A dazzling history of Africans in Europe, "masterfully" (Smithsonian) revealing their unacknowledged role in shaping the continent A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History Conventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans of African descent. From the third century, when the Egyptian Saint Maurice became the leader of a Roman legion, all the way up to the present, Otele explores encounters between those defined as "Africans" and those called "Europeans." She gives equal attention to the most prominent figures--like Alessandro de Medici, the first duke of Florence thought to have been born to a free African woman in a Roman village--and the untold stories--like the lives of dual-heritage families in Europe's coastal trading towns. African Europeans is a landmark celebration of this integral, vibrantly complex slice of European history, and will redefine the field for years to come.
An accessible guide for making the most of backyard and community gardens.
First published to help British civilians grow vegetables during the First World War, The Allotment Book was a handy manual for urban gardeners on how to best utilize their garden-spaces, also known as allotments, to produce crops when food supply lines were unreliable. Though written more than one hundred years ago, The Allotment Book is still an immensely helpful, practical guide to making the most of any-sized yard--whether it's to be used as a community or personal garden. The chapters cover digging techniques, making compost, clearing neglected ground, fertilizers, recommended varieties, a handy month-by-month guide to maintaining your plot throughout the year, and hints for novice growers.
The philosophy of growing could not be more apt for our times: "There is comfort in the fact that all of us, farmers, allotment-holders, and cottagers are inclined to get all we can from our land during our tenancy, without putting any more into it than we can help."
An ideal gift for gardeners everywhere, this timeless text is filled with easy-to-follow diagrams and reassuring advice that is still pertinent today from an expert who knew anybody could grow food successfully once given a guiding hand.
A stand-alone edition of Euripides's The Bacchae taken from Chicago's renowned translations of the Greek tragedies.
Dionysus, son of Zeus, has journeyed to the land of his birth expecting to be received as a god. After being rejected by his kin, he turns to the women of Thebes, driving them into a delirious frenzy. Dressed in animal skins and crowned with leaves, they roam wild in the hills as the king tries to restore order--with horrifying results.
Written in the final years of Euripides's life and first staged posthumously, The Bacchae is presented here in William Arrowsmith's energetic translation, drawn from the authoritative third edition of the University of Chicago Press's Complete Greek Tragedies series. An introduction by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most provides essential information about The Bacchae's first production, plot, and reception in antiquity, and an appendix presents Arrowsmith's hypothetical reconstruction of fifty lines missing from the denouement of the play.
A new account of racial logics in premodern Islamic literature. In Black Knights, Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world. Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.
Medieval people are often portrayed as having poor hygiene and table manners--licking their knives or throwing chicken bones on the floor. In the Middle Ages, however, such behavior was not tolerated. Medieval society cherished order in nearly every facet of life, from regular handwashing to daily prayer. There were consequences if you didn't adhere to the rules of good behavior: you wouldn't be invited to the lord's next dinner, you wouldn't win the battle, and you wouldn't win the lady.
Author Daniele Cybulskie explores the world of medieval etiquette, encompassing table manners and interpersonal relationships as well as running a household and ruling a kingdom. With wit and insight, Cybulskie draws on a wide variety of primary sources, from handbooks for young knights to romantic poems. Though we may no longer need best practices for things like dueling or ordering about our servants, the principles of generosity, kindness, and respect still apply today. After all, it's a good reminder to "not talk when you have food in your mouth" and "anything you say should be entertaining, polite, and sophisticated."
Illustrated with original drawings by Anna Lobanova as well as eighty medieval artworks, Chivalry and Courtesy is full of good advice for everyone, whether you are a peasant or a knight, a student or a CEO, a king or a queen.
Author Daniele Cybulskie explores the world of medieval etiquette, encompassing table manners and interpersonal relationships as well as running a household and ruling a kingdom. With wit and insight, Cybulskie draws on a wide variety of primary sources, from handbooks for young knights to romantic poems. Though we may no longer need best practices for things like dueling or ordering about our servants, the principles of generosity, kindness, and respect still apply today. After all, it's a good reminder to "not talk when you have food in your mouth" and "anything you say should be entertaining, polite, and sophisticated."
Illustrated with original drawings by Anna Lobanova as well as eighty medieval artworks, Chivalry and Courtesy is full of good advice for everyone, whether you are a peasant or a knight, a student or a CEO, a king or a queen.
