Ancient Greece and Rome

Ancient Greece and Rome
Author: Keith Hopwood
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780719024016

Sir Thomas Fairfax, not Oliver Cromwell, was creator and commander of Parliament's New Model Army from 1645 to1650. Although Fairfax emerged as England's most successful commander of the 1640s, this book challenges the orthodoxy that he was purely a military figure, showing how he was not apolitical or disinterested in politics. The book combines narrative and thematic approaches to explore the wider issues of popular allegiance, puritan religion, concepts of honour, image, reputation, memory, gender, literature, and Fairfax's relationship with Cromwell. 'Black Tom' delivers a groundbreaking examination of the transformative experience of the English revolution from the viewpoint of one of its leading, yet most neglected, participants. It is the first modern academic study of Fairfax, making it essential reading for university students as well as historians of the seventeenth century. Its accessible style will appeal to a wider audience of those interested in the civil wars and interregnum more generally.

African and Caribbean People in Britain

African and Caribbean People in Britain
Author: Hakim Adi
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2022-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1802060677

A major new history of Britain that transforms our understanding of this country's past 'I've waited so long so read a comprehensively researched book about Black history on this island. This is it: a journey of discovery and a truly exciting and important work' Zainab Abbas Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest. Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain's heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian's Wall while Rome's first 'African Emperor' died in York. In Elizabethan England, 'Black Tudors' served in the land's most eminent households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom - a struggle which raged throughout the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns. Charting a course through British history with an unobscured view of the actions of African and Caribbean people, Adi reveals how much our greatest collective achievements - universal suffrage, our victory over fascism, the forging of the NHS - owe to these men and women, and how, in understanding our history in these terms, we are more able to fully understand our present moment.

Rulers, Nomads, and Christians in Roman North Africa

Rulers, Nomads, and Christians in Roman North Africa
Author: Brent D. Shaw
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2024-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040231608

The studies collected in this volume cover three broad areas of the history of North Africa as part of the Roman Empire. Studies devoted to the history of 'political institutions' are followed by ones that detail aspects of interactions between nomad and sedentarist communities in the African provinces. The book concludes with two studies on African christianity. In all of these, special attention is given to the indigenous institutions, economies and beliefs that informed the confrontation between 'African' and 'Roman'. The studies in general argue for a strongly 'interactionist' approach to historians' reconstruction of the history of the period and the region - a perspective that would emphasise the continuous conflict between the two world of African and Roman.

Mediterranean Timescapes

Mediterranean Timescapes
Author: Ray Laurence
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2023-04-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351973851

This book, built around the study of the representation of age and identity in 23,000 Latin funerary epitaphs from the Western Mediterranean in the Roman era, sets out how the use of age in inscriptions, and in turn, time, varied across this region. Discrepancies between the use of time to represent identity in death allow readers to begin to understand the differences between the cultures of Roman Italy and contemporary societies in North Africa, Spain and southern Gaul. The analysis focuses on the timescapes of cemeteries, a key urban phenomenon, in relation to other markers of time, including the Roman invention of the birthday, the revering of the dead at the Parentalia and the topoi of life’s stages. In doing so, the book contributes to our understanding of gender, the city, the family, the role of the military, freed slaves and cultural changes during this period. The concept of the timescape is seen to have varied geographically across the Mediterranean, bringing into question claims of cultural unity for the Western Mediterranean as a region. Mediterranean Timescapes is of interest to students and scholars of Roman history and archaeology, particularly that of the Western Mediterranean, and ancient social history.

Tripolitania

Tripolitania
Author: David J. Mattingly
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135782830

"Lepcis Magna", one of the greatest of the Roman cities of North Africa and one of the most famous archaeological sites in the Mediterranean, was situated in the region of Tripolitania. Birthplace of the Emperor Septimius Severus, the city has yielded many well-preserved monuments from its Roman past. Mattingly presents valuable information on the pre-Roman tribal background, the urban centres, the military frontier and the regional economy. He reinterprets many aspects of the settlement history of this marginal arid zone that was once made prosperous, and considers the wider themes of Romanization, frontier military strategy, and economic links between provinces and sources of elite wealth.

Christians in Caesar’s Household

Christians in Caesar’s Household
Author: Michael Flexsenhar III
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-02-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 027108409X

In this volume, Michael Flexsenhar III advances the argument that imperial slaves and freedpersons in the Roman Empire were essential to early Christians’ self-conception as a distinct people in the Mediterranean and played a multifaceted role in the making of early Christianity. Scholarship in early Christianity has for centuries viewed Roman emperors’ slaves and freedmen as responsible for ushering Christianity onto the world stage, traditionally using Paul’s allusion to “the saints from Caesar’s household” in Philippians 4:22 as a core literary lens. Merging textual and material evidence with diaspora and memory studies, Flexsenhar expands on this narrative to explore new and more nuanced representations of this group, showing how the long-accepted stories of Christian slaves and freepersons in Caesar’s household should not be taken at face value but should instead be understood within the context of Christian myth- and meaning-making. Flexsenhar analyzes textual and material evidence from the first to the sixth century, spanning Roman Asia, the Aegean rim, Gaul, and the coast of North Africa as well as the imperial capital itself. As a result, this book shows how stories of the emperor’s slaves were integral to key developments in the spread of Christianity, generating origin myths in Rome and establishing a shared history and geography there, differentiating and negotiating assimilation with other groups, and expressing commemorative language, ritual acts, and a material culture. With its thoughtful critical readings of literary and material sources and its fresh analysis of the lived experiences of imperial slaves and freedpersons, Christians in Caesar’s Household is indispensable reading for scholars of early Christianity, the origins of religion, and the Roman Empire.

Herodotus, Explorer of the Past

Herodotus, Explorer of the Past
Author: James Allan Stewart Evans
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400861853

Why does a power expand and become an empire? Writing in the early years of the Peloponnesian War, Herodotus gave Athens full credit for saving Greece from Persia, but also identified the city's expansion as a new manifestation of imperialist aggression. In this skillful analysis of Herodotus' intellectual world, J.A.S. Evans combines historical, anthropological, and literary techniques to show how the war affected not only the great thinker's view of Persian aggression and of the people involved in it but also the shape of the Histories themselves. The first essay discusses Herodotus' investigation of imperialism, and the second finds the beginnings of biography in his descriptions of individuals, particularly in his well-crafted portrait of Cyrus. The third essay describes the "Father of History" as a collector and evaluator of local oral stories, sources for the written work that was destined by its scope and unifying plan to introduce a new genre. Evans draws analogies between Herodotus' methods and those of oral historians in other cultures, particularly in precolonial Africa. He also explores comparisons between Herodotus in Egypt and sixteenth-and seventeenth-century European ethnologists in the Americas. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.