 - October 2009

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Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two
Alan Allport

Snapshots of gaiety and celebration - the street parties, the victory speeches - are how some people today think of Britain in 1945. But the years following the end of World War II were far from a 'golden age' of pride and self-confidence. The country was troubled though triumphant, subject to continued rationing and political change. Wracked by social disorder, austerity and disillusion, Britain was exhausted - and it was the return of those men who had fought for their country who seemed to be a root cause of the trouble. 'Demobbed' is the real story of what happened when millions of ex-servicemen returned home. Most had been absent for years, and the joy of arrival was often clouded with ambivalence, regrets and fears. Returning soldiers faced both practical and psychological problems, from reasserting their place in the family home to rejoining a much-altered labour force. Civilians worried that their homecoming heroes had been barbarized by their experiences and would bring crime and violence back from the battlefield. 'Problem veterans' preoccupied the entire country. Alan Allport draws on their personal letters and diaries, on newspapers, reports, novels and films to illuminate the darker side of the homecoming experience for ex-servicemen, their families and society at large - a gripping story that's in danger of being lost to national memory.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300140439 - £20 - October 2009

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Eduardo Barreiros and the Recovery of Spain
Hugh Thomas

Born in an impoverished region of Galicia, possessed of little education and less money, Eduardo Barreiros (1919-1992) rose to become an immensely successful entrepreneur and one of Spain's most prominent industrialists. In this engaging biography, the first on a Spanish entrepreneur in English, Hugh Thomas recounts Barreiros' origins as a car mechanic, his success in the motor industry, his tragic alliance with the Chrysler Corporation, and his little-known role as a motor industry founder in 1980s Cuba. Drawing on an unrivaled knowledge of Spanish history, Lord Thomas also brings to light Barreiros' critical role in the modernization of the Spanish economy in the post - Civil War years.The book offers a detailed portrait of Don Eduardo's personality, character, and numerous entrepreneurial endeavours, as well as a full account of the difficulties the Franco-era government threw in the path of his capitalist activities. The relationship between Barreiros and the Chrysler Corporation is also described, along with the failed Dodge Dart project that ultimately cost Barreiros his business. Finally, the book recounts Don Eduardo's late-in-life efforts to help establish a motor industry in Castro's Cuba - a paradoxical conclusion for a great capitalist.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300121094 - £30 - January 2009

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Empire's New Clothes
A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700-1917
Christine Ruane

In 1701, Tsar Peter the Great decreed that all residents of Moscow must abandon their traditional dress and wear European fashion. Those who produced or sold Russian clothing would face 'dreadful punishment'. Peter's dress decree, part of his drive to make Russia more like Western Europe, had a profound impact on the history of Imperial Russia. This engrossing book explores the impact of Westernization on Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and presents a wealth of photographs of ordinary Russians in all their finery. Christine Ruane draws on memoirs, mail-order catalogues, fashion magazines, and other period sources to demonstrate that Russia's adoption of Western fashion had symbolic, economic, and social ramifications and was inseparably linked to the development of capitalism, industrial production, and new forms of communication. This book shows how the fashion industry became a forum through which Russians debated and formulated a new national identity.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300141559 - £35 - April 2009

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Enlightened Economy (The)
An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850
Joel Mokyr

This book focuses on the importance of ideological and institutional factors in the rapid development of the British economy during the years between the Glorious Revolution and the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Joel Mokyr shows that we cannot understand the Industrial Revolution without recognizing the importance of the intellectual sea changes of Britain's Age of Enlightenment. In a vigorous discussion, Mokyr goes beyond the standard explanations that credit geographical factors, the role of markets, politics, and society to show that the beginnings of modern economic growth in Britain depended a great deal on what key players knew and believed, and how those beliefs affected their economic behaviour. He argues that Britain led the rest of Europe into the Industrial Revolution because it was there that the optimal intersection of ideas, culture, institutions, and technology existed to make rapid economic growth achievable. His wide-ranging evidence covers sectors of the British economy often neglected, such as the service industries.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300124552 - £30.00 - October 2009

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Ethiopian Revolution (The)
War in the Horn of Africa
Gebru Tareke

Revolution, civil wars, and guerilla warfare wracked Ethiopia during three turbulent decades at the end of the twentieth century. This book is a pioneering study of the military history and political significance of this crucial Horn of Africa region during that period. Drawing on new archival materials and interviews, Gebru Tareke illuminates the conflicts, comparing them to the Russian and Iranian revolutions in terms of regional impact. Writing in vigorous and accessible prose, Tareke brings to life the leading personalities in the domestic political struggles, strategies of the warring parties, international actors, and key battles. He demonstrates how the brutal dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam lacked imagination in responding to crises and alienated the peasantry by destroying human and material resources.And he describes the delicate balance of persuasion and force with which northern insurgents mobilized the peasantry and triumphed. The book sheds invaluable light not only on modern Ethiopia but also on post-colonial state formation and insurrectionary politics worldwide.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300141634 - £30 - June 2009

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Familiarity of Strangers (The)
The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period
Francesca Trivellato

Taking a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, this book blends archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis to understand how the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, Tuscany, traded in regions near and far in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesca Trivellato tests assumptions about ethnic and religious trading diasporas and networks of exchange and trust. Her extensive research in international archives - including a vast cache of merchants' letters written between 1704 and 1746 - reveals a more nuanced view of the business relations between Jews and non-Jews across the Mediterranean, Atlantic Europe, and the Indian Ocean than ever before.The book argues that cross-cultural trade was predicated on, and generated familiarity among strangers, but could coexist easily with religious prejudice. It analyzes instances in which business cooperation among coreligionists and between strangers relied on language, customary norms, and social networks more than the progressive rise of state and legal institutions.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300136838 - £30 - June 2009

