Exploring the significant influences of Turkish dress on French fashion While French fashion has historically set the bar across the Western world, the cultural influences that inspired it are often obscured. Dressing a la Turque examines the theatrical depictions of Ottoman costumes, or Turkish dress, and demonstrates the French fascination ......
The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction
Allen W. Trelease's White Terror, originally published in 1971, was the first scholarly history of the Ku Klux Klan in the South during Reconstruction. With its research rooted in primary sources, it remains among the most comprehensive treatments of the subject. In addition to the Klan, Trelease discusses other night-riding groups, including the ......
Explores the western European idea of the witches' sabbath, based on translations of five texts dating from the 1430s, and examines how these texts went on to influence conceptions of diabolical witchcraft for centuries to come.
The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627
In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs raided Iceland, killing dozens of people and abducting close to four hundred to sell into slavery in North Africa. Among those taken were the Lutheran minister Reverend Olafur Egilsson. Reverend Olafur (born in the same year as William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei) wrote The Travels to chronicle his ......
Two of the world's leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagun's monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagun's Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished ......
Two of the world's leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagun's monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagun's Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished ......
Slavery and Political Conflict in the British Atlantic World
How American slavery engendered a new political vocabulary used on both sides of the Atlantic How is it, Samuel Johnson famously asked on the eve of the Revolution, that Americans could so vociferously demand freedom for themselves while so conspicuously continuing to deny it to those they held in slavery? With Seeking the High Ground, Matthew ......
The Early Influence of Jewish Thought in the New World
Explores the influence of Kabbalah in shaping America's religious identity In 1688, a leading Quaker thinker and activist in what is now New Jersey penned a letter to one of his closest disciples concerning Kabbalah, or what he called the mystical theology of the Jews. Around that same time, one of the leading Puritan ministers developed a ......