Today's (2/8/2010) New Book Releases on History

• Presents an innovative approach to Native American history by placing individual native communities and their experiences at the center of the study
• Following a first chapter that deals with creation myths, the remainder of the narrative is structured chronologically, covering over 600 years from the point of first contact to the present day
• Illustrates the great diversity in American Indian culture and emphasizes the importance of Native Americans in the history of North America
• Provides an excellent survey for courses in Native American history
• Includes maps, photographs, a timeline, questions for discussion, and “A Closer Focus” textboxes that provide biographies of individuals and that elaborate on the text,  exposing students to issues of race, class, and gender

The Archaeology of Britain is the only concise and up-to-date introduction to the archaeological record of Britain from the reoccupation of the landmass by Homo sapiens during the later stages of the most recent Ice Age until last century. This fully revised second edition extends its coverage, including greater detail on the first millennium AD beyond the Anglo-Saxon domain, and into recent times to look at the archaeological record produced by Britain’s central role in two World Wars and the Cold War.

The chapters are written by experts in their respective fields. Each is geared to provide an authoritative but accessible introduction, supported by numerous illustrations of key sites and finds and a selective reference list to aid study in greater depth. It provides a one-stop textbook for the entire archaeology of Britain and reflects the most recent developments in archaeology both as a field subject and as an academic discipline.

No other book provides such comprehensive coverage, with such a wide chronological range, of the archaeology of Britain. This collection is essential reading for undergraduates in archaeology, and all those interested in British archaeology, history and geography

The campstead is an American institution. After the Civil War, with neo-colonialism, environmentalism, and arts-and-crafts on the rise, some families sought rural locations for rustic camps. There they raised their children in the summertime. Around Squam Lake, after some eight generations, twenty-one such camps remain in these families.

The Squam area thus becomes a natural place to study relationships of persons and places, families and landscape, and humans and the world. Our present concerns for environmental stewardship, open space protection, and core values instead of consumerism, make this a good time to revisit the simple American Campstead.

Rustic camping itself revisited aspects of the American frontier. Just as the western frontier was disappearing, some families resorted to remnants of the first frontier among mountains and lakes of the Northeast. Through campsteads, these families preserved elements of the frontier ethos. Campsteads facilitate particular experiences involving nature and family. Brereton investigates campstead experience, and through it the nature of human experience generally.

This book is the first detailed account of campsteading, the first application of critical realism in anthropology, and the first anthropological use of John Dewey's evolutionary model of experience. Building on Dewey, the author further analyses experience into its levels, orders, and features. 

• Presents an innovative approach to Native American history by placing individual native communities and their experiences at the center of the study
• Following a first chapter that deals with creation myths, the remainder of the narrative is structured chronologically, covering over 600 years from the point of first contact to the present day
• Illustrates the great diversity in American Indian culture and emphasizes the importance of Native Americans in the history of North America
• Provides an excellent survey for courses in Native American history
• Includes maps, photographs, a timeline, questions for discussion, and “A Closer Focus” textboxes that provide biographies of individuals and that elaborate on the text,  exposing students to issues of race, class, and gender

• Written by a panel of international experts
• Focuses on religious life as it was experienced by Greek men and women at different times and in different places
• Features major sections on local religious systems, sacred spaces and ritual, and the divine

• Highlights recent developments, including archaeological discoveries, fresh approaches to textual sources, and the opening up of new areas of historical study
• Retains the drama of the Republic’s rise and fall
• Emphasizes not just the evidence of texts and physical remains, but also the models and assumptions that scholars bring to these artefacts
• Looks at the role played by the physical geography and environment of Italy
• Offers a compact but detailed narrative of military and political developments from the birth of the Roman Republic through to the death of Julius Caesar
• Discusses current controversies in the field

• Presents evidence from across the ages; from antiquity through to the Age of Discovery
• Provides cross-cultural comparison of ancient societies around the globe, from the Chinese to the Incas and Aztecs, from the Greeks and Romans to the peoples of ancient India
• Explores newly discovered medieval Islamic materials
  

The assassination of Julius Caesar is one of the most notorious murders in history. Two thousand years after it occurred, many compelling questions remain about his death: Was Brutus the hero and Caesar the villain? Did Caesar bring death on himself by planning to make himself king of Rome? Was Mark Antony aware of the plot, and let it go forward? Who wrote Antony's script after Caesar's death? Using historical evidence to sort out these and other puzzling issues, historian and award-winning author Stephen Dando-Collins takes you to the world of ancient Rome and recaptures the drama of Caesar's demise and the chaotic aftermath as the vicious struggle for power between Antony and Octavian unfolded. For the first time, he shows how the religious festivals and customs of the day impacted on the way the assassination plot unfolded. He shows, too, how the murder was almost avoided at the last moment.