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Fires of Faith
Catholic England Under Mary Tudor
Eamon Duffy

The reign of Mary Tudor has been remembered as an era of sterile repression, when a reactionary monarch launched a doomed attempt to reimpose Catholicism on an unwilling nation. Above all, the burning alive of more than 280 men and women for their religious beliefs seared the rule of 'Bloody Mary' into the protestant imagination, as an alien aberration in the onward and upward march of the English-speaking peoples.In this controversial reassessment, a leading reformation historian argues that Mary's regime was neither inept nor backward-looking. Led by the Queen's cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole, Mary's church dramatically reversed the religious revolution imposed under the child king Edward VI. Inspired by the values of the European Counter-Reformation, the cardinal and the queen reinstated the papacy and launched an effective propaganda campaign through pulpit and press.Even the most notorious aspect of the regime, the burnings, proved devastatingly effective. Only the death of the childless queen and her cardinal on the same day in November 1558 brought the protestant Elizabeth to the throne, and thereby changed the course of English history.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300152166 - £19.99 - May 2009

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Florence 1900
the Quest for Arcadia
Bernd Roeck

By the end of the nineteenth century, Florence was a key destination for cultured travelers from Europe and America. Writers such as Wilde, Rilke, and Mann; painters such as Degas and Klee; and not least, the young art historian Aby Warburg and his wife, Mary, flocked to Florence to escape the encroachments of modern life at home and to revel in the city's rich artistic and cultural past.This beguiling book fuses narrative and ideas to consider how the encounter between modernism and Renaissance culture was experienced by both visitors to Florence and its inhabitants. Based on Aby Warburg's letters, diaries, and notebooks; on Italian and German archives; and on conversations with E. H. Gombrich (director of the famous Institute that Warburg founded), the book is an intimate guide to life in Florence and the theaters, restaurants, galleries, and salons frequented by visiting cultural exiles. At the same time, the book paints an evocative picture of a city at the cusp of the modern age, adjusting to electricity and the motor car on one hand and to social unrest and a clash of cultures on the other.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300095159 - £25 - March 2009

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Forgotten Continent
The Battle for Latin America's Soul
Michael Reid

Latin America has often been condemned to failure. Neither poor enough to evoke Africa's moral crusade, nor as explosively booming as India and China, it has largely been overlooked by the West. Yet this vast continent, home to half a billion people, the world's largest reserves of arable land, and 8.5 percent of global oil, is busily transforming its political and economic landscape.This book argues that rather than failing the test, Latin America's efforts to build fairer and more prosperous societies make it one of the world's most vigorous laboratories for capitalist democracy. In many countries, including Brazil, Chile and Mexico, democratic leaders are laying the foundations for faster economic growth and more inclusive politics, as well as tackling deep-rooted problems of poverty, inequality, and social injustice. They face a new challenge from Hugo Chavez's oil-fueled populism, and much is at stake. Failure will increase the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants to the United States and Europe, jeopardize stability in a region rich in oil and other strategic commodities, and threaten some of the world's most majestic natural environments.Drawing on Michael Reid's many years of reporting from inside Latin America's cities, presidential palaces, and shantytowns, the book provides a vivid, immediate, and informed account of a dynamic continent and its struggle to compete in a globalized world.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300151206 - £10.99 - July 2009

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Franco and Hitler
Spain, Germany and World War II
Stanley G. Payne

This is the first book in any language to answer these intriguing questions. Stanley Payne, a leading historian of modern Spain, explores the full range of Franco's relationship with Hitler, from 1936 to the fall of the Reich in 1945. But as Payne brilliantly shows, relations between these two dictators were not only a matter of realpolitik. These two titanic egos engaged in an extraordinary tragi-comic drama often verging on the dark absurdity of a Beckett or Ionesco play.While Payne investigates the evolving relationship of the two regimes up to the conclusion of World War II, his principal concern is the enigma of Spain's unique position during the Second World War, as a fascist country struggling to maintain a tortured neutrality. Why Spain did not enter the war as a German ally, joining with Hitler to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British navy, is at the centre of Payne's narrative. Franco's only personal meeting with Hitler in 1940 to discuss precisely this is recounted here in groundbreaking detail that also sheds significant new light on the Spanish government's vacillating policy toward Jewish refugees, the Holocaust, and Spain's German connection throughout the duration of the war.

paper - ISBN: 9780300151220 - £14.99 - March 2009

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Gallipoli
The Final Story
Robin Prior

The Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16 was an ill-fated Allied attempt to shorten the war by eliminating Turkey, creating a Balkan alliance against the Central Powers, and securing a sea route to Russia. A failure in all respects, the operation ended in disaster, and the Allied forces suffered some 390,000 casualties. This conclusive book assesses the many myths that have emerged about Gallipoli and provides definitive answers to questions that have lingered about the operation.Robin Prior, a renowned military historian, proceeds step by step through the campaign, dealing with naval, military, and political matters and surveying the operations of all the armies involved: British, Anzac, French, Indian, and Turkish. Relying substantially on original documents, including neglected war diaries and technical military sources, Prior evaluates the strategy, the commanders, and the performance of soldiers on the ground. His conclusions are powerful and unsettling: the naval campaign was not 'almost' won, and the land action was not bedeviled by 'minor misfortunes'. Instead, the badly conceived Gallipoli campaign was doomed from the start. And even had it been successful, the operation would not have shortened the war by a single day. Despite their bravery, the Allied troops who fell at Gallipoli died in vain.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300149951 - £25 - April 2009

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Genocide Before the Holocaust
Cathie Carmichael