Winner of the Comics Studies Society Edited Book Prize Shortlisted for the Best Academic / Scholarly Work Eisner Award Honorable Mention for the Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies from the Popular Culture Association Some comics fans view the industry's Golden Age (1930s-1950s) as a challenging time when it comes to representations of race, an era when the few Black characters appeared as brutal savages, devious witch doctors, or unintelligible minstrels. Yet the true portrait is more complex and reveals that even as caricatures predominated, some Golden Age comics creators offered more progressive and nuanced depictions of Black people. Desegregating Comics assembles a team of leading scholars to explore how debates about the representation of Blackness shaped both the production and reception of Golden Age comics. Some essays showcase rare titles like Negro Romance and consider the formal innovations introduced by Black comics creators like Matt Baker and Alvin Hollingsworth, while others examine the treatment of race in the work of such canonical cartoonists as George Herriman and Will Eisner. The collection also investigates how Black fans read and loved comics, but implored publishers to stop including hurtful stereotypes. As this book shows, Golden Age comics artists, writers, editors, distributors, and readers engaged in heated negotiations over how Blackness should be portrayed, and the outcomes of those debates continue to shape popular culture today.
"A fascinating collection" of wartime cartoons from the beloved children's author and illustrator (The New York Times Book Review). For decades, readers throughout the world have enjoyed the marvelous stories and illustrations of Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. But few know the work Geisel did as a political cartoonist during World War II, for the New York daily newspaper PM. In these extraordinarily trenchant cartoons, Geisel presents "a provocative history of wartime politics" (Entertainment Weekly). Dr. Seuss Goes to War features handsome, large-format reproductions of more than two hundred of Geisel's cartoons, alongside "insightful" commentary by the historian Richard H. Minear that places them in the context of the national climate they reflect (Booklist). Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Spiegelman's introduction places Seuss firmly in the pantheon of the leading political cartoonists of our time. "A shocker--this cat is not in the hat!" --Studs Terkel
What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past--from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century--one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.
A magnificent work of original research that unravels history through textiles and cloth--how we make it, use it, and what it means to us. A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest?
Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town?
How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe?
What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents --and entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery.
Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town?
How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe?
What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents --and entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery.
THE #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 CUNDIL HISTORY PRIZE
A "Next Big Idea Book Club" Must Read?
A groundbreaking reappraisal of medieval femininity, revealing why women have been written out of history and why it matters
The Middle Ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings; a patriarchal society that oppressed and excluded women. But when we dig a little deeper into the truth, we can see that the "Dark" Ages were anything but.
Oxford and BBC historian Janina Ramirez has uncovered countless influential women's names struck out of historical records, with the word FEMINA annotated beside them. As gatekeepers of the past ordered books to be burned, artworks to be destroyed, and new versions of myths, legends and historical documents to be produced, our view of history has been manipulated.
Only now, through a careful examination of the artifacts, writings and possessions they left behind, are the influential and multifaceted lives of women emerging. Femina goes beyond the official records to uncover the true impact of women, such as:
Jadwiga, the only female king in Europe Margery Kempe, who exploited her image and story to ensure her notoriety Loftus Princess, whose existence gives us clues about the beginnings of Christianity in England
In Femina, Ramirez invites us to see the medieval world with fresh eyes and discover why these remarkable women were removed from our collective memories.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 CUNDIL HISTORY PRIZE
A "Next Big Idea Book Club" Must Read?
A groundbreaking reappraisal of medieval femininity, revealing why women have been written out of history and why it matters
The Middle Ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings; a patriarchal society that oppressed and excluded women. But when we dig a little deeper into the truth, we can see that the "Dark" Ages were anything but.
Oxford and BBC historian Janina Ramirez has uncovered countless influential women's names struck out of historical records, with the word FEMINA annotated beside them. As gatekeepers of the past ordered books to be burned, artworks to be destroyed, and new versions of myths, legends and historical documents to be produced, our view of history has been manipulated.
Only now, through a careful examination of the artifacts, writings and possessions they left behind, are the influential and multifaceted lives of women emerging. Femina goes beyond the official records to uncover the true impact of women, such as:
In Femina, Ramirez invites us to see the medieval world with fresh eyes and discover why these remarkable women were removed from our collective memories.