When Scotland Was Jewish
When Scotland Was Jewish

Author: Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-05-07

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0786455225

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The popular image of Scotland is dominated by widely recognized elements of Celtic culture. But a significant non-Celtic influence on Scotland's history has been largely ignored for centuries? This book argues that much of Scotland's history and culture from 1100 forward is Jewish. The authors provide evidence that many of the national heroes, villains, rulers, nobles, traders, merchants, bishops, guild members, burgesses, and ministers of Scotland were of Jewish descent, their ancestors originating in France and Spain. Much of the traditional historical account of Scotland, it is proposed, rests on fundamental interpretive errors, perpetuated in order to affirm Scotland's identity as a Celtic, Christian society. A more accurate and profound understanding of Scottish history has thus been buried. The authors' wide-ranging research includes examination of census records, archaeological artifacts, castle carvings, cemetery inscriptions, religious seals, coinage, burgess and guild member rolls, noble genealogies, family crests, portraiture, and geographic place names.

Mapping Water in Dominica
Mapping Water in Dominica

Author: Mark W. Hauser

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2021-05-23

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0295748737

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Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/ 9780295748733 Dominica, a place once described as “Nature’s Island,” was rich in biodiversity and seemingly abundant water, but in the eighteenth century a brief, failed attempt by colonial administrators to replace cultivation of varied plant species with sugarcane caused widespread ecological and social disruption. Illustrating how deeply intertwined plantation slavery was with the environmental devastation it caused, Mapping Water in Dominica situates the social lives of eighteenth-century enslaved laborers in the natural history of two Dominican enclaves. Mark Hauser draws on archaeological and archival history from Dominica to reconstruct the changing ways that enslaved people interacted with water and exposes crucial pieces of Dominica’s colonial history that have been omitted from official documents. The archaeological record—which preserves traces of slave households, waterways, boiling houses, mills, and vessels for storing water—reveals changes in political authority and in how social relations were mediated through the environment. Plantation monoculture, which depended on both slavery and an abundant supply of water, worked through the environment to create predicaments around scarcity, mobility, and belonging whose resolution was a matter of life and death. In following the vestiges of these struggles, this investigation documents a valuable example of an environmental challenge centered around insufficient water. Mapping Water in Dominica is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Northwestern University Libraries.