There is an appalling symmetry to the many instances of genocide that the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world witnessed. In the wake of the break-up of the old Hapsburg, Ottoman and Romanov empires, minority populations throughout those lands were persecuted, expelled and eliminated. The reason for the deplorable decimations of communities - Jews in Imperial Russia and Ukraine, Ottoman Assyrians, Armenians and Muslims from the Caucasus and Balkans - was, Cathie Carmichael contends, located in the very roots of the new nation states arising from the imperial rubble. The question of who should be included in the nation, and which groups were now to be deemed 'suspect' or 'alien', was one that preoccupied and divided Europe long before the Holocaust. Examining all the major eliminations of communities in Europe up until 1941, Carmichael shows how hotbeds of nationalism, racism and developmentalism resulted in devastating manifestations of genocidal ideology. Dramatic, perceptive and poignant, this is the story of disappearing civilizations - precursors to one of humanity's worst atrocities, and part of the legacy of genocide in the modern world.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300121179 - £25.00 - August 2009

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History Lesson
A Race Odyssey
Mary Lefkowitz

In the early 1990s, Classics professor Mary Lefkowitz discovered that one of her faculty colleagues at Wellesley College was teaching that Greek culture had been stolen from Africa and that Jews were responsible for the slave trade. This book tells the disturbing story of what happened when she spoke out. Lefkowitz quickly learned that to investigate the origin and meaning of myths composed by people who have for centuries been dead and buried is one thing, but it is quite another to critique myths that living people take very seriously. She also found that many in academia were reluctant to challenge the fashionable idea that truth is merely a form of opinion. For her insistent defence of obvious truths about the Greeks and the Jews, Lefkowitz was embroiled in turmoil for a decade. She faced institutional indifference, angry colleagues, reverse racism, anti-Semitism, and even a lawsuit intended to silence her.In 'History Lesson' Lefkowitz describes what it was like to experience directly the power of both postmodernism and compensatory politics. She offers personal insights into important issues of academic values and political correctness, and she suggests practical solutions for the divisive and painful problems that arise when a political agenda takes precedence over objective scholarship. Her forthright tale uncovers surprising features in the landscape of higher education and an unexpected need for courage from those who venture there.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300151268 - £11.99 - April 2009

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History's Greatest Heist
the looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks
Sean McMeekin

Historians have never resolved a central mystery of the Russian Revolution: how did the Bolsheviks, despite facing a world of enemies and leaving nothing but economic ruin in their path, manage to stay in power through five long years of civil war? In this penetrating book, Sean McMeekin draws on previously undiscovered materials from the Soviet Ministry of Finance and other European and American archives to expose some of the darkest secrets of Russia's early days of communism. Building on one archival revelation after another, the author reveals how the Bolsheviks financed their aggression through astonishingly extensive thievery. Their looting included everything from the cash savings of private citizens to gold, silver, diamonds, jewelry, icons, antiques, and artwork.By tracking illicit Soviet financial transactions across Europe, McMeekin shows how Lenin's regime accomplished history's greatest heist between 1917 and 1922 and turned centuries of accumulated wealth into the sinews of class war. McMeekin also names names, introducing for the first time the compliant bankers, lawyers, and middlemen who, for a price, helped the Bolsheviks launder their loot, impoverish Russia, and impose their brutal will on millions.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300135589 - £25 - January 2009

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Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution
Ian Kershaw

This book is the culmination of more than three decades of meticulous historiographic research on Nazi Germany by one of the period's most distinguished historians. The volume brings together the most important and influential aspects of Ian Kershaw's research on the Holocaust for the first time. The writings are arranged in three sections: Hitler and the 'Final Solution', popular opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the 'Final Solution' in historiography. Kershaw provides an introduction and a closing section on the uniqueness of Nazism.Kershaw was a founding historian of the social history of the Third Reich, and he has throughout his career conducted pioneering research on the societal causes and consequences of Nazi policy. His work has brought much to light concerning the ways in which the attitudes of the German populace shaped and did not shape Nazi policy. This volume presents a comprehensive, multifaceted picture both of the destructive dynamic of the Nazi leadership and of the attitudes and behaviour of ordinary Germans as the persecution of the Jews spiraled into total genocide.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300151275 - £12.99 - June 2009

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Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain
Scott K. Taylor

Early modern Spain has long been viewed as having a culture obsessed with honour, where a man resorted to violence when his or his wife's honour was threatened, especially through sexual disgrace. This book, the first to closely examine honour and interpersonal violence in the era, overturns this idea, arguing that the way Spanish men and women actually behaved was very different from the behaviour depicted in dueling manuals, law books, and 'honour plays' of the period.Drawing on criminal and other records to assess the character of violence among non-elite Spaniards, historian Scott Taylor finds that appealing to honour was a rhetorical strategy, and that insults, gestures, and violence were all part of a varied repertoire that allowed both men and women to decide how to dispute issues of truth and reputation.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300126853 - £30 - January 2009

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How Jews Became Germans
The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin
Deborah Hertz

When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, an urgent priority was to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country's premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz's discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that has led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries.The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz humanizes the stories, sets them in the context of Berlin's evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300151640 - £14.99 - April 2009

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Ideology and Inquisition
The World of the Censors in Early Mexico
Martin Austin Nesvig

This book is the first comprehensive treatment in English of the ideology and practice of the Inquisitional censors, focusing on the case of Mexico from the 1520s to the 1630s. Others have examined the effects of censorship, but Martin Nesvig employs a non-traditional approach that focuses on the inner logic of censorship in order to examine the collective mentality, ideological formation, and practical application of ideology of the censors themselves. Nesvig shows that censorship was not only about the regulation of books but about censorship in the broader sense as a means to regulate Catholic dogma and the content of religious thought. In Mexico, decisions regarding censorship involved considerable debate and disagreement among censors thereby challenging the idea of the inquisition as a monolithic institution. Once adapted to cultural circumstances in Mexico, the Inquisition and the Index produced not a weapon of intellectual terror, but a flexible apparatus of control.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300140408 - £40 - October 2009

