History

The World is Born From Zero is an investigation into the relationship between video games and science fiction through the philosophy of speculation. Cameron Kunzelman argues that the video game medium is centered on the evaluation and production of possible futures by following video game studies, media philosophy, and science fiction studies to their furthest reaches. Claiming that the best way to understand games is through rigorous formal analysis of their aesthetic strategies and the cultural context those strategies emerge from, Kunzelman investigates a diverse array of games like The Last of Us, VA-11 Hall-A, and Civilization VI in order to explore what science fiction video games can tell us about their genres, their ways of speculating, and how the medium of the video game does (or does not) direct us down experiential pathways that are both oppressive and liberatory. Taking a multidisciplinary look at these games, The World is Born From Zero offers a unique theorization of science fiction games that provides both science fiction studies and video game studies with new tools for thinking how this medium and mode inform each other.

"...Ned Ryun reveals the History of the Deep State, which has seized unConstitutional control over our Nation, and unleashed Death and Destruction on the World. This is not what our Founders’ intended."

"...a much needed and timely eleventh-hour clarion call for citizens to wake up and rebirth the republic as the Founders intended."

—Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

American Leviathan is the story of the rise of Progressive Statism and their massive, bureaucratic Administrative State at the turn of the 20th century and how we got to where we are today in the 21st century with governmental abuse by a class of so-called experts. 

Because of Progressives' quiet regime change over the last century and their replacing the Constitutional Republic with that Administrative State, our government today has very little to do with what the Founders' envisioned. So the question for us today is will we restore the American Republic and actually have a government of, by and for the people? 

American Leviathan details how an empowered Executive in the White House can actually devolve and break apart the Administrative State that is the leviathan crushing the freedoms of the American people.

How adventurous Jewish women’s travels upended Jewish norms

In 1922, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, first initiated the bat mitzvah as a rite-of-passage for Jewish girls. Characterized as a lifelong supporter of women’s rights, Kaplan’s family, including his wife and four daughters, played a role in shaping his ideas about women, culture, and Zionism. This was especially true of his second daughter, Hadassah Kaplan, who joined a small but influential cohort of American Jewish women who studied, worked, and volunteered in British Mandate Palestine.

Promised Lands provides a window into the lives of American Jewish women in both New York City’s Upper West Side and Palestine during the interwar period. By tracing Hadassah’s journey, the volume offers a sense of what drew this generation of adventurous women to Palestine, and helps us to understand their impact on American Jewry. Drawing on a rich personal archive of diary entries, photographs, and letters, Sharon Ann Musher displays how unconventional women like Hadassah Kaplan were able to challenge cultural norms and experiment with ideological commitments while still remaining “good” daughters, wives, and mothers. Their knowledge and experience in volunteering, philanthropy, and education within the United States helped them to build Jewish institutions and communities abroad, and to center Zionism in American Jewish education, institutions, and identity. Crafting a compelling portrait of an influential Jewish woman, Promised Lands showcases the legacy of Hadassah Kaplan and her fellow travelers on American Jewish life.

The first biography of Ericka Huggins, a queer Black woman who brought spiritual self-care practices to the Black Panther Party.

In this groundbreaking biography, Mary Frances Phillips immerses readers in the life and legacy of Ericka Huggins, a revered Black Panther Party member, as well as a mother, widow, educator, poet, and former political prisoner. In 1969, the police arrested Ericka Huggins along with Bobby Seale and fellow Black Panther Party members, who were accused of murdering Alex Rackley. This marked the beginning of her ordeal, as she became the subject of political persecution and a well-planned FBI COINTELPRO plot.

Drawing on never-before-seen archival sources, including prison records, unpublished letters, photographs, FBI records, and oral histories, Phillips foregrounds the paramount role of self-care and community care in Huggins’s political journey, shedding light on Ericka’s use of spiritual wellness practices she developed during her incarceration. In prison, Huggins was able to survive the repression and terror she faced while navigating motherhood through her unwavering commitment to spiritual practices. In showcasing this history, Phillips reveals the significance of spiritual wellness in the Black Panther Party and Black Power movement.

Transcending the traditional male-centric study of the Black Panther Party, Black Panther Woman offers an innovative analysis of Black political life at the intersections of gender, motherhood, and mass incarceration. This book serves as an invaluable toolkit for contemporary activists, underscoring the power of radical acts of care as well as vital strategies to thrive in the world.

2025 Gotham Book Prize Finalist

Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City’s most populous borough through their search for social justice

Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation’s third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life—businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers—who sought to grow their city in a radical anti-slavery vision. The residents of neighborhoods like DUMBO, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg organized and agitated for social justice. They did so even as their own freedom was threatened by systemic and structural racism, risking their safety for the sake of their city. Brooklynites recovers the lives of these remarkable citizens and considers their lasting impact on New York City’s most populous borough.

This cultural and social history is told through four ordinary families from Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century free Black community: the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters. The book illustrates the depth and scope of their activism, cementing Brooklyn’s place in the history of social justice movements. Their lives offer valuable lessons on freedom, democracy, and family—both the ones we’re born with and the ones we choose. Their powerful stories continue to resonate today, as borough residents fill the streets in search of a more just city.

This is a story of land, home, labor, of New Yorkers past, and the legacy they left us. This is the story of Brooklyn.

Contested City offers a history of state-society relations in Baghdad, exploring how city residents managed through periods of economic growth, sanctions, and war, from the oil boom of the 1950s through the withdrawal of US troops in 2011. Interactions between citizens and their rulers shaped the social fabric and political realities of the city. Notably, low-ranking Ba'th party officials functioned as crucial intermediaries, deciding how regime policies would be applied. Charting the social, economic, and political transformations of Iraq's capital city, Alissa Walter examines how national policies translated into action at the local, everyday level.

With this book, Walter reveals how authoritarian governance worked in practice. She follows shifts in mid-century housing and urban development, the impact of the Iran–Iraq and Gulf Wars on city life, and the manipulation of food rations and growth of black markets. Reading citizen petitions to the government, Walter illuminates citizens' self-advocacy and the important role of low-ranking party officials and state bureaucrats embedded within neighborhoods. The US occupation and ensuing sectarian fighting upended Baghdad's neighborhoods through violent displacement and the collapse of basic state services. This power vacuum paved the way for new power brokers, including militias and neighborhood councils, to compete for influence on the local level.

Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer.

Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.

“Gilder’s originality, plus the sheer force of his enthusiasm for the extraordinary virtues of the beleaguered Jewish state, sweep away the prevailing vitriol and make for a book that is nothing less than thrilling to read.”
—Norman Podhoretz

In this timely and courageous book, George Gilder demonstrates that the widespread antagonism toward the state of Israel is based – as is anti-Semitism itself – on self-defeating envy and resentment of its superior accomplishments and moral leadership.     

Israel’s stunning rise as a world capitalist and technological power, he argues, stems in part from the Jewish “culture of mind” and in part from Judaism itself, which encourages intellectual curiosity and rational analysis while providing a rigorous moral framework for entrepreneurial creativity. Israel’s critics throughout the Middle East and in Western Europe – all facing socialist decline – have failed the “Israel Test” because they seek to destroy Israel’s capitalist success rather than to emulate it.

America’s continued support for Western Civilization in the Middle East will define our future survival as a nation. “If Israel is destroyed,” Gilder predicts, “capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, the epitome of productive and creative capitalism spurred by its own Jewish citizens, will be in grave moral and economic jeopardy.”

At a time when ignorant students and overtly anti-Semitic politicians champion Israel’s murderous enemies and rush to abandon Israel, Gilder’s clarity of vision makes The Israel Test required reading not only for college students, but also for policy-makers in Washington, and throughout the world.

As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they produced—silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing—moved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere. Unmentionables offers a history of the global textile industry and the Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it.

Stacy Fahrenthold examines how Arab workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. She writes women workers—the majority of Syrian garment workers—back into US labor history. She also situates the rise of Syrian American industrial elites, who exerted supply chain power to combat labor uprisings, resist unionization, and stake claim to the global textile industry. Critiquing the hegemony of the Syrian peddler in histories of this diaspora, Unmentionables introduces alternative narrators: union activists who led street demonstrations, women garment workers who shut down kimono factories, child laborers who threw snowballs at police, and the diasporic merchant capitalists who contended with all of them.

How to raise a child became a central concern of intellectual debate from Cairo to Beirut over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intimately linked with discussions around capitalism and democracy, considerations about women, gender, and childrearing emerged as essential to modern social theory. Arab writers, particularly women, made sex, the body, and women's ethical labor central to fending off European imperial advances, instituting representative politics, and managing social order.

