Early History

What is sex exactly? Does everyone agree on a definition? And does that definition hold when considering literary production in other times and places? We cannot simply transfer our contemporary notions of what constitutes a sex act into the past and expect them to be true for the people who were then reading literature and watching plays.

The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this book explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson.

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the 20th century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars.

The early Church faced its share of villains - persecutors like Nero and Julian, heretics like Marcion and Arius. And what good were they? Plenty, say the Church fathers. The threat of persecution made Christians strong and bold. As noted author Mike Aquilina demonstrates in Villains of the Early Church: And How They Made Us Better Christians, the menace of heresy made Christians smarter - and deepened their knowledge of the divine mysteries. The villains of the ancient world proved the mettle of heroes like Peter and Paul, Irenaeus and Athanasius.

When Jesus sent 70 disciples on ahead of him, part of their mission was to heal the sick. In fact, they were supposed to heal the sick before they preached the Gospel. Best-selling author Mike Aquilina calls this command the healing imperative. And it's an imperative that ushered in the world of modern medicine. In The Healing Imperative: The Early Church and the Invention of Medicine as We Know It, Aquilina reconstructs the fascinating history of a uniquely Christian institution: the hospital.

The Reverend Joseph Julius Jackson was an African American preacher who published The History of the Black Man in 1921, a book which covers the history of the African people from Ethiopia and Egypt. Rev. Jackson believed that a lack of historical knowledge by the Afro American community about their past and origins has undermined their pride, and that a better knowledge of the contribution of the black man to civilization would ameliorate the situation.

When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind.

In Detestable and Wicked Arts, Paul B. Moyer places early New England's battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective. Moyer provides an accessible and comprehensive examination of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies that discusses how their English inhabitants understood the crime of witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting.

Der Beginn des modernen Europas war eine Zeit der Verwirrung, der Aufregung, der Verdächtigungen, der Hoffnung, der Verzweiflung und der Ideen. In wenigen hundert Jahren gab es tiefgreifende Veränderungen und das Ergebnis war eine Welt, die vollständig anders war als zuvor. Dieses Buch beschreibt Details des Übergangs vom Mittelalter zur frühen Neuzeit, in dem sich ganz Europa in verschiedenen Phasen bedeutenden Veränderungen gegenübersah.

Aaron Bank was an OSS Jedburgh in World War II and the subject of William Donovon's quote, "Tell Bank to get Hitler." He’d later become the inaugural commander of the 10th Special Forces Group earning the moniker, Father of the Green Berets. The development and use of unconventional warfare in WWII created a desire to develop permanent units for future wars.

In The Sum of Our Dreams, Louis P. Masur offers a sweeping yet compact history of America from its beginnings to the current moment. Evoking Barack Obama's belief that America remains the "sum of its dreams", Masur locates the origin of those dreams - of freedom, equality, and opportunity - and traces their progress chronologically, illuminating the nation's struggle over time to articulate and fulfill their promise.

Splendiferous Speech explores the main sources of the American vernacular - the expanding western frontier, the bumptious world of politics, and the sensation-filled pages of popular 19th-century newspapers. It's a process that started with the earliest English colonists (first word adoption - the Algonquian raccoon) and is still going strong today. Author Rosemarie Ostler takes listeners along on the journey as Americans learn to declare linguistic independence and embrace their own brand of speech.

The early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, and ruinous ignorance. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities.

While the majority of scholarship on early Washington focuses on its political and physical development, in Incidental Architect Gordon S. Brown describes the intellectual and social scene of the late 1700s through the lives of a prominent couple whose cultural aspirations served as both model and mirror for the city’s own.

Much of the contemporary discussion of the Jesus tradition has focused on aspects of oral performance, storytelling, and social memory, on the premise that the practice of communal reading of written texts was a phenomenon documented no earlier than the second century CE. Brian J. Wright overturns that premise by examining evidence that demonstrates communal reading events in the first century.

When Betty Robinson assumed the starting position at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, she was participating in what was only her fourth-ever organized track meet. She crossed the finish line as a gold medalist and the fastest woman in the world. This improbable athletic phenom was an ordinary high school student, discovered running for a train in rural Illinois mere months before her Olympic debut. Amsterdam made her a star.

In 1823, the History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson rattled Philadelphia society and became one of the most scandalous, and popular, memoirs of the age. This tale of a woman who tried to rescue her lover from the gallows and attempted to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania tantalized its audience with illicit love, betrayal, and murder.

The human species is relatively new to the planet in geologic terms. With origins reaching back only a few million years, the rise of humans from primate ancestors is a remarkable evolutionary success story. Early Humans traces the beginnings of the human species, its success and adaptability, and the development of such innovations as human language and culture.

John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, two leading experts on the nation’s roadside landscape, examine the crucial role that small- to mid-sized city hotels played in American life during the early decades of the 20th century, a time when the automobile was fast becoming the primary mode of transportation. Before the advent of the interstate system, such hotels served as commercial and social anchors of developing towns across the country. America’s Main Street Hotels provides a thorough survey of the impact these hotels had on their communities and cultures.

Larry was invited by the Navy Labor Board to work in Hawaii, while he took time off from Ohio State University, to earn the finances needed for his junior year. On his first Sunday morning in Oahu, he planned to meet with his brother, who was stationed at Pearl Harbor. Waiting there at the Navy Yard, Dry Dock No. 1, taking in the sights of the harbor and the USS Pennsylvania, the scene changed astonishingly as Pearl Harbor was brutally attacked before his own eyes.