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Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy
Michael H. Hunt

This new edition of Michael H. Hunt's classic reinterpretation of American diplomatic history includes a preface that reflects on the personal experience and intellectual agenda behind the writing of the book, surveys the broad impact of the book's argument, and addresses the challenges to the thesis since the book's original publication. In the wake of 9/11, this interpretation is more pertinent than ever.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300139259 - £12.99 - April 2009

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Italian Inquisition (The)
Christopher F. Black

The Italian Inquisition, or Holy Office, was established in 1542, stimulated partly by the earlier Spanish operation. Certainly Spain's 'black legend' affected opinions of the Inquisition in Italy, but as this pioneering book shows, there were significant differences between their operations, targets, and casualties. In this pioneering history of the Italian Inquisition, Christopher Black charts how it developed and changed over time. He maps its cumbersome means of command, supervision, and action, as well as its role as a surprisingly approachable regulatory body working within communities. Ranging right across the Italian panorama, and rooting his enquiry in striking individual cases, Black uncovers Inquisitional procedure from denunciation to punishment. This scrupulous and richly rewarding book shows how the Inquisition shaped Italy's religious and social worlds.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300117066 - £35.00 - August 2009

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Joseph in Egypt
A Cultural Icon from Grotius to Goethe
Bernhard Lang

The biblical story of Joseph ranks in the history of world literature alongside 'The Odyssey' and other ancient legends as a seminal canonical text and has provided rich material for later writers to imitate and elaborate. This book, by Bernhard Lang, an internationally acclaimed biblical scholar, examines the many and varied ways that the story of Joseph has been interpreted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. During that time, Joseph was heralded as an icon by many different writers and thinkers, among them Henry Fielding, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, and Goethe. Educators commended Joseph as a model of piety, moralists extolled him in defense of chastity, and political philosophers regarded him as an exemplary leader; historians debated variously whether he was a benefactor, tyrant, or merely a character in a well-told ancient oriental tale. Lang examines a range of texts - novels, stage plays, poems, children's books, and critical treatises - to illuminate the debt each owes to earlier versions of the Joseph story. In doing so, he presents a masterful, sensitive, and highly readable account of the early modern world.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300151565 - £30.00 - September 2009

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King's Dream
Eric J. Sundquist

'I have a dream' - no words are more widely recognized, or more often repeated, than those called out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. King's speech, elegantly structured and commanding in tone, has become shorthand not only for his own life but for the entire civil rights movement. In this new exploration of the 'I have a dream' speech, Eric J. Sundquist places it in the history of American debates about racial justice, debates as old as the nation itself, and demonstrates how the speech, an exultant blend of grand poetry and powerful elocution, perfectly expressed the story of African American freedom.This book is the first to set King's speech within the cultural and rhetorical traditions on which the civil rights leader drew in crafting his oratory, as well as its essential historical contexts, from the early days of the republic through present-day Supreme Court rulings. At a time when the meaning of the speech has been obscured by its appropriation for every conceivable cause, Sundquist clarifies the transformative power of King's 'Second Emancipation Proclamation' and its continuing relevance for contemporary arguments about equality.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300118070 - £16.99 - February 2009

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Living with Hitler
Eric Kurlander

This book addresses key questions about liberal democrats and their activities in Germany from 1933 to the end of the Nazi regime. While it is commonly assumed that liberals fled their homeland at the first sign of jackboots, in reality most stayed. Some even thrived under Hitler, personally as well as professionally. Historian Eric Kurlander examines the motivations, hopes, and fears of liberal democrats - Germans who best exemplified the middle-class progressivism of the Weimar Republic - to discover why so few resisted and so many embraced elements of the Third Reich.German liberalism was not only the opponent and victim of National Socialism, Kurlander suggests, but in some ways its ideological and sociological antecedent. That liberalism could be both has crucial implications for understanding the genesis of authoritarian regimes everywhere. Indeed, Weimar democrats' prolonged reluctance to oppose the regime demonstrates how easily a liberal democracy may gradually succumb to fascism.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300116663 - £25 - May 2009

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Magnificent Mrs. Tennant (The)
David Waller

Gertrude Tennant's life was remarkable for its length (1819-1918), but even more so for the influence she achieved as an unsurpassed London hostess. The salon she established when widowed in her early fifties attracted legions of celebrities, among them Gladstone and Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Thomas Huxley, John Everett Millais, Henry James, and Robert Browning. In her youth she had a fling with Gustave Flaubert, and in her later years she became the redoubtable mother-in-law to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. But as a woman in a male-dominated world, Mrs. Tennant has been remembered mainly as a footnote in the lives of eminent men.This book recovers the lost life of Gertrude Tennant, drawing on a treasuretrove of recently discovered family papers - thousands of letters, including two dozen original letters from Flaubert to Gertrude, dozens of diaries, and many other unpublished documents relating to Stanley and other famous figures of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. David Waller presents Gertrude Tennant's life in colourful detail, placing her not only at the heart of a multi-generational, matriarchal family epic but also at the centre of European social, literary, and intellectual life for the best part of a century.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300139358 - £20 - May 2009

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Marvelous Hairy Girls (The)
The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

This book tells the extraordinary story of three sixteenth-century sisters who, along with their father and brothers, were afflicted with an extremely rare genetic condition that made them unusually hairy. Amazingly, the Gonzales sisters were not mocked or shunned, but were welcomed in the courts of Europe, spending much of their lives among nobles, musicians, and artists. Their double identity as humans and beasts made them intriguing, and the girls and their father were the subjects not only of medical investigations but also of a considerable number of portraits, some of which still hang in European castles today.Using the Gonzales family as a lens, historian Merry Wiesner-Hanks examines their varied and wondrous times. The story of this family connects with every important change of their era - political and religious violence, colonial conquest, new forms of scholarship and science - and also provides insights into the complex relationships between beastliness, monstrosity, and gender in early modern life.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300127331 - £18.99 - May 2009