Labors of Love traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Susanna Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls' education and women writers' authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women's unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

A vivid look at the wartime experiences of a Jewish woman in the Confederate South

Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that offered women few options other than marriage. She was American born when most American Jews were immigrants. She affirmed and maintained her dedication to Jewish religious practice and Jewish faith while many family members embraced Christianity. Yet she also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans.

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai is one of the few surviving Civil War diaries by a Jewish woman in the antebellum South. It charts her daily life and her evolving perspective on Confederate nationalism and Southern identity, Jewishness, women’s roles in wartime, gendered domestic roles in slave-owning households, and the centrality of family relationships. While never losing sight of the racist social and political structures that shaped Emma Mordecai’s world, the book chronicles her experiences with dislocation and the loss of her home.

Bringing to life the hospital visits, food shortages, local sociability, Jewish observances, sounds and sights of nearby battles, and the very personal ramifications of emancipation and its aftermath for her household and family, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai offers a valuable and distinct look at a unique historical figure from the waning years of the Civil War South.

With this book, Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor offer the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women's organizations, the authors trace minoritarian politics and the shifting relationships among doubly minoritized Armenian female subjects, Iran's central nodes of power, and the Irano-Armenian patriarchal institutions of church and political parties.

Engaging broader considerations around modernization, nationalism, and feminism, this book makes a conceptually rich contribution to how we think about the history of women and minoritized peoples. Berberian and Grigor read archival, textual, visual, and oral history sources together and against one another to challenge conventional notions of "the archive" and transform silences and absences into audible and visual presences. Understanding minoritarian politics as formulated by women through their various forms of public and intellectual activisms, this book provides a groundbreaking intervention in Iran's history of modernization, Armenian diasporic history, and Iranian and Armenian feminist historiography.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Arabian Peninsula emerged as a key site of oil production. International companies recruited workers from across the Middle East and Asia to staff their expanding oil projects. Unruly Labor considers the working conditions, hiring practices, and, most important, worker actions and strikes at these oil projects. It illuminates the multiple ways workers built transnational solidarities to agitate for better working conditions, and how worker actions informed shifting understandings of rights, citizenship, and national security.

Andrea Wright highlights the increasing associations between oil, governance, and racialized management practices to map how labor was increasingly depoliticized. From the 1940s to 1971, a period that includes the end of formal British imperialism in the Arabian Sea and the development of new state governments, citizenship became both an avenue for workers to advocate for their rights and, simultaneously, a way to limit other solidarities. Examining the interests of workers, government officials, and oil company managers alike, Wright offers a new history of Middle Eastern oil and twentieth-century capitalism—a history that illuminates how labor management and national security concerns have shaped state governance and economic policy priorities.

In 2012, Steve Green, billionaire and president of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, announced a recent purchase of a Biblical artefact—a fragment of papyrus, just discovered, carrying lines from Paul's letter to the Romans, and dated to the second century CE. Noted scholar Roberta Mazza was stunned. When was this piece discovered, and how could Green acquire such a rare item? The answers, which Mazza spent the next ten years uncovering, came as a shock: the fragment had come from a famous collection held at Oxford University, and its rightful owners had no idea it had been sold.

The letter to the Romans was not the only extraordinary piece in the Green collection. They soon announced newly recovered fragments from the Gospels and writings of Sappho. Mazza's quest to confirm the provenance of these priceless fragments revealed shadowy global networks that make big business of ancient manuscripts, from the Greens' Museum of the Bible and world-famous auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's, to antique shops in Jerusalem and Istanbul, dealers on eBay, and into the collections of renowned museums and universities.

Mazza's investigation forces us to ask what happens when the supposed custodians of our ancient heritage act in ways that threaten to destroy it. Stolen Fragments illuminates how these recent dealings are not isolated events, but the inevitable result of longstanding colonial practices and the outcome of generations of scholars who have profited from extracting the cultural heritage of places they claim they wish to preserve. Where is the boundary between protection and exploitation, between scholarship and larceny?

This book explores the establishment and development of a multi-ethnic frontier society on the Habsburg–Ottoman border, in the historic region of the Banat (today divided between Romania, Serbia, and Hungary). After it passed from Ottoman to Habsburg control in the early eighteenth century, the Habsburgs sought to settle the region with Western and Central European migrants, mainly though not exclusively German-speakers from the Holy Roman Empire. Historian Timothy Olin argues that this policy led to destabilizing demographic changes and laid the foundations for the ethno-religious tensions that characterized the region through the twentieth century and beyond.

Imperial authorities used colonists as a means to ensure the loyalty and stability of the province and to prevent Hungarian–Ottoman collusion. Their settlement, beginning in the 1710s and lasting until the 1820s, led to government-sponsored displacement and resettlement of many local villages. In the process of narrating the history of the region, Olin argues that the land empires of Europe engaged in forms of settlement that fit the larger patterns of colonial rule in other parts of Europe and the world, and demonstrates that the movement of settlers and the culture they brought with them began a process of Europeanization in the borderlands of the continent and helped solidify Europe's boundaries.

Tells the story of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis through her evolving public persona, from campaign wife to First Lady to fallen idol to treasured national icon

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis became First Lady of the United States over sixty years ago, she stepped into the public spotlight. Although Jackie is perhaps best known for her two highly-publicized marriages, her legacy has endured beyond twentieth-century pop culture and she remains an object of public fascination today.

Drawing on a range of sources– from articles penned for the women’s pages of local newspapers, to esteemed national periodicals, to fan magazines and film– Our Jackie evaluates how media coverage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis changed over the course of her very public life. Jackie’s interactions with and framing by the American media reflect the changing attitudes toward American womanhood. Over the course of four decades, Jackie was alternatively praised for her service to others, and pilloried for her perceived self-interest. In Our Jackie, Karen M. Dunak argues that whether she was portrayed as a campaign wife, a loyal widow, a selfish jetsetter, or a mature career woman, the history of Jackie’s highly publicized life demonstrates the ways in which news, entertainment, politics, and celebrity evolved and intertwined over the second half of the twentieth century.

Examining the intimate chronicles of this famous First Lady’s life, Our Jackie suggests that media coverage of this enigmatic public figure revealed as much about the prevailing views of women in America– how they should behave and whom they should serve– as it did about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as an individual.

On October 7, 2023, Israel was ambushed by the Palestinian terrorist organization, Hamas. The attack, underwritten by the Islamic Republic of Iran, unleashed unspeakable terrors on the Israeli population. Most of the world reacted with horror to Hamas’s actions. But many commentators labeled the Jewish people, and Israel as a nation, as oppressors. The Palestinians, according to their Marxist calculus, were the oppressed.

A legion of figures in academia, the media, and the United States then declared support for Palestine, the perpetrator of the atrocities. Many American institutions have been indoctrinated and transformed into puppets who propagate the hateful antisemitism that has returned to the West.

Why does Israel exist? Why is it worthy of remaining a critical ally of the United States?  Why have critical race theorists identified Israel and the US as the most pernicious examples of “settler colonialism”?

Answers to these questions were developing during the first term of President Trump. But they were promptly abandoned by the Biden-Harris Administration, imperiling both Israel and the United States. In The Battle for the Jewish State, Victoria Coates shows how the current conflict in Israel is not a regional issue to be resolved through an interminable diplomatic peace process. Rather, it is a broader military and cultural war that must be won for the sake not only of Israel, but also of the United States.

While premodern kabbalistic texts were not chronicles of historical events, they provided elaborate models for understanding the secret divine plan guiding human affairs. Hartley Lachter analyzes innovative kabbalistic doctrines, such as the idea of reincarnation and the notion of multiple successive universes, through which Jewish mystics sought to demonstrate that the misfortunes of Jewish history were in fact necessary steps toward redemption.

Lachter argues that these works, mostly composed between the early 14th century and the generation affected by the Spanish expulsion in the early 16th century, enabled Jewish readers to make sense of the troubling misfortunes of their own time. Kabbalah and Catastrophe uncovers the remarkable variety of ways that kabbalists deployed esoteric tradition to argue that God had not abandoned the Jews to the inscrutable forces of history. Instead, they suggested to readers that Jews are history's primary actors, and that despite their small numbers and lack of military power, Jews nonetheless secretly push history forward. For scholars of Jewish mysticism and medieval Jewish history, Lachter articulates how premodern mystical texts can be crucial sources of insight into how Jews understood the meaning of history.

Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Bruce Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity.

Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, what we think of now as atrocities have not always invited indignation or been seen to violate moral norms. Venturing from the Bible to Zadie Smith, Robbins explores the literature of suffering, to show how, over time, abhorrence of mass violence takes shape. With it comes the emergence of a necessary element of cosmopolitanism: the ability to look at one's own nation with the critical eyes of a stranger.

