This volume gathers together research by ten scholars engaging with multicultural discourse in Australia and Germany. The term 'polyculturalism' rather than 'multiculturalism' is employed deliberately to re-open a space in which the workings of discourse on culturally diverse societies, both as archive or practice, and as intervention, can be considered in greater depth.
Examines the forms that poverty takes around the world, its many causes, the serious negative consequences that it has for individuals and societies, and the effort to eliminate it.
Why did Cleopatra seduce Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, engulfing the Roman Empire in bloody civil war? What historical evidence substantiates tales of sexual rites in Babylonian temples? How could the Greek women who served the god Apollo at Delphi utter pronouncements that changed the course of history? Why has the story of the Amazons fascinated ancient and modern societies? This extensive and fascinating A-to-Z encyclopedia, illustrated with many rare and revealing images, tells the stories of the famous and the ordinary, treating subjects as diverse as...
A highly original and
ambitious approach to civilizations. Fernández-Armesto emphasizes the degree to
which control over the environment shapes the nature of civilizations. Blessed
with a gift for illuminating "total history" in books like
Millennium, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has become a fixture on the annual New
York Times Notables list, time and again proving himself a brilliantly original
and accessible historian. Now, with this breakthrough new work, he achieves a
masterful resolution to the riddle that has preoccupied centuries of state-of-the-art
thinkers: the nature of civilization. To the author, societies become civilized
by taming and warping nature. Civilizations can best be studied and ranked in
relation to their environments. Exploring seventeen distinct habitats -
including tundra societies of Ice Age Europe, bushmen of South Africa, and
island cultures of Polynesia - Civilizations zooms in on features that will be
familiar to any ecologist, but which actually reflect the quality of life and
source of survival in civilizations across ten millennia.
This book is the first to focus on war and peace in the ancient world from a global perspective. 19 distinguished scholars, all of whom are experts in their fields, discuss different aspects of this fascinating subject in relation to a large number of early civilizations, from China and India through West Asia (Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Hittites, Israel, Persia, and early Islam) to the Mediterranean (Greece, Rome, and early Christianity) and the Americas (the Aztecs and the Iroquois Peace League).
The book demonstrates that ancient societies, no less than modern ones, suffered from the losses and destructions caused by war, and yearned for peace and prosperity. It offers remarkable insights into the different responses ancient societies developed in order not only to defend their territory, but also to avoid war and restore peace. Some early societies, the volume reveals, even developed an explicit public discourse on war and peace, and embedded peace in an ideological or religious framework.