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Master of the House
Stalin and his Inner Circle
Oleg V. Khlevniuk

Based on meticulous research in previously unavailable documents in the Soviet archives, this compelling book illuminates the secret inner mechanisms of power in the Soviet Union during the years when Stalin established his notorious dictatorship. Oleg V. Khlevniuk focuses on the top organ in Soviet Russia's political hierarchy of the 1930s - the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party - and on the political and interpersonal dynamics that weakened its collective leadership and enabled Stalin's rise.Khlevniuk's unparalleled research challenges existing theories of the workings of the Politburo and uncovers many new findings regarding the nature of alliances among Politburo members, Sergei Kirov's murder, the implementation of the Great Terror, and much more. The author analyzes Stalin's mechanisms of generating and retaining power and presents a new understanding, unmatched in texture and depth, of the highest tiers of the Communist Party in a crucial era of Soviet history.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300110661 - £25 - January 2009

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New History of Early Christianity (A)
Charles Freeman

The relevance of Christianity is as hotly contested today as it has ever been. 'A New History of Early Christianity' shows how our current debates are rooted in the many controversies surrounding the birth of the religion and the earliest attempts to resolve them. Charles Freeman's meticulous historical account of Christianity from its birth in Judaea in the first century A.D. to the emergence of Western and Eastern churches by A.D. 600 reveals that it was a distinctive, vibrant, and incredibly diverse movement brought into order at the cost of intellectual and spiritual vitality. Against the conventional narrative of the inevitable 'triumph' of a single distinct Christianity, Freeman shows that there was a host of competing Christianities, many of which had as much claim to authenticity as those that eventually dominated. Tracing the astonishing transformation that the early Christian church underwent - from sporadic niches of Christian communities surviving in the wake of a horrific crucifixion to sanctioned alliance with the state - Charles Freeman shows how freedom of thought was curtailed by the development of the concept of faith. The imposition of 'correct belief', and an institutional framework that enforced orthodoxy were both consolidating and stifling. Uncovering the church's relationships with Judaism, Gnosticism, Greek philosophy and Greco-Roman society, Freeman offers dramatic new accounts of Paul, the resurrection, and the church fathers and emperors.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300125818 - £25.00 - October 2009

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Not the Enemy
Israel's Jews from Arab lands
Rachel Shabi

In this remarkable, page-turning book, Rachel Shabi lays bare the painful division within Israeli society between Ashkenazi Jews, whose families come from Eastern Europe, and Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews, who come from the Arab countries of the Middle East. Herself from an Iraqi Jewish family, Shabi explores the history of this relationship, tracing it back to the first days of the new state of Israel. In a society desperate to identify itself with Europe, immigrants who spoke Arabic and followed Middle Eastern customs were seen as inferior; David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, famously described them as lacking the most elementary knowledge.Sixty years later, Mizrahis are still much less successful than Ashkenazis, condemned, often, to substandard education, low-quality housing and mockery for their accents, tastes and lifestyles. Through a combination of archival research and personal interviews, Shabi brings to light the prejudices that permeate Israeli society and demonstrates how they affect Mizrahi lives and hopes. Even more importantly, she argues that the treatment meted out to Mizrahis reflects a wider Israeli rejection of the Middle East and its culture, a rejection that makes it impossible for Israel ever to become integrated within its own region.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300122756 - £18.99 - January 2009

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Oceans of Wine
Madeira and the Organization of the Atlantic World 1640-1815
David Hancock

This innovative book examines how, between 1640 and 1815, the Portuguese Madeira wine trade shaped the Atlantic world and American society. David Hancock painstakingly reconstructs the lives of producers, distributors, and consumers, as well as the economic and social structures created by globalizing commerce, to reveal an intricate interplay between individuals and market forces. Wine lovers and Madeira enthusiasts will enjoy 'Oceans of Wine', as will historians interested in food, colonial trade, and the history of the Atlantic region. Using voluminous archives pertaining to wine, many of them previously unexamined, Hancock offers a dramatic new perspective on the economic and social development of the Atlantic world by challenging traditional interpretations that have identified states and empires as the driving force behind trade. He demonstrates convincingly just how decentralized the early modern commercial system was, as well as how self-organized, a system that emerged from the actions of market participants working across imperial lines. The networks they formed began as commercial structures and expanded into social and political systems that were conduits not only for wine but also for ideas about reform, revolution, and independence.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300136050 - £40 - October 2009

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Pashas
Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World
James Mather

Long before they came as occupiers, the British were drawn to the Middle East by the fabled riches of its trade and the enlightened tolerance of its people. The Pashas, merchants and travelers from Europe, discovered an Islamic world that was alluring, dynamic, and diverse. Ranging across two and a half centuries and through the great cities of Istanbul, Aleppo, and Alexandria, James Mather tells the forgotten story of the men of the Levant Company who sought their fortunes in the Ottoman Empire. Their trade brought to the region not only merchants but also ambassadors and envoys, pilgrims and chaplains, families and servants, aristocratic tourists and roving antiquarians. Unlike the nabobs who gathered their fortunes in Bengal, they both respected and learned from the culture they encountered, and their lives provide a fascinating insight into the meeting of East and West before the age of European imperialism. Intriguing, intimate, and original, 'Pashas' brings to life an extraordinary tale of faraway visitors beguiled by a mysterious world of Islam.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300126396 - £25 - October 2009

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Peter's War
A New England Slave boy and the American Revolution
Malcolm Joyce Lee

