This book provides a detailed analysis of Isidore of Seville's attitude towards Jews and Judaism. Starting out from his anti-Jewish work De fide catholica contra Iudaeos, the author puts Isidore's argument into the context of his entire literary production. Furthermore, he explores the place of Isidore's thinking within the contemporary situation of Visigothic Spain, investigating the political functionalization of religion, most particularly the forced baptisms ordered by King Sisebut, whose advisor Isidore was thought to have been. It becomes clear that Isidore's primary goal is to produce a new "Gothic" identity for the recently established Catholic "nation" of Visigothic Spain; to this end he uses anti-Jewish stereotypes inherited from the tradition of Catholic anti-Judaism.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was perhaps the most dramatic single event of the Cold War and a major turning point in history. Though it ended unsuccessfully, the spontaneous uprising of Hungarians against their country's Communist party and the Soviet occupation forces in the wake of Stalin's death demonstrated to the world at large the failure of Communism. In full view of the Western media—and therefore the world—the Russians were obliged to use force on a vast scale to subdue armed students, factory workers, and intellectuals in the streets of a major European capital. In October 1956, Michael Korda and three fellow Oxford undergraduates traveled to Budapest in a beat-up Volkswagen to bring badly needed medicine to the hospitals—and to participate, at street level, in one of the great battles of the postwar era. Journey to a Revolution is at once history and a compelling memoir—the author's riveting account of the course of the revolution, from its heroic beginnings to the sad martyrdom of its end.

“Scandal on the Turf!” the Los Angeles Times proclaimed. It was October 1940, a mere few months after Seabiscuit had won the Santa Anita Derby, and now this bombshell: “Six Jockeys Admit Horse Races Fixed.” The Gambler and the Bug Boy recounts this dark chapter in horse racing history. At its center is Bernard “Big” Mooney, a flashy L.A. bookmaker who began his seedy career by threatening young jockeys with death if they didn’t “pull” their horses. His unwilling partner is Albert Siler, a callow, eighteen-year-old apprentice rider (a so-called bug boy) from eastern Oregon. John Christgau tells how Big Mooney manipulated this promising rider and how Siler tried to escape the gambler’s criminal grip without ruining his career. Christgau's book gives all the harrowing details of the unraveling plot and the botched court case that followed which riveted the attention of the nation. Told in full for the first time, this story brings to light a little-known but important horse racing scandal.

The death penalty in classical Judaism has been a highly politicized subject in modern scholarship. Those wishing to defend the Talmud from Enlightenment attacks on its legitimacy pointed to Talmudic criminal law as evidence for its elevated, progressive morals. But even more pressing was the need to prove the Jews' innocence of the charge of being Christ-killers. This charge hinged on the reconstruction of the ancient Jewish death penalty. The Gospels show a corrupt Jewish court as responsible for the death of Christ. Contemporary Jewish scholars have argued that the Mishnah's criminal law is in fact rigorously just and even abolitionist with respect to the death penalty. In this book Beth Berkowitz tells the story of modern scholarship on the ancient rabbinic death penalty and continues the story by offering a fresh perspective using the approaches of ritual studies, cultural criticism, and talmudic source criticism. Against the scholarly consensus, Berkowitz argues that the rabbinic laws of the death penalty were used by the early Rabbis in their efforts to establish themselves in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. The purpose of the laws, she contends, was to create a complex ritual of execution that was controlled by the Rabbis, thus bolstering their claims to authority in the context of Roman imperial domination.

Since the earliest days of the Church, theologians have struggled to understand how humanity and divinity coexisted in the person of Christ. Proponents of the Arian heresy, which held that Jesus could not have been fully divine, found significant scriptural evidence of their position: Jesus wondered, questioned, feared, suffered, and prayed. The defenders of orthodoxy, such as Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan, Jerome, and Augustine, showed considerable ingenuity in explaining how these biblical passages could be reconciled with Christ's divinity. Medieval theologians such as Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure, also grappled with these texts when confronting the rising threat of Arian heresy. Like their predecessors, they too faced the need to preserve Jesus' authentic humanity and to describe a mode of experiencing the passions that cast no doubt upon the perfect divinity of the Incarnate Word. As Kevin Madigan demonstrates, however, they also confronted an additional obstacle. The medieval theologians had inherited from the Greek and Latin fathers a body of opinion on the passages in question, which by this time had achieved normative cultural status in the Christian tradition. However, the Greek and Latin fathers wrote in a polemical situation, responding to the threat to orthodoxy posed by the Arians. As a consequence, they sometimes found themselves driven to extreme and sometimes contradictory statements. These statements seemed to their medieval successors either to compromise the true divinity of Christ, his true humanity, or the possibility that the divine and human were in communication with or metaphysically linked to one another. As a result, medieval theologians also needed to demonstrate how two equally authoritative but apparently contradictory statements could be reconciled-to protect their patristic forebears from any doubt about their unanimity or the soundness of their orthodoxy. Examining the arguments that resulted from these dual pressures, Madigan finds that, under the guise of unchanging assimilation and transmission of a unanimous tradition, there were in fact many fissures and discontinuities between the two bodies of thought, ancient and medieval. Rather than organic change or development, he finds radical change, trial, novelty, and even heterodoxy.