Drawing on a vast written archive and with penetrating insight, Robbins takes up such literary representations of violence as Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homero Aridjis's short novel Smyrna in Flames, and Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. These essential texts do more than simply testify to atrocious acts. In their literariness, they take the risk of contextualizing and relativizing, thereby extending beyond the legal paradigm of accusation. They recognize atrocity as a moral scandal about which something should be done and can be done, while they also place that scandal within a larger and more uncertain history.

Disorder and Diagnosis offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents—hospital patients, quarantined passengers, women migrant nurses, and others too often excluded from histories of this region—Laura Frances Goffman demonstrates how the Gulf and its Arabian hinterland served as a buffer zone between "diseased" India and white Europe, as a space of scientific translation, and, ultimately, as an object of development.

In placing health at the center of political and social change, this book weaves the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula into global circulations of commodities and movements of people. As a collection of institutions and infrastructures, pursuits of health created shifting boundaries of rule between imperial officials, indigenous elites, and local populations. As a set of practices seeking to manipulate the natural world, health policies compelled scientists and administrators to categorize fluid populations and ambiguous territorialities. And, as a discourse, health facilitated notions of racial difference, opposing native uncleanliness to white purity and hygiene, and indigenous medicine to modern science. Disorder and Diagnosis examines how Gulf residents, through their engagements with health, fiercely contested and actively shaped state and societal interactions.

The story of how nearly 100,000 Americans achieved reparations and an official apology for one of the most shameful episodes in US history.

"Redress gives us an insider's step-by-step view of how a bold and determined group of Japanese Americans achieved an unprecedented goal that, at the beginning, looked impossible. We have a lot to learn from their extraordinary success." —Adam Hochschild

For decades the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans remained hidden from the historical record, its shattering effects kept silent. But in the 1970s the Japanese American Citizens League headed a campaign for an official government apology and monetary compensation. Redress is John Tateishi's firsthand account of this against-all-odds campaign. Tateishi, who led the JACL Redress Committee for many years, admits the task was herculean. The campaign sought an unprecedented admission of wrongdoing from Congress. It depended on a unified effort but began with an acutely divided community; for many, the shame of "camp" was so deep that they could not even speak of it. And Tateishi knew that the campaign would succeed only if the public learned that there had been concentration camps on U.S. soil.

Redress is the story of a community reckoning with what it means to be both culturally Japanese and American citizens, and what it means to prevent terrible harms from happening again. This edition features a new preface about the lessons Tateishi's story might have for reparations efforts today.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans had come to see the Alps as the ideal place to fashion an alternative to the era's dominant energy source: coal. After 1850, Alpine water increasingly became "white coal": a power source with the revolutionary economic potential of fossil fuel. In this book, Marc Landry shows how dam-building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the Alps into Europe's "battery"—an energy landscape designed to store and produce electricity for use throughout the Continent. These stores of energy played an important role in supplying the war economies of west-central Europe in both world wars as demand for munitions and other factory production necessitated access to electrical energy and the conservation of coal.

Through historical research conducted in archives across Europe—especially in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Italy—Landry shows how and why Europeans thoroughly transformed the Alps in order to generate hydroelectricity, and explores the effects of its attendant economic and military advantages across the turbulent twentieth century. Landry surveys the environmental and energy changes wrought by dam-building, demonstrating that with global warming, melting glaciers, and calls for a green energy transition, the future of white coal is once again in question in twenty-first-century Europe.

Before Hacks and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, there was the comedienne who started it all

First Lady of Laughs tells the story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish woman to become a star in the field we now call stand-up comedy. Though rarely mentioned among the pantheon of early stand-up comics such as Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce, Jean Carroll rivaled or even outshone the male counterparts of her heyday, playing more major theaters than any other comedian of her period. In addition to releasing a hit comedy album, Girl in a Hot Steam Bath, and briefly starring in her own sitcom on ABC, she also made twenty-nine appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Carroll made enduring changes to the genre of stand-up comedy, carving space for women and modeling a new form of Jewish femininity with her glamorous, acculturated, but still recognizably Jewish persona. She innovated a newly conversational, intimate style of stand-up, which is now recognized in comics like Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman, and Tiffany Haddish. When Carroll was ninety-five she was honored at the Friars Club in New York City, where celebrities like Joy Behar and Lily Tomlin praised her influence on their craft. But her celebrated career began as an impoverished immigrant child, scrounging for talent show prize money to support her family.

Drawing on archival footage, press clippings, and Jean Carroll’s personal scrapbook, First Lady of Laughs restores Jean Carroll’s remarkable story to its rightful place in the lineage of comedy history and Jewish American performance.

This searing account of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine reveals that, contrary to popular media narratives, Western hawks are culpable in triggering a war that has cost many thousands of innocent Ukrainian lives.

In 1991, the Cold War ended in a bloodless victory for NATO. After 45 years of a grueling, nuclear-tinged Cold War, communism was dead, Eastern Europe was free, Russia looked to the West for how to build a better, freer future for itself, and liberal democracy and capitalism reigned supreme.

But in the ruins of the last war lie the seeds for the next great conflict. Floating just beneath the surface of post-Cold War international relations was the question of what was to become of NATO with the loss of the Soviet Union as a threat. Western leaders believed expansion into the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe was the natural next step. But the Russians opposed this.

For 30 years, a succession of Russian leaders—from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin—warned the West that NATO’s expansion into territories bordering Russia, notably into Ukraine, would trigger a violent response from Moscow. Yet, the West did not listen. Contrary to the popular narrative in the West, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine will show readers how Westerners created our current crisis with Russia and why innocent Ukrainians are being made to pay with their lives for the arrogance (and ignorance) of Western leaders in the post-Cold War era. Thanks to their hubris, the world now teeters on the brink of a potential nuclear world war over the status of Ukraine.

The archaeological investigation and the architectural survey conducted at Villa Arianna at Stabiae between 2010 and 2019 form the core of this book. The author's motivation to start on a large-scale study began with the wall constructions, paintings, and mosaics that have gradually been uncovered over the years. His book offers an in-depth comprehension of the history, the decorations, and the construction dynamics of the building from its foundation as country villa to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. For the first time it provides a synthesis of the archaeological evidence, the ancient texts and the journals of the Bourbon age excavations. The first part of the book is divided into four narrative chapters, which unearth essential environmental and historical-archaeological information. The second part consists of three chapters and the conclusion. They evaluate the results of the recent excavations and the evidence obtained from the study of the archaeological findings. The book offers a rare diachronic and synchronic biography of this unique villa. It offers students, scholars, and enthusiasts alike profound first-hand insights into Roman archaeology and one of its material manifestations, the Roman villa.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Why are the small and unimportant relics of Roman antiquity often the most enduring, in material form and in our affections? Through close encounters with minor things such as insects, brief lives, quibbles, irritants, and jokes, Emily Gowers provocatively argues that much of what the Romans dismissed as superfluous or peripheral in fact took up immense imaginative space. It was often through the small stuff that the Romans most acutely probed and challenged their society’s overarching values and priorities and its sense of proportion and justice. There is much to learn from what didn’t or shouldn’t matter. By marking the spots where the apparently pointless becomes significant, this book radically adjusts our understanding of the Romans and their world, as well as our own minor feelings and intimate preoccupations.
 

The term ‘Judeo-Christian’ in reference to a tradition, heritage, ethic, civilization, faith etc. has been used in a wide variety of contexts with widely diverging meanings. Contrary to popular belief, the term was not coined in the United States in the middle of the 20th century but in 1831 in Germany by Ferdinand Christian Baur. By acknowledging and returning to this European perspective and context, the volume engages the historical, theological, philosophical and political dimensions of the term’s development. Scholars of European intellectual history will find this volume timely and relevant.

In this firsthand account, David Bernhardt, 53rd Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior, describes how he witnessed firsthand the administrative state's transformation from a collection of departments under the command of the President into a sprawling and unaccountable bureaucracy.

“Resistance” to the Trump presidency within the civil service drew media attention, but it was only part of a larger problem: a federal bureaucracy that often goes its own way, contrary to the policies of elected leadership. In this insider’s account, David L. Bernhardt reveals how the bureaucratic swamp really operates and how unaccountable power has been concentrated deep within the administrative state, resulting in dysfunction.

Executive agencies were created to implement legislation and presidential directives, yet career civil servants use them to advance their own agendas instead. Congress often writes laws broadly, letting subject-matter experts at administrative agencies fill in the details with regulations. Then, agency employees sometimes substitute their own policy preferences for actual statutory or regulatory language. They may also fail to appreciate that their authority is delegated from an official who answers to the president. Bernhardt gives examples of federal employees undermining the administration’s policies simply by refusing to work on a task, slow-walking it, or doing a subpar job.