A boy named Peter, born to a slave in Massachusetts in 1763, was sold nineteen months later to a childless white couple there. This book recounts the fascinating history of how the American Revolution came to Peter's small town, how he joined the revolutionary army at the age of twelve, and how he participated in the battles of Bunker Hill and Yorktown and witnessed the surrender at Saratoga.Joyce Lee Malcolm describes Peter's home life in rural New England, which became increasingly unhappy as he grew aware of racial differences and prejudices. She then relates how he and other blacks, slave and free, joined the war to achieve their own independence. Malcolm juxtaposes Peter's life in the patriot armies with that of the life of Titus, a New Jersey slave who fled to the British in 1775 and reemerged as a feared guerrilla leader.A remarkable feat of investigation, Peter's biography illuminates many themes in American history: race relations in New England, the prelude to and military history of the Revolutionary War, and the varied experience of black soldiers who fought on both sides.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300119305 - £16.99 - February 2009

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Plumes
Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a lost World of Global Commerce
Sarah Abrevaya Stein

From Yiddish-speaking Russian-Lithuanian feather handlers in South Africa to London manufacturers and wholesalers, from rival Sephardic families whose feathers were imported from the Sahara and traded across the Mediterranean, from New York's Lower East Side to entrepreneurial farms in the American West, Stein explores the details of a remarkably vibrant yet ephemeral culture. This is a singular story of global commerce, colonial economic practices, and the rise and fall of a glamorous luxury item.The thirst for exotic ornament among fashionable women in the metropoles of Europe and America prompted a bustling global trade in ostrich feathers that flourished from the 1880s until the First World War. When feathers fell out of fashion with consumers, the result was an economic catastrophe for many, a worldwide feather bust. In this remarkable book, Sarah Stein draws on rich archival materials to bring to light the prominent and varied roles of Jews in the feather trade. She discovers that Jews fostered and nurtured the trade across the global commodity chain and throughout the far-flung territories where ostriches were reared and plucked, and their feathers were sorted, exported, imported, auctioned, wholesaled, and finally manufactured for sale.From Yiddish-speaking Russian-Lithuanian feather handlers in South Africa to London manufacturers and wholesalers, from rival Sephardic families whose feathers were imported from the Sahara and traded across the Mediterranean, from New York's Lower East Side to entrepreneurial farms in the American West, Stein explores the details of a remarkably vibrant yet ephemeral culture. This is a singular story of global commerce, colonial economic practices, and the rise and fall of a glamorous luxury item.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300127362 - £18 - January 2009

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Policing Stalin's Socialism
Repression and Social order in the Soviet Union 1924-1953
David R. Shearer

Policing Stalin's 'Socialism' is one of the first books to emphasize the importance of social order repression by Stalin's Soviet regime in contrast to the traditional emphasis of historians on political repression. Based on extensive examination of new archival materials, David Shearer finds that most repression during the Stalinist dictatorship of the 1930s was against marginal social groups such as petty criminals, deviant youth, sectarians, and the unemployed and unproductive. It was because Soviet leaders regarded social disorder as more of a danger to the state than political opposition that they instituted a new form of class war to defend themselves against this perceived threat. Despite the combined work of the political and civil police the efforts to cleanse society failed; this failure set the stage for the massive purges that decimated the country in the late 1930s.

Paper - ISBN: 9780300149258 - £40 - October 2009

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Resurrection
The Power of God for Christians and Jews
Kevin J. Madigan, John D. Levenson

This book, written for religious and nonreligious people alike in clear and accessible language, explores a teaching central to both Jewish and Christian traditions: the teaching that at the end of time God will cause the dead to live again. Although this expectation, known as the resurrection of the dead, is widely understood to have been a part of Christianity from its beginnings nearly two thousand years ago, many people are surprised to learn that the Jews believed in resurrection long before the emergence of Christianity. In this sensitively written account, religious scholars Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson aim to clarify confusion and dispel misconceptions about Judaism, Jesus and Christian origins.Madigan and Levenson tell the fascinating but little-known story of the origins of the belief in resurrection, investigating why some Christians and some Jews opposed the idea in ancient times while others believed it was essential to their faith. The authors also discuss how the two religious traditions relate their respective practices in the here and now to the new life they believe will follow resurrection. Making the rich insights of contemporary scholars of antiquity available to a wide readership, Madigan and Levenson offer a new understanding of Jewish-Christian relations and of the profound connections that tie the faiths together.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300151374 - £12.99 - April 2009

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Sacco-Vanzetti Affair (The)
America on Trial
Moshik Temkin

What began as the obscure local case of two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of robbery and murder flared into an unprecedented political and legal scandal as the perception grew that their conviction was a judicial travesty and their execution a political murder. This book is the first to reveal the full national and international scope of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, uncovering how and why the two men became the centre of a global cause celebre that shook public opinion and transformed America's relationship with the world. Drawing on extensive research on two continents, and written with verve, this book connects the Sacco-Vanzetti affair to the most polarizing political and social concerns of its era. Moshik Temkin contends that the worldwide attention to the case was generated not only by the conviction that innocent men had been condemned for their radical politics and ethnic origins but also as part of a reaction to U.S. global supremacy and isolationism after World War I.The author further argues that the international protest, which helped make Sacco and Vanzetti famous men, ultimately provoked their executions. The book concludes by investigating the affair's enduring repercussions and what they reveal about global political action, terrorism, jingoism, xenophobia, and the politics of our own time.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300124842 - £25 - June 2009

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Savages and Scoundrels
The Great Taking of America and the Road to Empire
Paul VanDevelder