This book will completely transform the standard interpretation of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, a watershed event in the late Ottoman Empire and a key to the emergence of the modern nation-states in the Middle East and Balkans. Preparation for a Revolution is the first book on the Young Turk Revolution to draw on both the extensive memoirs and papers of the Young Turks and on the extensive diplomatic archives around the world. The author has plumbed not only the Ottoman Archives but collected documents from archives in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem, London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Sofia, Tirana, Bern, Geneva, Sarajevo, Cairo, Stockholm, and Tokyo. Breaking new ground, Hanioglu describes in detail how practical considerations led the Young Turks to sacrifice or alter many of their goals for social transformation. He tells a story rich in character and plot, and reveals the many factions and competing intellectual trends that marked this tumultuous period at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Preparation for a Revolution will prove indispensable to anyone working on the political, intellectual, and social history of the Ottoman Empire and of the states that were established on its ruins.

Although the history of the book is a booming area of research, the journeymen who printed books in the sixteenth century have remained shadowy figures because they were not thought to have left any significant traces in the archives. Clive Griffin, however, uses Inquisitional documents from Spain and Portugal to reveal a clandestine network of Protestant-minded immigrant journeymen who were arrested by the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal in the 1560s and 1570s at a time of international crisis. A startlingly clear portrait of these humble men (and occasionally women) emerges allowing the reconstruction of what Namier deemed one of history's greatest challenges: 'the biographies of ordinary men'. We learn of their geographical and social origins, educational and professional training, travels, careers, standard of living, violent behaviour, and even their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions. In the course of this study, many other subjects are addressed, among them: popular culture and religion; the history of skilled labour, the history of the book, and of reading and writing; the Inquisition; foreign and itinerant workers and the xenophobia they encountered; and the 'double lives' of lower-class Protestants living within a uniquely vigilant Catholic society.

Creating Prehistory deals even-handedly and sympathetically with the creation of several different sorts of prehistory during the volatile period between the two World Wars.
* Investigates the origins of professional archaeology in Britain during the inter-war period
* Brings to life many fascinating and controversial personalities and their creeds, including the archaeologists O. G. S. Crawford, Mortimer Wheeler and Gordon Childe; Grafton Elliot Smith and W. H. R. Rivers (of ‘Regeneration’ fame); Alfred Watkins and The Old Straight Track; and the thunderous George Watson Macgregor Reid, who brought the Druids back to Stonehenge
* Examines the production of archaeological knowledge as a social process, and the relationship between personalities, institutions, ideology, and power
* Addresses the ongoing debates of the significance of sites such as Stonehenge, Avebury, and Maiden Castle.

This new 11th edition of a classic text, come to be known as "the bible of Cuban Studies," emphasizes two key issues of the twenty-first century. First, transition concerns in a world without Castro, and second, the continuing embargo of Cuba by the United States in the aftermath of a major change in the presidency. Cuban Communism has been updated to take account of changes in the 44 years of Castro's rule since seizing power in 1959. In addition to articles and essays that represent new developments in Cuba, the work boasts a database upgrade that makes it more important to students, scholars, and researchers. The volume has expanded the section on future prospects for civil society and democracy in a post-Castro environment; including "Regime Change in Cuba" by Eusebio Mujal-Leon and Joshua W. Busby; "Transition Scenarios" by Randolph H. Pherson, and "A Policy Conundrum over Cuba" by Edward Gonzalez. It also contains a chronology of events from 1959 through 2002. Finally, the new work contains a carefully constructed Who's Who of important players in Cuba and the regime during the Castro period up to the present. Other articles new to the 11th edition of Cuban Communism are by Ernesto Betancourt, "Cuba's Balance of Payment Gap"; Carmelo Mesa-Lago, "The Cuban Economy From 1999-2001"; Taylor Boas, "The Internet and U.S. Policy toward Cuba"; Aldo M. Leiva, "Environmental Technology Transfer and Foreign Investment"; Moises Asis, "Judaism in Cuba"; Wolf Grabendorff, "A View from the European Union." More than ever, it is a must volume for those interested in political systems and social structures.