Administrative agencies have further gained power through judicial deference to an agency’s own interpretation of a statute when its enforcement action is challenged. Courts essentially abdicate their role of interpreting the law, leaving citizens with little recourse against penalties or prohibitions. Both legislative and judicial powers have thus been shifted to the executive branch, where they are exercised without adequate political oversight.

Drawing on his experiences working under two administrations, Bernhardt explains how President Trump’s enabling leadership showed a path for reining in the administrative state. He calls on political leadership to turn off autopilot and take control of their agencies, and on Congress and the judiciary to assert their constitutional authority, before an unaccountable federal bureaucracy destroys the Founders’ vision of government by consent of the governed.

For decades, tree planting and forestry have been pivotal to Chinese environmentalism. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid increases in industrial production, the "Greening the Motherland" campaign promoted conservationist tree-planting nationwide. Contested Environmentalisms explores the seemingly contradictory rhetoric and desires of Chinese conservation from the early twentieth century through to the present.

Drawing on literary, cinematic, scientific, archival, and digital media sources, Cheng Li investigates the emergence, evolution, and devolution of Chinese conservationist ideas. Combining literary, historical, and environmental studies approaches, he shows that these ideas acquired their value and assumed their power precisely because of their malleability and adaptability. Li historicizes authoritarian environmentalism and probes the global-local dynamics underlying conservationist ideas that energize environmental impulses in China. Examining ethnic borderlands, the Beijing political center, and China's growth on the world stage, this book demonstrates the strength of Chinese environmentalism to adapt and survive through tumultuous change lies in what seems to be a weakness: its inconsistency and contestation.

The paradoxes of nineteenth-century colonialism in the Middle East revealed through the accounts of three working class European travelers to Egypt

This book tells the stories of two French women and a French African man, travelers connected to the Saint-Simonian utopian socialists, who came to work for the Egyptian government in the 1830s. They have been marginalized and excluded from the historical record, because they were women, not part of the colonial elite, or of mixed racial heritage. This history brings them alive through extensive archival research and vibrant storytelling.

There is Suzanne Voilquin, a practicing midwife in Cairo who was involved in left-wing popular politics in Paris and became the editor of one of the first feminist newspapers ever published (1832–34). The second traveler, Thomas Ismayl Urbain, was born in French Guyana, where his mother was born a slave and his father was a French sea captain. “Jehan d’Ivray” is the pen name of the third traveler, a teenage woman who married an Egyptian studying medicine in France, and traveled with him to Egypt in 1879. She wrote more than twenty books, including a retrospective look at Suzanne Voilquin and women in the Saint-Simonian movement, bringing the story full circle to another generation.

Their stories brilliantly illustrate the paradoxes of nineteenth century colonialism in Egypt. Suzanne Voilquin grew up in the Parisian working class and sympathized deeply with Egyptians but initially exoticized the differences between Egypt and her home country, while Urbain, a literary pioneer in black pride, nevertheless joined the French army and saw his role in the colonial occupation as a means of helping indigenous people. These characters transcend the neat binary of East and West and offer a rich, nuanced window onto the experiences of French travelers in Egypt during the nineteenth century.

Following the horrific attack on October 7, support for a devastating military retaliation and resolution has taken center stage. Nevertheless, within Israel, numerous critical voices cast doubt on the sustainability of such approaches. They champion the principles of morality, legality, and common sense as the true keys to a lasting solution. This book focuses on these voices which are critical of Israeli government policies. They are deeply grieving and affected by the October 7 attack, while also able to hold both Palestinian and Israeli pain and aspirations not as mutually exclusive, but as an impetus for creating a better and more equitable future for all who inhabit the land. It chronicles the reactions of intellectuals and scholars to unfolding events. All the pieces in this volume were written within a few days to a few months of October 7 and comprise an archive of a particular discourse taking shape in Israel at this historical juncture.

The book is dedicated to the memory of Vivian Silver, who devoted her life to waging peace through valiant activism, and was murdered in her home on October 7. The editor’s royalties will go to support an annual lecture in her memory on the themes of peace and democracy.

Read the interview with Lihi Ben Shitrit on De Gruyter Conversations and learn more about the book and the editor!

With contributions by Shaul Arieli, Eva Illouz, Idan Landau, Yaniv Ronen, Yofi Tirosh, Assaf David, Ameer Fakhoury, Ghadir Hani, Eran Tzidkiyahu, Orit Kamir, Orly Noy, Noam Shuster-Eliassi, Jessica Ausinheiler, Meirav Jones, Tal Correm, Anwar Mhajne, David Kretzmer, Omer Bartov, Rawia Aburabia, Hannah Safran, Tanya Zion-Waldoks, Galit Cohen-Kedem, Avi Shilon, Hagar Kotef, Merav Amir, Ali Al-Awar, and Nicholas Kristof.

For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses.

But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, this book offers critical discussion of Rockstar as a company, their video games, and ultimately, their attempts at creating new narratives about U.S. history and culture. It explores the ways in which Rockstar’s brand identity and their titles coalesce to create a new kind of video game history, how promotional materials work to claim the "authenticity" of these products, and assert the authority of game developers to perform the role of historian.

By working at the intersection of historical game studies, U.S. history, and film and media studies, this book explores what happens when contemporary demands for historical authenticity are brought to bear on the way we envisage the past – and whose past it is deemed to be. Ultimately, this book implores those who research historical video games to consider the oft-forgotten sources at the margins of these games as importance spaces where historical meaning is made and negotiated.

Watch our book talk with the author Esther Wright here: https://youtu.be/AaC_9XsX-CQ

A provocative new account of how India moved relentlessly from its hope-filled founding in 1947 to the dramatic economic and democratic breakdowns of today.

When Indian leaders first took control of their government in 1947, they proclaimed the ideals of national unity and secular democracy. Through the first half century of nation-building, leaders could point to uneven but measurable progress on key goals, and after the mid-1980s, dire poverty declined for a few decades, inspiring declarations of victory. But today, a vast majority of Indians live in a state of underemployment and are one crisis away from despair. Public goods—health, education, cities, air and water, and the judiciary—are in woeful condition. And good jobs will remain scarce as long as that is the case. The lack of jobs will further undermine democracy, which will further undermine job creation. India is Broken provides the most persuasive account available of this economic catch-22.

Challenging prevailing narratives, Mody contends that successive post-independence leaders, starting with its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, failed to confront India's true economic problems, seeking easy solutions instead. As a popular frustration grew, and corruption in politics became pervasive, India's economic growth relied increasingly on unregulated finance and environmentally destructive construction. The rise of a violent Hindutva has buried all prior norms in civic life and public accountability.

Combining statistical data with creative media, such as literature and cinema, to create strong, accessible, people-driven narratives, this book is a meditation on the interplay between democracy and economic progress, with lessons extending far beyond India. Mody proposes a path forward that is fraught with its own peril, but which nevertheless offers something resembling hope.

Following the British conquest of Ottoman Palestine, Jews across the British Empire—from Jerusalem to Johannesburg, London to Calcutta—found themselves at the heart of global Jewish political discourse. As these intellectuals, politicians, activists, and communal elites navigated shifting political landscapes, some envisioned Palestine as a British dominion, leveraging imperial power for Jewish state-building, while others fostered ties with anticolonial movements, contemplating independent national aspirations. Uncertain Empire considers this intricate interplay between British imperialism, Zionism, and anticolonial movements from the 1917 British conquest of Palestine to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Elizabeth Imber highlights diverse and sometimes conflicting visions of Jewish political futures, offering detailed case studies of key figures including Chaim Arlosoroff, Moshe Shertok, Helen Bentwich, Rachel Ezra, and Hermann Kallenbach. She explores a "politics of uncertainty" in which Jews engaged with both imperial stability and the rise of anticolonial mobilization, when many were likewise forced to reconsider Palestine as a viable refuge and political solution. Ultimately, this book provides a nuanced understanding of how the British Empire's fate became central to Zionist and broader Jewish political thought, revealing the complex intersections of empire, state power, and Jewish politics during a time marked by profound urgency and exigency.

Chronicles the sweeping history of the storied Henry Street Settlement and its enduring vision of a more just society

On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying—abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee. The misery in the room and the walk to reach it inspired Wald to establish Henry Street Settlement, which would become one of the most influential social welfare organizations in American history.

Through personal narratives, vivid images, and previously untold stories, Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier chronicles Henry Street’s sweeping history from 1893 to today. From the fights for public health and immigrants’ rights that fueled its founding, to advocating for relief during the Great Depression, all the way to tackling homelessness and AIDS in the 1980s, and into today—Henry Street has been a champion for social justice. Its powerful narrative illuminates larger stories about poverty, and who is “worthy” of help; immigration and migration, and who is welcomed; human rights, and whose voice is heard.