What really happened in the early days of the American nation? How was it possible for white settlers to march across the entire continent, inexorably claiming Native American lands for themselves? Who made it happen, and why? This gripping book tells America's story from a new perspective, chronicling the adventures of our forefathers and showing how a legacy of repeated betrayals became the bedrock on which the republic was built.Paul VanDevelder takes as his focal point the epic federal treaty ratified in 1851 at Horse Creek, formally recognizing perpetual ownership by a dozen Native American tribes of 1.1 million square miles of the American West. The astonishing and shameful story of this broken treaty - one of 371 Indian treaties signed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - reveals a pattern of fraudulent government behaviour that again and again displaced Native Americans from their lands. VanDevelder describes the path that led to the genocide of the American Indian; those who participated in it, from cowboys and common folk to aristocrats and presidents; and, how the history of the immoral treatment of Indians through the twentieth century has profound social, economic, and political implications for America even today.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300125634 - £19.99 - April 2009

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Shopping in the Renaissance
Consumer Cultures in Italy 1400-1600
Evelyn Welch

Shopping was an important in the Renaissance as it is today. This fascinating and original book breaks new ground in the area of Renaissance material culture, focusing on the marketplace and such related topics as middle-class to courtly consumption, the provision of foodstuffs, and the acquisition of antiquities and holy relics. The book investigates how men and women of different social classes went to the streets, squares, and shops to buy goods they needed and wanted on a daily - or a once-in-a-lifetime - basis, during the Renaissance period. Evelyn Welch draws on wide-ranging sources to expose the fears, anxieties, and social possibilities of the Renaissance marketplace and to show the impact of these attitudes on developing urban spaces. She considers transient forms of sales such as fairs, auctions, and lotteries as well as consumers themselves. Finally, she explores antiquities and indulgences, both of which posed dramatic challenges to contemporary notions of market value and to the concept of commodification itself.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300159851 - £18.99 - October 2009

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Spain, Europe & the Wider World
1500–1800
John Elliott

When J. H. Elliott published 'Spain and Its World, 1500-1700' some twenty years ago, one of many enthusiasts declared, 'For anyone interested in the history of empire, of Europe and of Spain, here is a book to keep within reach, to read, to study and to enjoy' - "Times Literary Supplement". Since then Elliott has continued to explore the history of Spain and the Hispanic world with originality and insight, producing some of the most influential work in the field. In this new volume he gathers writings that reflect his recent research and thinking on politics, art, culture, and ideas in Europe and the colonial worlds between 1500 and 1800.The volume includes fourteen essays, lectures, and articles of remarkable breadth and freshness, written with Elliott's characteristic brio. It includes an unpublished lecture in honour of the late Hugh Trevor-Roper. Organized around three themes - early modern Europe, European overseas expansion, and the works and historical context of El Greco, Velazquez, Rubens, and Van Dyck - the book offers a rich survey of the themes at the heart of Elliott's interests throughout a career distinguished by excellence and innovation.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300145373 - £25 - April 2009

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Spies
The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
John Earl Haynes

This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account.Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, 'Spies' resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. "Spies" also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted - for American nuclear spies. Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300123906 - £25 - June 2009

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Spirit of an Age (The)
Victorian Essays
Gertrude Himmelfarb Himmelfarb

None of the stereotypes of Victorian England - narrow-minded, inhibited, moralistic, complacent - prepares us for the vitality, variety, and above all the extraordinary quality of intellectual life displayed in this volume of essays. Selected and annotated by Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian of Victorian thought, the writings address a wide range of subjects, including religion, politics, history, science, art, socialism, and feminism, by eminent figures of the era including Carlyle, Mill, Macaulay, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, and Wilde.The selections reflect what Himmelfarb terms 'the spirit of the age', one that she characterises as contentious as well as earnest, given to high aspirations and convictions, and at the same time subject to deep anxieties and doubts. The Victorians, undisputed masters of the long, serious essay, found the genre congenial to the expression of their most compelling and provocative views. This volume offers a representative sampling of essays from the early, middle, and late Victorian periods, each accompanied by an introductory note. Himmelfarb also introduces the volume with two enlightening essays, one on the evolving 'Spirit of the Age', and the other on the essay as a genre and on the important periodicals that attracted such a large and engaged audience.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300151381 - £14.99 - April 2009

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Terror by Quota
State Security from Lenin to Stalin (An Archival Study)
Paul R. Gregory

This original analysis of the workings of Soviet state security organs under Lenin and Stalin addresses a series of questions that have long resisted satisfactory answers. Why did political repression affect so many people, most of them ordinary citizens? Why did repression come in waves or cycles? Why were economic and petty crimes regarded as political crimes? What was the reason for relying on extra-judicial tribunals? And what motivated the extreme harshness of punishments, including the widespread use of the death penalty?Through an approach that synthesizes history and economics, Paul Gregory develops systematic explanations for the way terror was applied, how terror agents were recruited, how they carried out their jobs, and how they were motivated. The book draws on extensive, recently opened archives of the Gulag administration, the Politburo, and state security agencies themselves to illuminate in new ways terror and repression in the Soviet Union as well as dictatorships in other times and places.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300134254 - £25 - February 2009

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The Bible and the People
Lori Anne Ferrell

In the eleventh century, the Bible was available only in expensive and rare hand-copied manuscripts. Today, millions of people from all walks of life seek guidance, inspiration, entertainment, and answers from their own editions of the Bible. This illustrated book tells the story of what happened to the ancient set of writings we call the Bible during those thousand years. Anchoring the story in material evidence - hundreds of different translations and versions of the Bible - Lori Anne Ferrell discusses how the Bible has been endlessly retailored to meet the changing needs of religion, politics, and the reading public while retaining its special status as a sacred text.Focusing on the English-speaking world, 'The Bible and the People' charts the extraordinary voyage of the Bible from manuscript Bibles to the Gutenberg volumes, Bibles commissioned by kings and queens, the Eliot Indian Bible, salesmen's door-to-door Bibles, children's Bibles, Gideon Bibles, teen magazine Bibles, and more. Ferrell discusses the Bible's profound impact on readers over the centuries, and, in turn, the mark those readers made upon it. Enjoyable and informative, this book takes a fresh look at the fascinating and little-recognized connections among Christian, political, and book history.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300114249 - £19.99 - January 2009

