Encyclopedia of African American History 3 volumes
Encyclopedia of African American History introduces readers to the significant people, events, sociopolitical movements, and ideas that have shaped African American life from earliest contact between African peoples and Europeans through the late 20th century. The encyclopedia places the African American experience in the context of the entire African diaspora, with entries organized in sections on African/European contact and enslavement, culture, resistance and identity during enslavement, political activism from the Revolutionary War to Southern emancipation, political activism from Reconstruction to the modern Civil Rights movement, black nationalism and urbanization, and
Why does truth matter, when politicians so easily sidestep it and intellectuals scorn it as irrelevant? Why be concerned over an abstract idea like truth when something that isn't true gets the desired result?
In this engaging and spirited book, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. Lynch explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is
This is a thorough and original study of German knighthood as a class in its medieval heyday. Arnold draws on a rich array of descriptive detail from the lives of individual knights, their families, and various groups to examine knightly customs and practices, the impact of knighthood in the political world of the German Empire, and the curious status of most knights as at once noble and unfree. These unfree knights, argues Arnold, were above all professional warriors in an empire where violence for political ends prevailed--a harsh reality that dictated the structure and development of their class.
What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men—and occasionally women—who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques, inventions, and cures, these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons, who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time, satirists, artists, and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europe’s social and economic ills.
The King's Body - Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Since the 18th century, political theory has focused on the making of the state rather than on the role of the king or sovereign as political ruler. Relying on minute details and exhaustive research, Bertelli, a historian at the University of Florence, demonstrates that from the early Middle Ages up through the 17th century the centrality of the sovereign provided the key element in maintaining the order of society. Societies thought of their kings as divine. The king's body thus became the ground where the sacred and the profane, the supernatural and the natural intersected. Consequently, Bertelli argues, rituals developed emphasizing the divine sovereignty of the king.