For over 125 years, Henry Street Settlement has survived in a changing city and nation because of its ability to change with the times; because of the ingenuity of its guiding principle—that by bridging divides of class, culture, and race we could create a more equitable world; and because of the persistence of poverty, racism, and income disparity that it has pledged to confront. This makes the story of Henry Street as relevant today as it was more than a century ago. The House on Henry Street is not just about the challenges of overcoming hardship, but about the best possibilities of urban life and the hope and ambition it takes to achieve them.

Executive editor: Wolf Gruner; English-language edition prepared by: Caroline Pearce and Dorothy Mas

This volume documents the persecution of the Jews in the German Reich between 1933 and 1937. The documents illustrate the ways in which the Jews in Germany were thrown out of their jobs and excluded from public institutions and public life, and how the Nuremberg Laws reduced the status of German Jews to second-class citizens and set out to sever the ties between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. It documents the political calculations and strategy of the Nazi ruling elite in relation to antisemitic measures, and the local outbreaks of violence and terror against the Jewish population. It also illustrates the widespread indifference of non-Jewish Germans. In 1935 the Berlin rabbi Joachim Prinz described how the circumstances for the Jewish population had changed: ‘The Jew’s lot is to be neighbourless. We would not find it all so painful if we did not have the feeling that we once did have neighbours.’

Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/

Executive editor: Susanne Heim; English-language edition prepared by: Caroline Pearce and Dorothy Mas

This volume documents the persecution of the Jews in the German Reich between January 1938 and the end of August 1939. In the months between the Anschluss of Austria and the start of the Second World War, the Nazi leadership plunged Jewish life further into crisis. ‘Aryanization’, bureaucratically organized expulsions, and ultimately the pogrom in November 1938 meant that for more and more Jews, life was untenable. At the same time, it became increasingly difficult to emigrate. In the aftermath of the pogrom of 9 November 1938, Morris Troper from the Jewish aid organization JDC (Joint Distribution Committee) recorded: ‘What is to become of the Jews in the next few weeks is altogether uncertain. Even if the disorders and arrests come to an end, the basis of the existence of German Jewry has been wiped out.’

Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/

Æthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning to Æthelflæd’s life, and through this shows how medieval history can invite new engagements with the past.

As part of the historicizing corpus of seventh-century Irish writing, the Lives framed the narrative of the early saints as an effective weapon in contemporary political and ecclesiastical conflicts. Cogitosus’s Life of Brigit, Muirchú’s and Tírechán’s accounts of Saint Patrick, and Adomnán’s Life of Columba created the understanding of the history of early Ireland that has endured to this day. How did the writers accomplish this through their literary choices?

The authors of Irish saints’ Lives used the literary form of hagiography (Christian biography), miracle stories, and an elaborate rhetorical style to present the words and actions of their subjects. These Lives created a narrative of early Irish history that supported the political/ecclesiastical elites by showing that their power derived from the actions of their patron saints.

This book is a re-edition and detailed study of a parchment codex from Egypt of the fourth century CE with Greek and Coptic recipes for healing through magic and pharmacology (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Library Ms. 136). A text and annotated translation were published in a brief journal article by William H. Worrell in 1935, but the codex has been understudied since then. This new edition offers advances in readings and interpretation, a thorough philological commentary, and accompanying studies on the ritual and medical traditions to which the codex belongs and its position in the linguistic landscape of Egypt. The recipes comprise magical rituals for healing and broader personal advancement, pharmacological and related medical recipes, and advice for the management of a household. Traditional Egyptian religion and ritual are illustrated in interaction with medical practices of Hellenic culture more recently introduced to Egypt, and the archaic, even poetic language of some of the Coptic invocations featuring the Egyptian gods Amun and Thoth share pages with an incantation constructed from the verses of Homer.

This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in digital public history. Individual studies by internationally renowned public historians, digital humanists, and digital historians elucidate central issues in the field and present a critical account of the major public history accomplishments, research activities, and practices with the public and of their digital context. The handbook applies an international and comparative approach, looks at the historical development of the field, focuses on technical background and the use of specific digital media and tools. Furthermore, the handbook analyzes connections with local communities and different publics worldwide when engaging in digital activities with the past, indicating directions for future research, and teaching activities.

Luwian and the closely related Hittite are the oldest known languages of the Indo-European group. Luwian is written in two scripts: Cuneiform and its own Hieroglyphic, which survives mostly on stone monuments collected from Turkey and Syria. The texts fall into two main groups, those of the Hittite Empire (c. 1400–1200 B.C.), and those of the Iron Age (c. 1000–700 B.C.),with a transitional period (c. 1200–1000 B.C.). One of the editor’s principal research efforts has been the establishment of reliable texts presented in facsimile copies and photographs. His Inscriptions of the Iron Age were published as Vol. I in 2000, and the great Luwian-Phoenician Bilingual in collaboration with Halet Çambel as Vol. II in 1999. Vol. III will present the Inscriptions of the Hittite Empire along with the newly discovered Iron Age inscriptions, thus completing the whole corpus. It will then make available to the scholarly world the Luwian language in its Hieroglyphic manifestation, which will be of importance to philologists and ancient historians alike.

In Sparta’s Third Attic War, Paul Rahe examines the armed conflict that followed, attending to the impact on its outcome of the internal struggles that took place at Athens, at Sparta, and at the court of the Great King; describing the maneuvers of the wily, flexible, seductive Athenian turncoat Alcibiades, who dominated in turn the counsels of the Spartans, the Persians, and his fellow Athenians; and charting the eventual emergence at Lacedaemon of a commanding figure of helot ancestry named Lysander, who formed a close relationship with the younger son of the Great King and, in battle, outwitted the Athenians at every turn. This is a story of grit, determination, and brilliance on both sides. It examines the ambivalence of the Spartans, it relates the folly that brought the Athenians down, and it traces their ultimate defeat to defects in the policy and vision of Pericles.

In 1732, Christian Petter Löwe, a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, published his Speculum Religionis Judaicæ (Mirror of the Jewish Religion), a description of the Jewish religion and ceremonies as practised at the time. Over 50 years before Jews were permitted to settle in Sweden in 1782, the genre of Christian ethnographical writing about Jews and Jewish rituals had arrived in Sweden from Germany. In this volume, Jonathan Adams (University of Gothenburg) introduces the background to Löwe’s "mirror" by looking at both the earlier history of Jews in Sweden and the phenomenon of ethnographical writing about Jews. The text of Speculum is presented in its original Swedish with a translation into English facing on the opposite pages. This edition includes notes explaining technical terms, identifying people and places, and translating Hebrew words and phrases. The volume also includes two works published in Sweden prior to Speculum: Bezelius’ Die Herrlichkeit des Christenthums (The Glory of Christianity [excerpts], 1684) and Seeligmann’s Jüdischer Ceremonien (On Jewish Ceremonies, 1725). The volume should be of interest to students and researchers of Jewish and Scandinavian history as well as the history of Jewish–Christian relations.

From the outset of the twentieth century, Egyptian and Indian leaders understood their movements for self-determination as linked and part of a shared project. Following World War I, as connections between the Middle East and South Asia proliferated, Egypt and India lay squarely at the heart of increasingly complex and multilateral relations. East of Empire traces how anticolonial nationalism gained momentum across the East and documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges, and shifting political alliances that came to animate the interwar project of Easternism: a cosmopolitan vision of the world whose center of gravity lay beyond Europe, in the great city of Cairo.

Erin O'Halloran offers a compelling new account of the era immediately preceding decolonization and the epochal partitions of India and Palestine. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Saad Zaghlul, she introduces less familiar but no less intriguing personalities: feminists, diplomats, and poets; surrealists, socialists and spies. Each dreamed, wrote, organized and fought for the liberation of the East—a space universally evoked, though seemingly impossible to pin down. Drawing on a broad cross-section of Indian, Arab, British, and European sources, East of Empire transcends archival partitions to tell a powerful and nearly forgotten set of stories about the rise of anticolonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.

World-renowned archaeologist Zahi Hawass weaves a spellbinding narrative about how the pyramids were built and why, new in paperback

Nearly five thousand years ago, the fourth dynasty of Egypt’s Old Kingdom reigned over a highly advanced civilization. Believed to be gods, the royal family lived amid colossal palaces and temples built to honor them and their deified ancestors.