A compelling history that is packed with intrigue and written with the pacing of a first-rate mystery, The Ides will challenge what you think you know about Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire.

In this original study, Milne moves between close readings of letters, postcards and emails, and investigations of the material, technological infrastructures of these forms, to answer the question: How does presence function as an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy within networked communication practices? As her work reveals, the relation between old and new communication systems is more complex than allowed in much contemporary media theory.

Although the correspondents of letters, postcards and emails are not, usually, present to one another as they write and read their exchanges, this does not necessarily inhibit affective communication. Indeed, this study demonstrates how physical absence may, in some instances, provide correspondents with intense intimacy and a spiritual, almost telepathic, sense of the other’s presence. While corresponding by letter, postcard or email, readers construe an imaginary, incorporeal body for their correspondents that, in turn, reworks their interlocutor’s self-presentation. In this regard the fantasy of presence reveals a key paradox of cultural communication, namely that material signifiers can be used to produce the experience of incorporeal presence.

• A comprehensive introduction and overview of the classical tradition - the interpretation of classical texts in later centuries
• Comprises 26 newly commissioned essays from an international team of experts
• Divided into three sections: a chronological survey, a geographical survey, and a section illustrating the connections between the classical tradition and contemporary theory

The letters he sent her are snapshots of the ups and downs, the crises and everyday minutiae from Heidegger’s life: their engagement, the building of the Cabin at Todtnauberg, the part he played in the two world wars, the difficulties of his early professional career, their financial problems, his dealings with women, and his constant concern with expounding his ideas.

Apart from three letters now in the hands of the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Elfride Heidegger kept all of the countless letters and cards from her husband locked away in a wooden chest. After reading them one final time, in 1977 she gave the key to this chest to her granddaughter Gertrud Heidegger on condition that she should not open it until after Elfride’s death. After years spent deciphering, transcribing and ordering the letters with the help of her father and her uncle, Gertrud Heidegger has here made a selection of them available to the public and added a commentary that provides relevant background material.

This selection from the many letters written by Martin Heidegger to his wife provides an invaluable insight into their life together, their friendships and relationships, and sheds fresh light on the ideas and beliefs of one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers.

That ‘poor law was law’ is a fact that has slipped from the consciousness of historians of welfare in England and Wales, and in North America. Welfare's Forgotten Past remedies this situation by tracing the history of the legal right of the settled poor to relief when destitute. Poor law was not simply local custom, but consisted of legal rights, duties and obligations that went beyond social altruism. This legal ‘truth’ is, however, still ignored or rejected by some historians, and thus ‘lost’ to social welfare policy makers. This forgetting or minimising of a legal, enforceable right to relief has not only led to a misunderstanding of welfare’s past; it has also contributed to the stigmatisation of poverty, and the emergence and persistence of the idea that its relief is a 'gift' from the state.

Documenting the history and the effects of this forgetting, whilst also providing a ‘legal’ history of welfare, Lorie Charlesworth argues that it is timely for social policy-makers and reformists - in Britain, the United States and elsewhere - to reconsider an alternative welfare model, based on the more positive, legal aspects of welfare’s 400-year legal history.

This definitive Reader presents a coherent, comprehensive, comparative, and much-needed collective history of women’s activism throughout the world.
 
Including key pieces on the history of feminism from an international group of scholars, the book charts feminists’ attempts to restore a balance of power between the sexes against a backdrop of huge cultural, social and political transitions across the world. The collection covers the period from the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 – a turning point that gave rise to practical efforts to embody principles of rights, liberty, and equality on behalf of women as well as men – up until the end of World War II. The chapters reach out well beyond Europe and the Americas to examine the history of feminisms in Japan, India, China, the Middle East and Australasia. 
 
This diverse body of material is drawn together through a comprehensive general introduction, and individual section introductions. The chapters are also supported by a global timeline of events, and there is a bibliography of further reading. 
 
Contributors include Padma Anagol, Marilyn J. Boxer, Jacqueline R. DeVries, Ellen Carol DuBois, Louise Edwards, Ellen L. Fleischmann, Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Patricia Grimshaw, Inger Hammar, Nancy Hewitt, Francesca Miller, Barbara Molony, Karen Offen, Florence Rochefort, Leila J. Rupp, Sandra Stanley Holton, Anne Summers, Ann Taylor Allen, Angela Woollacott and Susan Zimmermann.