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The Culture of Nature in Britain, 1680-1860
P. J. Harman

This wide-ranging book investigates the emergence of modern ideas about the natural world in Britain from 1680-1860 through an examination of the cultural values common to the sciences, art, literature, and natural theology. During this critical period, spanned by Newtonian science and natural theology, Darwin's 'Origin of Species', and Ruskin's 'Modern Painters', the fundamental conception of nature and humanity's place within it changed. P. M. Harman calls for a new understanding of the varied ways in which the British comprehended natural beauty, from the perception of nature as a 'design' flowing from God's creative power to the Darwinian naturalistic aesthetic. Harman connects a variety of differing views of nature deriving from religion, science, visual art, philosophy, and literature to developments in agriculture, manufacture, and the daily lives of individuals. This ambitious and accessible book represents intellectual history at its best.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300151978 - £45 - October 2009

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The Lost Politburo Transcripts
Paul R. Gregory

In this groundbreaking book, prominent Western and Russian scholars examine the 'lost' transcripts of the Soviet Politburo, a set of verbatim accounts of meetings that took place from the 1920s to 1938 but remained hidden in secret archives until the late 1990s. Never intended for publication or wide distribution, these records (known as stenograms in Russia) reveal the actual process of decision-making at the highest levels of the Soviet communist party. The transcripts also provide new, first-hand records of the rise of Stalin's dictatorship.The contributors to the volume explore the power struggles among the Politburo members, their methods of discourse and propaganda, and their economic policies. Taken as a whole, the essays shed light on early Soviet history and on the individuals who supported or opposed Stalin's consolidation of power.

cloth - ISBN: 9780300134247 - £35 - January 2009

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The Persians
Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran
Homa Katouzian

In recent years, Iran has gained attention mostly for negative reasons - for its authoritarian religious government, disputed nuclear program, and controversial role in the Middle East - but there is much more to the story of this ancient land than can be gleaned from the news. This authoritative and comprehensive history of Iran, written by Homa Katouzian, an acclaimed expert, covers the entire history of the area from the foundation of the ancient Persian Empire to today's Iranian state. Writing from an Iranian rather than a European perspective, Katouzian integrates the significant cultural and literary history of Iran with its political and social history. Some of the greatest poets of human history wrote in Persian - among them Rumi, Omar Khayyam, and Saadi - and Katouzian discusses and occasionally quotes their work. In his thoughtful analysis of Iranian society, Katouzian argues that the absolute and arbitrary power traditionally enjoyed by Persian/Iranian rulers has resulted in an unstable society where fear and short-term thinking dominate. A magisterial history, this book also serves as an excellent background to the role of Iran in the contemporary world.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300121186 - £30 - October 2009

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TRIPLEX
Secrest from the Cambridge Spies
Nigel West

'Triplex' reveals more clearly than ever before the precise nature and extent of the damage done to the much-vaunted British intelligence establishment during World War II by the notorious 'Cambridge Five' spy ring - Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. The code word 'Triplex' refers to an exceptionally sensitive intelligence source, one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war, which appears nowhere in any of the British government's official histories. 'Triplex' was material extracted illicitly from the diplomatic pouches of neutral missions in wartime London. MI5, the British Security Service, entrusted the job of overseeing the highly secret assignment to Anthony Blunt, who was already working for the NKVD, Stalin's intelligence service. The rest is history, documented here for the first time in rich detail.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300123470 - £25 - October 2009

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Triumph of Provocation (The)
Jozef Mackiewicz

This masterful political treatise, first published in 1962, examines the history and nature of Communism as it developed in the Soviet Union and in Poland. Jozef Mackiewicz, known for his relentless opposition to Communism, argues that accommodation with the Communists simply helped them to impose their vision of the world and pursue their goal of global domination. He compares Communism to Nazism and insists that the former was the greater threat to the future of humanity. Now available in English for the first time, The Triumph of Provocation will be compelling reading for those interested in Polish history, Communism, and Nazism. Mackiewicz's unique interpretation of the differences and similarities between Communism and Nazism is highly relevant to debates about these two systems and to major contemporary issues which are of particular importance to the U.S. and Europe, including radical Islam and the necessity of war and the responsibility for war.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300145694 - £30.00 - September 2009

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Wall Street
America's Dream Palace
Steve Fraser

Wall Street: no other place on earth is so singularly identified with money and the power of money. And no other American institution has inspired such deep moral, cultural, and political ambivalence. Is the Street an unbreachable bulwark defending commercial order? Or is it a centre of mad ambition? This book recounts the colourful history of America's love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Steve Fraser frames his fascinating analysis around the roles of four iconic Wall Street types - the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist - all recurring figures who yield surprising insights about how the nation has wrestled, and still wrestles, with fundamental questions of wealth and work, democracy and elitism, greed and salvation.Spanning the years from the first Wall Street panic of 1792 to the dot.com bubble-and-bust and Enron scandals of our own time, the book is full of stories and portraits of such larger-than-life figures as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Michael Milken. Fraser considers the conflicting attitudes of ordinary Americans toward the Street and concludes with a brief rumination on the recent notion of Wall Street as a haven for Everyman.

Paperback - ISBN: 9780300151435 - £9.99 - April 2009

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Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters
Louis Begley

In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attache in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil's Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards - committed to restoring freedom and honour to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another - against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army's top brass in order to secure Dreyfus' conviction. Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism? In 'Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters', the acclaimed novelist draws upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our liberties and honour.

Hardback - ISBN: 9780300125320 - £18 - October 2009

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5 October 2009