In Mountains of the Pharaohs, Zahi Hawass brings these extraordinary historical figures to life, detailing a soap opera-like saga complete with murder, incest, and the triumphant ascension to the throne of one of only four queens ever to rule Egypt. It was during this dynasty that the magnificent pyramids of Giza were built. These monuments attest not only to the dynasty’s supreme power, but also to the engineering expertise and architectural sophistication that flourished under its rule.

Hawass tells the complete story of the pyramids, weaving archaeological data with a history of Egypt’s powerful pharaohs, and argues that the pyramids—including the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the only one of the Seven Wonders of the World still standing—were built by skilled craftsmen who took great pride in their work.

Illustrated with black-and-white photographs and drawings, Mountains of the Pharaohs is a compelling account of one of civilization’s greatest achievements.

An innovative account of the lives and times of the ‘warrior king’ Thutmose III, and the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, by renowned Egyptologist Aidan Dodson

Thutmose III and Hatshepsut are among the best-known figures in Egyptian history. Thutmose has been called the “Napoleon of ancient Egypt,” during whose reign Egypt’s armies penetrated deep into northern Syria and consolidated Egyptian dominion over much of Sudan. Hatshepsut, one of the handful of female pharaohs, also took to the battlefield, but is best known today for a great trading expedition, down the Red Sea coast to the mysterious land of Punt.

At first, Hatshepsut served simply as regent for her young nephew-stepson Thutmose, but subsequently the two shared the throne of Egypt as co-pharaohs for over a decade. Later, as sole king, Thutmose devoted much of the rest of his life to military matters and large-scale building works, continuing the work of Hatshepsut that created much of the core of the great temple of Karnak. During the very last years of his life, Thutmose launched an attack on the memory of Hatshepsut, with most of her images destroyed. Yet, some four centuries later, Thutmose III and Hatshepsut were still remembered together as great figures of the past, whose conception of pharaonic kingship served as the model for later rulers, into the eighth century BC.

This book, illustrated in full color, traces what we know about the lives and times of Thutmose and Hatshepsut, and the monuments they built to guarantee their afterlives. It then explores their posthumous reputations in ancient times, and ends with the story of how the two pharaohs emerged from the mists of time during the nineteenth century AD, to resume their places in history.

Explores the little-known connection between Lincoln and the Jews

Lincoln and the Jews provides the first full-scale history of Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with American Jews. Newly republished in a second revised edition and incorporating rarely seen historical manuscripts and documents, the volume explores how Lincoln’s remarkable regard for American Jews affected his path to the presidency and his policy decisions once in the White House. Lincoln counted Jews among his closest friends and, as president, placed Jews in positions of authority and both extended and protected Jewish rights.

The first edition of Lincoln and the Jews won three prizes and was hailed by famed Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer as “the definitive study of a long-neglected aspect of Civil War history and Lincoln biography.” This edition features little known and rarely seen documents as well as a new preface highlighting the theme of antisemitism and insights which can be gleaned from this history for today.

Lincoln and the Jews affirms that Lincoln’s warm relationships with Jews not only broadened Lincoln personally, but, in effect, broadened America. A groundbreaking work, this stunning volume contributes to Civil War-era Jewish American history and uncovers a new facet to Abraham Lincoln’s legacy.

The Business of Transition examines how the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigated the transition from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century. In this social and cultural history, Paris Papamichos Chronakis shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst revolution and war, rising ethnic tensions, and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, he traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members, and civic leaders to illustrate how the self-reinvention of a Jewish-led bourgeoisie made a city Greek.

Papamichos Chronakis draws on previously untapped local archival material to weave a rich narrative of individual portraits, introducing us to revered philanthropists and committed patriots as well as vilified profiteers and victimized Salonicans. Offering a kaleidoscopic view of a city in transition, this book reveals how the collapse of empire shook all the constitutive elements of Jewish and Greek identities, and how Jews and Greeks reinvented themselves amidst these larger political and economic disruptions.

From the birth of Berlin’s railway network to the time when the bombs of the Second World War and the concrete slabs of the Wall changed the city forever, the Prussian and later German capital counted eight major railway stations. These were beacons in the city: impressive monuments, magnificently built for the bygone rituals of arrival and departure, yet tightly woven into a distinct part of town.

Railway stations are magical, meaningful places, allowing for escape as well as promise, nostalgia as well as novelty. They process all sorts of people, from well-to-do business types to unfortunates forced to live on the fringes of society. There is a nervous energy around them, created by those looking forward to their journey, others trying to get oriented in a place that is new to them, and some facing the drudgery of yet another commute.

And if pre-World War 2 Berlin was anything, it was energetic. Building an adequate transport infrastructure for Europe’s fastest-growing city proved to be a continuous challenge that required flexibility and adaptation and touched the city in ways that can still be seen today. This is the history of Berlin’s railway stations, the people that used them, and the way the city was shaped by them.

A wonderfully written, sweeping narrative history of the United States that will help Americans discover the land they call home.

Guide for Teachers using Land of Hope: Young Readers Edition. Middle School — Grades 6-8

The FIRST Teachers Guide to accompany the two-volume narrative Land of Hope: Young Readers Edition

This Teacher's Guide to the Young Reader's Edition of Wilfred McClay's Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story is an invaluable supplemental resource for teachers who use the Young Reader's Edition as a textbook for middle-grade courses in US history. Prepared by McClay in collaboration with John McBride, a master teacher with more than thirty years of secondary and collegiate teaching experience, it is an exceptionally rich and useful tool for classroom instructors.

Each chapter of this Teacher's Guide receives a five-part treatment: a short summation of the chapter's contents questions and answers about the chapter, a list of key names and terms appearing within each one, a crossword puzzle based on those names and terms, and one or more primary source documents for class analysis with accompanying questions and answers. Longer documents are broken into shorter passages with questions interspersed to help younger readers. 

This Teacher's Guide also features a collection of map exercises as well as special units to assist instructors in teaching students about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the two-party system.

Italian and Irish immigrant experiences

When people migrate, they often perform social and cultural rituals along the way. The idea of rites of passage—with its elements of preparation, departure, transit, admission, exclusion, expulsion, and return—helps us understand these moments in the process of migration in new and meaningful ways.

Rituals of Migration offers snapshots of Italian and Irish migrants on the move from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The essays in this volume examine the particular moments, actions, sentiments, and material objects in the process of migration—at the point of departure, in transit, and in the process of return. Because rites and rituals feature both nonverbal and verbal expression, migration history can be understood by studying physical objects as well as written sources. The authors focus on rituals created by migrants and their descendants, but they also consider the actions of officials who regulated migrants’ departure, travel, admission, exclusion, and removal. By examining what people did, thought, felt, and packed on the eve of their departures, during their journeys, and when returning to their homelands, Rituals of Migration reveals how everyone involved in the immigration process, including the migrants themselves, the families they left behind, and those in charge of regulating their mobility, have tried to make sense of a process filled with peril, uncertainty, excitement, and opportunity.

How Americans have weathered constitutional crises throughout our history

Since protestors ripped through the Capitol Building in 2021, the threat of constitutional crisis has loomed over our nation. The foundational tenets of American democracy seem to be endangered, and many citizens believe this danger is unprecedented in our history. But Americans have weathered many constitutional crises, often accompanied by the same violence and chaos experienced on January 6. However, these crises occurred on the state level. In Sedition, Marcus Alexander Gadson uncovers these episodes of civil unrest and examines how state governments handled them.

Sedition takes readers through six instances of constitutional crisis: The Buckshot War, Dorr’s Rebellion, Bleeding Kansas, the Brooks-Baxter War, a successful terrorist campaign to overthrow South Carolina’s government during Reconstruction, and the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. He chronicles these turbulent periods of violent anti-government conflict on the state level, explaining what it was like to experience coup d’états, rival governments fighting in the streets, and disputed elections that gave way to violence. As he addresses constitutional breakdown, Gadson urges Americans to pay increased attention to the risk of constitutional instability in their home states. His sweeping historical analysis provides new insights on the fight to protect democracy today.

As Americans mobilize to prevent future crises, Sedition reminds us that our constitutional order can fail, that democratic collapse is possible, and offers us advice on how to save our constitutional system.

How an engineering crisis threatened a career, a building, and the lives of countless New Yorkers

The Citicorp Center, a fifty-nine-story skyscraper built in 1977, immediately became one of the most recognizable features on the New York City skyline with its distinctive inclined roof and oddly placed support columns. Designed by one of the top structural engineers in the field, William LeMessurier, the tower would become the crown jewel of his professional career; In essence, he created a skyscraper on stilts. The building was a modern marvel – until it was revealed that it had a 1 in 16 chance of collapse.

