Abraham's Luggage

Abraham's Luggage

Author: Elizabeth Lambourn

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1107173884

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A single, unique document - a list of one merchant's baggage - is the starting point used to bring to life the twelfth-century Indian Ocean. Drawing connections between material culture, foodstuffs and the construction of identity, Lambourn examines notions of home and mobility at a key moment in world history.


Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade

Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade

Author: Roxani Eleni Margariti

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1469606712

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Positioned at the crossroads of the maritime routes linking the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the Yemeni port of Aden grew to be one of the medieval world's greatest commercial hubs. Approaching Aden's history between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries through the prism of overseas trade and commercial culture, Roxani Eleni Margariti examines the ways in which physical space and urban institutions developed to serve and harness the commercial potential presented by the city's strategic location. Utilizing historical and archaeological methods, Margariti draws together a rich variety of sources far beyond the normative and relatively accessible legal rulings issued by Islamic courts of the time. She explores environmental, material, and textual data, including merchants' testimonies from the medieval documentary repository known as the Cairo Geniza. Her analysis brings the port city to life, detailing its fortifications, water supply, harbor, customs house, marketplaces, and ship-building facilities. She also provides a broader picture of the history of the city and the ways merchants and administrators regulated and fostered trade. Margariti ultimately demonstrates how port cities, as nodes of exchange, communication, and interconnectedness, are crucial in Indian Ocean and Middle Eastern history as well as Islamic and Jewish history.


Tonne Goodman: Point of View

Tonne Goodman: Point of View

Author: Tonne Goodman

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1683355091

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Throughout her illustrious career, Tonne Goodman has made the famous stylish and the stylish famous. The Vogue fashion director has not only shaped the way women dress and see themselves, but she has also created a nexus in which the worlds of celebrity and style continually collide. Now, in Point of View, Goodman’s life and career are explored for the first time. Organized chronologically, this book charts Goodman’s career from her modeling days, to her freelance fashion reportage, to her editorial and advertising work, through to her reign at Vogue. The editor’s recollections of some of the world’s greatest photographers, models, celebrities, and designers of our time are illustrated throughout, with behind-the-scenes fashion photos and shots of Goodman’s personal life.


A Late Mamluk Medical Regimen for Travellers

A Late Mamluk Medical Regimen for Travellers

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-10-24

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 9004708200

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The fifteenth-century travel regimen entitled al-Isfār ʿan ḥikam al-asfār (‘The unveiling of the wisdoms of the books’) written by the Cairene jurist-physician Ibn al-Amshāṭī (d. 1496) is an interesting example of the postclassical medical literature. It includes, besides a travel regimen (written likely as a health guide for the pilgrimage to Mecca), a short pharmacopoeia of single and compound remedies deemed useful for the traveller. The work was composed for Kamāl al-Dīn al-Bārizī (d. 1452), the head of the Mamluk Chancery. The Arabic edition, English translation, and commentary of this text are framed by a detailed introductory study of the Arabic-language tradition of travel regimens and various medico-pharmacological glossaries.


Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World

Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World

Author: Gregory T. Cushman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-03-25

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1107004136

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This book traces the history of bird guano, demonstrating how this unique commodity helped unite the Pacific Basin with the industrialized world.


I Am Abraham

I Am Abraham

Author: Jerome Charyn

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2015-02-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1631490028

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Jerome Charyn’s “daring” and “memorable” (The New Yorker) historical novel renders the inner life of our sixteenth president like never before. This unforgettable portrait of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War effortlessly mixes humor with Shakespearean-like tragedy to create an achingly human portrait of the sixteenth president. Charyn conducts an orchestra of historical figures and fictional extras centered around a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and his sons—Robert, Willie, and Tad—is explored with penetrating psychological insight and the utmost compassion. Seized by melancholy and imbued with an unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln comes to vibrant, three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait we have rarely seen in historical fiction.


Two Families At War

Two Families At War

Author: David Lowther

Publisher: Sacristy Press

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1908381167

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A gripping WWII thriller set in London during the blitz. As the bombs begin to fall on London, the paths of two families cross with tragic consequences as their lives race towards a dangerous and thrilling climax. Two Families at War tells of the battle between good and evil, set against the terror of the second Great Fire of London, December 1940.


Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean

Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean

Author: Jessica L. Goldberg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-23

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1139560468

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The Geniza merchants of the eleventh-century Mediterranean - sometimes called the 'Maghribi traders' - are central to controversies about the origins of long-term economic growth and the institutional bases of trade. In this book, Jessica Goldberg reconstructs the business world of the Geniza merchants, maps the shifting geographic relationships of the medieval Islamic economy and sheds new light on debates about the institutional framework for later European dominance. Commercial letters, business accounts and courtroom testimony bring to life how these medieval traders used personal gossip and legal mechanisms to manage far-flung agents, switched business strategies to manage political risks and asserted different parts of their fluid identities to gain advantage in the multicultural medieval trading world. This book paints a vivid picture of the everyday life of Jewish merchants in Islamic societies and adds new depth to debates about medieval trading institutions with unique quantitative analyses and innovative approaches.


Chike and the River

Chike and the River

Author: Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: 2011-08-09

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 0307473864

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After an 11-year-old Nigerian boy leaves his small village to live with his uncle in the city, he is exposed to a range of new experiences and becomes fascinated with crossing the Niger River on a ferry boat.


The Lost Archive

The Lost Archive

Author: Marina Rustow

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 620

ISBN-13: 0691189528

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A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentation The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer. Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper’s westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to understand preindustrial documentary ecology. Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artifacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.