x

History & Classics

Fifteen Eighty Four

Menu

Number of articles per page:

  • 8 Dec 2022
    Silhouette of the statue of liberty at sunset
    Salim Yaqub

    A New History of the United States since 1945

    Do we really need another post-1945 history of the United States? That was what I asked myself when a senior editor at Cambridge University Press approached me about writing Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States Since 1945 in 2017. After all, the academic publishing market already abounded with excellent survey texts covering […]

    Read More
  • 6 Dec 2022
    Adam R. Gaiser

    Thinking about Muslim Sects and Schools

    The Muslim community, known as the umma, is meant to be united. The Qur’an, in chapter 29, verse 92, states that “Indeed, this your umma is one umma, and I am your Lord; so worship Me.” Yet Muslims, just like Jews, Christians and other religious groups, divided into various communal divisions quite early in their […]

    Read More
  • 2 Dec 2022
    Cindy Ermus

    The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Society in the Eighteenth-Century World

    On May 12, 1720, health officials in Marseille wrote the gouverneur of the region of Provence in Paris requesting to expedite the construction of a new building for the local Bureau de la santé or Health Board. The structure that had stood there since 1660 was a bureau flotant—literally a floating office—that stood on the […]

    Read More
  • 23 Nov 2022
    Johan Fourie

    How do you win the World Cup?

    A year or so before South Africa hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup, a visiting professor gave a talk at a South African university. He asked a very simple question: How do you win a world cup? Do you, he continued, appoint a very expensive coach? This, in fact, was exactly what South Africa had […]

    Read More
  • 15 Nov 2022
    Andrew Hammond

    Modern Islamic Thought Through a Different Lens: Bringing the Late Ottomans Into the Story

    On November 17 my latest book is finally published and I just wanted to give a brief outline here of what it’s about. Titled Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought: Turkish and Egyptian Scholars on the Disruption of Islamic Knowledge, it starts off from a basic observation: if you read any of the histories of […]

    Read More
  • 8 Nov 2022
    Michael Brown

    When surgery really hurt

    ‘Detail of the manipulation of the scalpel in order to make incisions’ from J. M. Bourgery and N. H. Jacob, Atlas d’anatomie humaine et de chirurgie (1831-54), vol. 1, plate 15. Courtesy of Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark’.

    Read More
  • 4 Nov 2022
    James Grantham Turner

    When is a Villa like a Hawk?

    The Renaissance theorist and architect Leon Battista Alberti imagined houses as living beings: when they are happy they welcome you to their ‘bosom’, the central hall; when they are badly sited they feel humiliated, ‘enjoying no dignity’ and ‘taking no pleasure’. Gendered as feminine, the building loves to ‘gaze out’ at her surrounding landscape, ‘both […]

    Read More
  • 3 Nov 2022
    Anthi Andronikou

    Art before museums, galleries, the press, and the internet. How did artistic exchange work in the medieval Mediterranean?

    The medieval Mediterranean was a sea of exchange of cultures, religions, commodities, and worldviews. With a focus on monumental and panel painting, Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean probes issues of cultural transmission through a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. It is a product of almost ten years of research; it began as […]

    Read More

Number of articles per page:

Authors in History & Classics