The Great Miscalculation tells the riveting story of LeMessurier’s discovery of a fatal flaw in his building’s design and his decision to blow the whistle on himself, putting his reputation on the line in a race to save this iconic skyscraper. With hurricane season rapidly approaching, the structural design flaws of the Citicorp Tower posed a menacing danger. Meanwhile, the economic hardships and political turmoil of 1970s New York only compounded the obstacles to a massively expensive, never-before-seen structural redesign in the heart of downtown Manhattan.

A fascinating piece of overlooked New York City history, The Great Miscalculation tells the gripping narrative of a catastrophe averted in the nick of time.

Using the categories of status, political power, and wealth, Robert W. Patch shows how Hispanic society in Mérida, Yucatán was stratified into upper, middle, and lower classes. Lacking any exportable resource except cotton textiles extracted from Maya people and exported to northern Mexico, the Hispanic community earned enough through those exports to import the material goods necessary to maintain a "Spanish" identity. The only productive economic activity of the Hispanic people was cattle ranching, and ownership of cattle was widespread, though some owned a lot more than others. Political participation was shared by the upper and middle classes, but a power elite dominated politics. Socially, people usually married within their social class and remained separate from the Maya population. The upper class, however, was not an endogamous caste descended from the conquistadors, but instead accepted wealthy people, including European immigrants, into their group. Basques, Cantabrians, and Canary Islanders tried to maintain their separate ethnicities but ultimately created a new "Spanish" identity, and many entered the upper class. Social mobility upward and downward was thus common in colonial Mérida. An Outpost of Colonialism illuminates this process of class formation and explains how the successful social reproduction of Hispanic society perpetuated the correlation between skin color (race) and social class.

The period between the Roman take-over of Egypt (30 BCE) and the failure of the Jewish diaspora revolt (115–117 CE) witnessed the continual devaluation in the status of the Jews in Egypt, and culminated in the destruction of its Jewish community. This volume collects and presents all papyri, ostraca, amulets and inscriptions from this early Roman period connected to Jews and Judaism, published since 1957. It is a follow-up of the 1960 volume 2 of the Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum. It includes over 80 documents in Greek, Demotic, and Hebrew, both documentary and literary. The expansion of the scope of documents, to include languages other than Greek and genres beyond the documentary, allows for a better understanding of the life of the Jews in Egypt. The documents published in this volume shed new light on aspects discussed previously: The Demotic papyri better explain the Jewish settlement in Edfu, new papyri reveal more about Jewish tax, about the Acta papyri, and about the developments of the Jewish revolt. The magical papyri help explain cultural developments in the Jewish community of Egypt. This volume is thus a major contribution to the study of the decline of the greatest diaspora Jewish community in antiquity.

Der Band dokumentiert die Entwicklung der inneren Bundespolitik in den Jahren von 1824 bis 1830, über die bislang relativ wenig bekannt ist. In insgesamt 170 Dokumenten wird ein breites Panorama von Themen behandelt, die in der Bundesversammlung und ihren Kommissionen, in den einzelstaatlichen Ministerien und Parlamenten, in diplomatischen Korrespondenzen sowie in der Presse und Publizistik diskutiert wurden. Zu den Schwerpunkten des Bandes zählen:

– Die Tätigkeit der Mainzer Zentraluntersuchungskommission und deren Ergebnisse.

– Die Beratungen der Bundesversammlung und der Bundesmilitärkommission im Hinblick auf die Übernahme und Ausrüstung der Bundesfestungen Mainz, Luxemburg und Landau.

– Die wirtschaftspolitischen Fragen, die innerhalb des Bundes und in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit breit diskutiert wurden, vor allem die zoll- und handelspolitische Integration im Deutschen Bund, die Frage des Nachdruckschutzes und die Regulierung der Flussschifffahrt.

– Verfassungspolitische Auseinandersetzungen zwischen den Landständen und den Landesherrn.

Den ausführlich kommentierten Dokumenten ist eine umfangreiche Einleitung vorangestellt, in welcher die Problemlagen und Zielsetzungen der Bundespolitik, ihr föderatives Integrationspotential sowie ihr Konfliktpotential im Hinblick auf liberale und nationale Tendenzen diskutiert werden.

During the Nazi era, about three million Jews – half the victims of the Holocaust – were deported from the German Reich, the occupied territories, as well as Nazi-allied countries, and sent to ghettos, camps, and extermination centers. The police and the SS also deported tens of thousands of Sinti and Roma, mainly to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, where most of them were killed. Deportations were central to National Socialist persecution and extermination. In November 2020, an international conference organized by the Arolsen Archives focused on the various historical sources, their research potential, and (digital) methods of cataloging them. It also explored new (systematizing and comparative) approaches in historical research. This volume features over 20 contributions by scholars from different countries and with a variety of perspectives and questions. The main geographical focus is on deportations from the German Reich and German-occupied Southeastern Europe.

Seit etwas mehr als 100 Jahren wurden die nubischen Kulturen Gegenstand übergreifender Darstellungen. An keinem Fundplatz war es jedoch bislang möglich, eine kontinuierliche Sequenz für die Zeit des 4.- 2. Jtds. v. Chr. vorzulegen. Die vollständige Zerstörung des unternubischen Raumes durch die Staudämme des 20.Jahrhunderts hat die letzte Chance für eine diachrone Darstellung der Geschichte des Grenzraumes in das angrenzende Südägypten verlegt. Die ungestörte Abfolge von Siedlungsschichten auf der Insel Elephantine eröffnet hierzu die einmalige Möglichkeit. Die Hauptquelle der Darstellung ist die nubische Keramik, die in den Ausgrabungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Abt. Kairo, in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Schweizerischen Institut für Ägyptische Bauforschung und Altertumskunde, gefunden wurde. Die Funde und Befunde werden im Kontext des aktuellen Forschungsstands zu weiteren Fundplätzen und Textquellen betrachtet. Anhand dieses vielfältigen und quantitativ aussagekräftigen Materials wird eine Neubewertung der Äußerungen von Ethnizität und der Realität des ägyptisch-nubischen wie auch innernubischen Kulturkontakts an einer Schnittstelle politischer und wirtschaftlicher Räume in Nordostafrika vorgestellt.

Ugaritic literary and ritual studies have often neglected or even ignored the Akkadian material from the same archives, which can be used as a frame of reference for the Ugaritic texts. The aim of this work is to offer a comprehensive study of the consonantal (Ugaritic) as well as the syllabic (Akkadian) incantation and anti-witchcraft texts from Ras Shamra as a unified corpus. These texts, dealing with impending dangers (mainly snakebites) and witchcraft attacks, are placed in the context of Ancient Near Eastern magic literature. A discussion of general topics, including magic and religion, the Ugaritic gods of magic, and the definition of incantation, is followed by a new collation and translation of the Akkadian texts, as well as new photographic material for both series. The main focus of this book is the close reading of the consonantal texts in the context of the much larger and better analyzed corpus of Akkadian magic literature.

This volume presents a collection of essays on different aspects of Roman sarcophagi. These varied approaches will produce fresh insights into a subject which is receiving increased interest in English-language scholarship, with a new awareness of the important contribution that sarcophagi can make to the study of the social use and production of Roman art. The book will therefore be a timely addition to existing literature. Metropolitan sarcophagi are the main focus of the volume, which will cover a wide time range from the first century AD to post classical periods (including early Christian sarcophagi and post-classical reception). Other papers will look at aspects of viewing and representation, iconography, and marble analysis. There will be an Introduction written by the co-editors.

Das Werk stellt erstmals die umfangreichen Einflüsse des über Byzanz vermittelten römischen Rechts im ersten geschriebenen Recht der Isländer dar. Nach einem chronologischen Überblick über die Gesetzgebungsgeschichte auf Island während der Freistaatszeit (930-1262/4) wird die Person des Goden Hafliði Másson näher dargestellt, der maßgeblich bei der Abfassung des später Grágás genannten Gesetzbuches im Winter 1117/1118 war. Hafliði Másson kann auch mit der ersten Klostergründung sowie der Errichtung des zweiten Bischofsstuhls auf Island in Verbindung gebracht werden.

Im ersten Hauptteil der Arbeit wird der Einfluss des römischen Rechts auf den juristischen Wortschatz, die Gesetzgebungstechnik und einzelne Rechtsinstitute der Grágás wie beispielsweise die Popularklage dargestellt. Im zweiten Hauptteil werden einzelne Tatbestände analysiert, die durch das römische Recht sowie durch alttestamentliche Normen geprägt sind. Weiterhin werden einige Parallelen zum langobardischen Recht festgestellt.

Das Buch ist damit sowohl für die Rechtsgeschichte als auch für die Germanistik (insbesondere Nordische Philologie), Byzantinistik und Kirchengeschichte von Interesse.

