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Writing down the epic tales of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus in texts that became the Iliad and the Odyssey was a defining moment in the intellectual history of the West, a moment from which many current conventions and attitudes toward books can be traced. But how did texts originally written on papyrus in perhaps the eighth century BC survive across nearly three millennia, so that today people can read them electronically on a smartphone?
“Classics...
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During the Golden Age of Islam, in the seventh through seventeenth centuries A. D., Muslim philosophers and poets, artists and scientists, princes and laborers created a unique culture that has influenced societies on every continent. This book offers a fully illustrated, highly accessible introduction to an important aspect of that culture: the scientific achievements of medieval Islam.
Howard Turner, who curated the subject for a major traveling...
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Embarking on a unique study of Roman criminal law, Judy Gaughan has developed a novel understanding of the nature of social and political power dynamics in republican government. Revealing the significant relationship between political power and attitudes toward homicide in the Roman republic, “Murder Was Not a Crime” describes a legal system through which families (rather than the government) were given the power to mete out punishment for murder.
With...
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The history of the United States is often told as a movement westward, beginning at the Atlantic coast and following farmers across the continent. But cities played an equally important role in the country's formation. Towns sprung up along the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, as Spaniards and Englishmen took Indian land and converted it into private property. In this reworking of early American history, Mary P. Ryan shows how cities-specifically...
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Based on official Spanish expedition diaries, a fascinating account of the daily routes taken and the Indigenous tribes, terrain, and wildlife encountered.
Mapping old trails has a romantic allure at least as great as the difficulty involved in doing it. In this book, William Foster produces the first highly accurate maps of the eleven Spanish expeditions from northeastern Mexico into what is now East Texas during the years 1689 to 1768.
Foster...
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Nine lectures from the 1971 symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, on music history, theory and composition, education, and performance.
Ranging from the Middle Ages to the present and touching on all the major disciplines of musicology, the nine papers collected in this volume constitute a broad overview of the direction of music scholarship in the 1970s.
In "Tractatus Esthetico-Semioticus: Model of the Systems of Human Communication,"...
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The first history of slavery in this key Middle Eastern country and how it shaped the nation's unique character.
Slavery in the Middle East is a growing field of study, but the history of slavery in a key country, Iran, has never before been written. This history extends to Africa in the west and India in the east, to Russia and Turkmenistan in the north, and to the Arab states in the south. As the slave trade between Iran and these regions shifted...
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This social history of the common British soldier in the American Revolution dispels myths and sheds new light on who fought for the Crown-and why.
In this extensive study, Sylvia Frey surveys recruiting records, contemporary training manuals, statutes, and memoirs to provide insight into the soldier's "life and mind." In the process she reveals a great deal about the common soldier: his social origins and occupational background, his size, age, and...
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An "engaging" study of Machu Picchu's transformation from ruin to World Heritage site, and the role a National Geographic photo feature played (Latin American Research Review).
When Hiram Bingham, a historian from Yale University, first saw Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a ruin obscured by overgrowth whose terraces were farmed by a few families. A century later, Machu Picchu is a UNESCO World Heritage site visited by more than a million tourists annually....
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During the height of the Guatemalan civil war, Tomás Guzaro, a Mayan evangelical pastor, led more than two hundred fellow Mayas out of guerrilla-controlled Ixil territory and into the relative safety of the government army's hands. This exodus was one of the factors that caused the guerrillas to lose their grip on the Ixil, thus hastening the return of peace to the area. In Escaping the Fire, Guzaro relates the hardships common to most Mayas and...
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By the middle of the second century BCE, after nearly one hundred years of warfare, Rome had exerted its control over the entire Mediterranean world, forcing the other great powers of the region-Carthage, Macedonia, Egypt, and the Seleucid empire-to submit militarily and financially. But how, despite its relative poverty and its frequent numerical disadvantage in decisive battles, did Rome prevail? Michael J. Taylor explains this surprising outcome...
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When Michael Johns joined a Sandinista militia in 1983, a fellow revolutionary dubbed him a rábano, a radish: red on the outside but white on the inside. Now, more than twenty-five years later, Johns appreciates the wisdom of that label as he revisits the questions of identity he tried to resolve by working with the Sandinistas at that point in his life. In The Education of a Radical, Johns recounts his immersion in Marxism and the Nicaraguan sojourn...
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The author of Murder City and Down by the River reflects on the destructive nature of American culture.
Cultivated from the fierce ideas seeded in Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals is an elegiac reflection on death, pain, and a wavering confidence in humanity's own abilities for self-preservation. After years of reporting on border violence, sex crimes, and the devastation of the land, Bowden struggles to make sense of the many ways in which we destroy...
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The classic account of what day-to-day life was like for cowboys and pioneer families in the American West.
Born in a log cabin in 1879-Edward Everett Dale sought education and become a prolific and versatile professional writer-but always remained rooted in his close connection to the frontier. He lived in a sod house, and once rode the range as cook to a group of cowboys. His life experiences brought exceptional authenticity to his work, including...
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Against a backdrop of revolution, border banditry, freewheeling aerial dramatics, and World War II comes this compelling look at the rise of U.S. combat aviation at an unlikely proving ground-a remote airfield in the rugged reaches of the southwestern Texas borderlands. Here, at Elmo Johnson's Big Bend ranch, hundreds of young Army Air Corps pilots demonstrated the U.S. military's reconnaissance and emergency response capabilities and, in so doing,...
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What would Thanksgiving be without pecan pie? New Orleans without pecan pralines? But as familiar as the pecan is, most people don't know the fascinating story of how native pecan trees fed Americans for thousands of years until the nut was "improved" a little more than a century ago-and why that rapid domestication actually threatens the pecan's long-term future.
In The Pecan, the acclaimed author of Just Food and A Revolution in Eating explores...
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When Sam Houston crossed the Red River for the first time in 1832, he termed Texas the "finest portion of the Globe that has ever blessed my vision." He soon made it his "abiding place" and became a lifelong traveller in his adopted country. By carriage and muleback his diplomatic, military, political, and personal activities took him over what is now the eastern half of the state-and he fell in love with every foot of it. With panoramic vision and...
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Long overshadowed by the towering buildings of downtown San Antonio, the modest little Alamo still evokes tremendous feeling among Texans and, indeed, many other Americans. For Anglo Texans, the Alamo is the "Cradle of Texas Liberty" and a symbolic confirmation of Manifest Destiny. For Hispanic Texans, however, the Alamo has increasingly become a stolen symbol, its origin as a Spanish mission forgotten, its famous defeat used to exclude Hispanics...
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This illustrated history of the colorized linen postcards of the 1930s and '40s.
From the Great Depression through the early postwar years, any postcard sent in America was more than likely a "linen" card. Colorized in vivid, often exaggerated hues and printed on card stock embossed with a linen-like texture, linen postcards celebrated the American scene with views of majestic landscapes, modern cityscapes, roadside attractions, and other notable...
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The Gulf Coast has been a principal place of entry into Texas ever since Alonso Alvarez de Pineda explored these shores in 1519. Yet, nearly five hundred years later, the maritime history of Texas remains largely untold. In this book, Richard V. Francaviglia offers a comprehensive overview of Texas' merchant and military marine history, drawn from his own extensive collection of maritime history materials, as well as from research in libraries and...
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