Humanities Resources

Ancient History: Key Themes and Approaches is a sourcebook of writings on ancient history. It presents over 500 of the most important stimulating and provocative arguments by modern writers on the subject, and as such constitutes an invaluable reference resource. The first section deals with different aspects of life in the ancient world, such as democracy, imperialism, slavery and sexuality, while the second section covers the ideas of key ancient historians and other writers on classical antiquity. Overall this book offers an invaluable introduction to the most important ideas, theories and controversies in ancient history, and a thought-provoking survey of the range of views and approaches to the subject.

This book brings together a team of international experts to show how the careful study of bones and other ancient remains using modern scientific techniques, known as forensic archaeology, can reveal a picture of the lives, cultures and beliefs of ancient societies. Includes the Chinchorro mummies of Chile, Ötzi the Iceman, headless men and giant wolves from a Mesolithic cemetery in Siberia, burials from Han dynasty China, bog bodies from Denmark, and many others.

New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women's unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies.

Written by leading experts in the fields of ancient history and art history, women's studies, and Greek and Roman literature, the book's chronological arrangement allows the changing roles of women to unfold over a thousand year period, beginning in the eighth century B.C.E. The authors seek out literature that preserves women's own voices. Both the art and the literature highlight women's creativity, sexuality and coming of age, marriage and childrearing, religious and public roles, and other themes. Fascinating chapters probe revealing aspects of the classical world: the ubiquitous reports of wild behavior on the part of Spartan and Etruscan women and the mythical Amazons; the changing views of the female body presented in male-authored gynecological treatises; the "new woman" represented by the love poetry of the late Republic and Augustan Age; and the traces of upper and lower-class life in Pompeii, miraculously preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.

This volume gathers eighty articles on mythologies from around the world. A section on the Americas and the South Pacific covers myths of native Americans, from the Inuit to the Mesoamericans, about such topics as the cosmos, fire, and the creation of the world. Essays on African mythology range from the 266 basic signs of West Africa to themes such as twins, the placenta, and masks. The final section, covering Celtic, Norse, and Slavic traditions opens with an overview of the Indo-Europeans and concludes with an essay on the religion and myths of Armenia.

n the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Now, Karen Armstrong reveals how the sages of this pivotal "Axial Age" can speak clearly and helpfully to the violence and desperation that we experience in our own times. The Axial Age faiths began in recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. There was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. The traditions of the Axial Age were not about dogma--all insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering.

From tales of chivalry and valor to the barbarity of the Inquisition and the devastation of the plague, no era has been a greater source of fascination and horror than the Middle Ages. With extraordinarily crafted prose, acclaimed historian William Manchester takes us on a vividly painted journey into the medieval mind. We travel from the depths of the Dark Ages to the heights of the rebirth that spawned some of history's greatest artists and thinkers--and that eventually ushered the West into the brilliance of the Renaissance. For Manchester, the man who best epitomized this new quest for knowledge in a changing world was Ferdinand Magellan, the great circumnavigator, whose inspiring story Manchester dramatically recounts, along with the stories of countless medieval men and women from every walk of life who influenced and changed the course of history.

Concrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shape-shifters. In an inspired refashioning of architectural history, Edward Hollis recounts more than a dozen stories of such metamorphosis, highlighting the way in which even the most familiar structures all change over time into “something rich and strange.

The names of James Joyce and Ezra Pound ring out in the annals of literary modernism--that of Samuel Roth, less so. A Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, Roth attended Columbia University and both wrote and published poetry. In the 1920s he founded literary and men's magazines. He publishedselections from foreign novels-including the risque parts, and without permission. When he reprinted segments of Ulysses, James Joyce took him to court. Their battle, writes Robert Spoo, influenced both American copyright law and modernism itself. Spoo, professor of law at the University of Tulsa and former editor of James Joyce Quarterly, tells the story in Without Copyrights. From its inception in 1790, he writes, American copyright law offered noor less-than-perfect protection for works published abroad - to the fury of Charles Dickens, among others, who often received no money from sales in the United States. American publishers avoided ruinous competition with each other through "courtesy of the trade," a code of etiquette that gaveinformal, exclusive rights to the first house to announce plans to issue a foreign work. American piracy and copyright law deeply affected transatlantic modernist writers. Spoo draws on previously unknown legal archives to recount Joyce's lawsuit, his campaign to discredit Roth through an international protest, and efforts to free Ulysses from an obscenity ban that prevented alegitimate release by an American publisher. Ezra Pound plays a role in the story with his attempts to reform U.S. copyright law, as does Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House, who finally issued an authorized edition of Ulysses in 1934, reviving trade courtesy to protect it from pirates. More thanthe tale of one book, Without Copyrights offers a new look at the history of the American public domain, a commons shaped by custom as much as by law, and of piracy's crucial role in literary history.

Ludlow and journalist Wallace, the editor of a highly acclaimed blog (3pointD.com), trace the trajectory of a "virtual tabloid" that deals with many issues now confronting virtual worlds like The Sims Online and Second Life, such as ethical responsibilities of the service providers, rights of the avatar, virtual crime, intellectual property abuses, and, of course, cybersex. This journalistic work has met with stiff opposition from some of the corporations that host these virtual worlds, and Ludlow and Wallace are more than happy to comment on their tribulations, including being banned from The Sims Online. This is an effort to bring an understanding of online culture to the general public.