This book contributes to the understanding of Dionysos, the Greek god of wine, dancing, theatre and ecstasy, by putting together 30 studies of classical scholars. They combine the analysis of specific instances of particular dimensions of the god in cult, myth, literature and iconography, with general visions of Dionysos in antiquity and modern times. Only from the combination of different perspectives can we grasp the complex personality of Dionysos, and the forms of his presence in different cults, literary genres, and artistic forms, from Mycenaean times to late antiquity.

The ways in which Dionysos was experienced may vary in each author, each cult, and each genre in which this god is involved. Therefore, instead of offering a new all-encompassing theory that would immediately become partial, the book narrows the focus on specific aspects of the god. Redefinition does not mean finding (again) the essence of the god, but obtaining a more nuanced knowledge of the ways he was experienced and conceived in antiquity.

Gesundheitsausstellungen erlebten im Deutschen Reich der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts eine wahre Boomphase. Sie waren die deutschen Versionen der Weltausstellung und zogen bis zum Beginn des Zweiten Weltkriegs ein Millionenpublikum an. Ziel ihrer Veranstalter war es, durch Wissensvermittlung und emotionale Ansprache das gesundheitsrelevante Verhalten der Bevölkerung zu beeinflussen. Dafür versammelten sie eine Vielzahl heterogener Akteure auf den Ausstellungen, deren Bezugspunkt die Gesundheit der deutschen Bevölkerung darstellte. Die Studie untersucht einerseits die Geschichte der Gesundheitsausstellung vom späten Kaiserreich bis zum Nationalsozialismus und beschreibt die Genese, Durchführung und erstmals auch die transnationale Dimension dieser Großexpositionen. Andererseits zeigt sie, welchen Ordnungen der Körper auf den Ausstellungen unterworfen wurde und wie die unterschiedlichen Akteure durch den Bezug auf den Körper Fragen der gesellschaftlichen Inklusion oder Exklusion verhandelten. Damit leistet die Arbeit nicht nur einen Beitrag zur Geschichte der Wissenschaftspopularisierung um die Jahrhundertwende, sondern auch zur Körpergeschichte der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts.

Young Germans marched through Haifa shouting „Heil Hitler!“ and Swastika flags were hoisted at the German consulates in Mandatory Palestine. It was in November 1931 when a non-Jewish German made the initial contact with Nazi officials in Germany that led to the establishment of a miniature Third Reich with local NS groups, Hitler Youth program, and associations for women, teachers, and others in Palestine. Approximately 33% of all Palestine-Germans (Palästina-Deutsche) participated in the NS movement. Until today no extensive research written in English has been done on this bizarre „footnote“ in history. While previous publications in German mainly concentrated on the members of the Temple Society, this work includes Protestant and Catholic Germans as well. It focuses on the relationship of Palästina-Deutsche with local Arabs and Jews. It covers the period of 1933 to 1948 as well as the years between the establishing of the State of Israel and the departure of the last group of Germans in 1950. At the end of the book, the reader will find a list with more than seven hundred names of those who joined the NS groups.

45 Jahre nach dem Corpus der Inschriften der makedonischen Stadt Thessaloniki (IG X 2, 1, ed. Charles Edson, 1972) erscheint der erste Teil der Supplemente zu diesem Band. Er enthält die zwischen 1960 und 2015 neu gefundenen Inschriften aus der antiken Stadt und ihrem Territorium. Von den etwa 650 Inschriften werden hier knapp 200 erstmals ediert. Bemerkenswert sind neben der großen Zahl von Grabinschriften, darunter viele aus spätantiker und christlicher Zeit, mehrere lange Texte aus den Jahren zwischen 250 und 260 n.Chr., die zu Gladiatorenspielen einladen.

Der Band wird durch ausführliche Indices erschlossen. Alle Inschriften werden photographisch abgebildet.

Die Konfession deutscher Orientalisten rückt zunehmend in den Fokus fachgeschichtlicher Forschung. Dabei bietet das Spannungsfeld von Orientalismus und Antisemitismus nicht nur Ansatzpunkte bei Gelehrtenbiografien jüdischer Wissenschaftler. Die besonderen gesellschaftspolitischen Rahmenbedingungen des „kulturkämpferischen“ Zweiten Deutschen Kaiserreichs lenken den Blick auch auf Konflikte zwischen den christlichen Konfessionen. Der Orientalistik kommt durch ihren Forschungsgegenstand dabei eine Schlüsselrolle zu. Die Ägyptologie in Deutschland hat sich, anders als ihre Nachbardisziplin der Assyriologie, nicht in den „Babel-Bibel-Streit“ verwickeln lassen. Weitgehend staatlich finanziert, mussten deutsche Ägyptologen, anders als ihre angelsächsischen Kollegen, auch nicht „biblische“ Themen aufgreifen, um private Förderer zu gewinnen. Dennoch hatte die Konfession unmittelbaren Einfluss auf Karrieren und Wissenschaftspolitik. Die vorliegende Studie geht diesem Einfluss anhand ausgesuchter Fallbeispiele auf den Grund.

Der Band schafft mit der Erschließung eines umfangreichen, vielfach unbekannten Quellenmaterials die Grundlage für eine umfassende und differenzierte Analyse der Anfangsjahre des Deutschen Bundes (1815-1819). Im Zentrum steht die Tätigkeit der Deutschen Bundesversammlung in Frankfurt. Dokumentiert werden die Phase bis zur Eröffnung der Deutschen Bundesversammlung, deren Organisation und Arbeitsweise sowie anhand von fünf zentralen Themenfeldern (Austrägalwesen des Deutschen Bundes, Einführung landständischer Verfassungen in den Bundesstaaten, Initiativen zur wirtschaftlichen Integration, Pressefreiheit und Büchernachdruck, Auswanderungsfreiheit und Nachsteuerfreiheit) die Bemühungen des Bundestags um eine organische Fortbildung und innere Ausgestaltung des Deutschen Bundes. In 212 Dokumenten entsteht das Bild einer "kurzen, aber intensiv genutzten" (Reinhard Stauber) ersten Phase der Bundesgeschichte, in der eine behutsame Weiterentwicklung und Integration des Deutschen Bundes angestrebt wurde, bevor mit der vor allem von Österreich und Preußen betriebenen restaurativen Wende von 1819/20 der Bund zur "konservativen Entwicklungsblockade" (Dieter Langewiesche) umgestaltet wurde.

Dr. Konrad Peutinger (1465–1546) verkörperte als Stadtschreiber von Augsburg, als Politiker, Gelehrter und Kunstsammler das, was in Italien mit dem Begriff des ‚uomo universale‘ benannt wurde. Er prägte über lange Jahre die Politik der Reichsstadt und agierte vielfach im Brennpunkt des Reichsgeschehens. Als Humanist sammelte er mit über 2000 Bänden eine der größten Privatbibliotheken nördlich der Alpen. Und er stand als führende Persönlichkeit der sog. „Sodalitas Augustana" in Kontakt mit vielen gelehrten Zeitgenossen, edierte römische Inschriften und war maßgeblich an der Selbstinszenierung Kaiser Maximilians I. beteiligt.

Der vorliegende Band dokumentiert eine Tagung zum 550. Geburtstag Peutingers mit dem Ziel, die breite Palette seiner Tätigkeiten zu würdigen: den Stand der Forschung zu rekapitulieren, neue Akzente zu setzen und Anregungen für weitere Studien zu geben. Das Themenfeld reicht deshalb von seinen ganz spezifischen Anteilen an der städtischen Politik und Publizistik über Aspekte seiner Wissensfelder und Mediennutzung bis zur kritischen Beleuchtung des Umgangs mit der Erinnerungskultur.

Maríu saga, the Old Norse-Icelandic life of the Virgin Mary, survives in nineteen manuscripts. While the 1871 edition of the saga provides two versions based on multiple manuscripts and prints significant variants in the notes, it does not preserve the literary and social contexts of those manuscripts. In the extant manuscripts Maríu saga rarely exists in the codex by itself. This study restores the saga to its manuscript contexts in order to better understand the meaning of the text within its manuscript matrix, why it was copied in the specific manuscripts it was, and how it was read and used by the different communities that preserved the manuscripts.

Unique among the Icelandic sagas, part-history, part-fiction, the Saga of the Jómsvikings tells of a legendary band of vikings, originally Danish, who established an island fortress of the Baltic coast and launched and ultimately lost their heroic attack on the pagan ruler of Norway in the late tenth century. The saga's account of their stringent warrior code, fatalistic adherence to their own reckless vows and declarations of extreme courage as they face execution articulates a remarkable account of what it meant to be a viking. This translation presents the longest and earliest text of the saga, never before published in English, with a full literary and historical introduction to this remarkable work.