What makes a person a witch? For those living in sixteenth century Scotland the very word witch is terrifying. Everyone is afraid of witches, both to be accused of one, and to be cursed by one. In a series of events beyond their control one family faces their ultimate fear and the consequences they can't escape. The very idea of witchcraft becomes all too real for the Dalais family. Caitrìona Dalais Guaire, Sorcha Dalais Creag, and Niall Dalais are torn from their homes and put on trial. Their very lives are at stake, and everything points to their eventual demise. In an act of desperation one of them arranges for the children to be secreted away to safety. Only time will tell if they are successful and if their legacy will live on…
Situating Derrida's engagement with Freud vis-à-vis key contemporaries such as Lévi-Strauss and Foucault, this title uses close analysis of a range of primary texts to show how Derrida reshaped Freud's insights in the very different intellectual context of post-war France.
Shlapentokh undertakes a dispassionate analysis of the ordinary functioning of the Soviet system from Stalin's death through the Soviet collapse and Russia's first post-communist decade. Without overlooking its repressive character, he treats the USSR as a "normal" system that employed both socialist and nationalist ideologies for the purposes of technological and military modernization, preservation of empire, and expansion of its geopolitical power. Foregoing the projection of Western norms and assumptions, he seeks to achieve a clearer understanding of a civilization that has perplexed its critics and its champions alike.
The civilisation of medieval Muslim Spain is perhaps the most brilliant and prosperous of its age and has been essential to the direction which civilisation in medieval Europe took. This volume is the first ever in any language to deal in a really comprehensive manner with all major aspects of Islamic civilisation in medieval Spain.
Harvard’s searing and sobering indictment of its own long-standing relationship with chattel slavery and anti-Black discrimination. In recent years, scholars have documented extensive relationships between American higher education and slavery. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard adds Harvard University to the long list of institutions, in the North and the South, entangled with slavery and its aftermath. The report, written by leading researchers from across the university, reveals hard truths about Harvard’s deep ties to Black and Indigenous bondage, scientific racism, segregation, and other forms of oppression. Between the university’s founding in 1636 and 1783, when slavery officially ended in Massachusetts, Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff enslaved at least seventy people, some of whom worked on campus, where they cared for students, faculty, and university presidents. Harvard also benefited financially and reputationally from donations by slaveholders, slave traders, and others whose fortunes depended on human chattel. Later, Harvard professors and the graduates they trained were leaders in so-called race science and eugenics, which promoted disinvestment in Black lives through forced sterilization, residential segregation, and segregation and discrimination in education. No institution of Harvard’s scale and longevity is a monolith. Harvard was also home to abolitionists and pioneering Black thinkers and activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Eva Beatrice Dykes. In the late twentieth century, the university became a champion of racial diversity in education. Yet the past cannot help casting a long shadow on the present. Harvard’s motto, Veritas, inscribed on gates, doorways, and sculptures all over campus, is an exhortation to pursue truth. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard advances that necessary quest.
This book explores the legacies of the genocide of Roma in Europe after the end of the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of people labelled as ‘Gypsies’ were persecuted or killed in Nazi Germany and across occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945. In many places, discrimination continued after the war was over. The chapters in this volume ask how these experiences shaped the lives of Romani survivors and their families in eastern and western Europe since 1945. This book will appeal to researchers and students in Modern European History, Romani Studies, and the history of genocide and the Holocaust.
Libman and Obydenkova reveal how legacies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) have survived in the politics, economic development, culture, and society of post-Communist regions in the 21st Century. The authors show how this impact is not driven by Communist ideology but by the clientelistic practices, opportunism and cynicism prevalent in the CPSU. Their study is built on a novel dataset of the CPSU membership rates in Russian regions in the 1950s-1980s, alongside case studies, interviews and an analysis of mass media previously only available in Russian and discussed here in English for the first time. It will appeal to students and scholars of Russian and Eastern European politics and history, and anyone who wants to better understand countries which live or have lived through Communism: from Eastern Europe to China and East Asian Communist states.
Who are the Jews--a race, a people, a religious group? For over a century, non-Jews and Jews alike have tried to identify who they were--first applying the methods of physical anthropology and more recently of population genetics. In Legacy, Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist and authority on the genetics of the Jewish people, explores not only the history of these efforts, but also the insights that genetics has provided about the histories of contemporary Jewish people. Much of the book is told through the lives of scientific pioneers. We meet Russian immigrant Maurice Fishberg; Australian Joseph Jacobs, the leading Jewish anthropologist in fin-de-siècle Europe; Chaim Sheba, a colorful Israeli geneticist and surgeon general of the Israeli Army; and Arthur Mourant, one of the foremost cataloguers of blood groups in the 20th century. As Ostrer describes their work and the work of others, he shows that to look over the genetics of Jewish groups, and to see the history of the Diaspora woven there, is truly a marvel. Here is what happened as the Jews migrated to new places and saw their numbers wax and wane, as they gained and lost adherents and thrived or were buffeted by famine, disease, wars, and persecution. Many of these groups--from North Africa, the Middle East, India--are little-known, and by telling their stories, Ostrer brings them to the forefront at a time when assimilation is literally changing the face of world Jewry. A fascinating blend of history, science, and biography, Legacy offers readers an entirely fresh perspective on the Jewish people and their history. It is as well a cutting-edge portrait of population genetics, a field which may soon take its place as a pillar of group identity alongside shared spirituality, shared social values, and a shared cultural legacy.
