Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958)--President of the Indian National Congress from 1939 to 1946, outspoken opponent of Jinnah and Partition, symbol of the Muslim will to coexist in a secular India, and scholar and intellectual--was one of modern India's most important leaders. This first substantial biography of Azad in English charts his many contributions to the intellectual, political, and religious heritage of modern India, revealing important continuities in his life and thought.

This text explores how early American colonists used magic to protect themselves from harm in their challenging new world. Analysing evidence from different domestic spheres within Puritan society C. Riley Augé provides a trailblazing archaeological study of magical practice and its relationship to gender in the Anglo-American culture of colonial New England.

Offering a rare look into the lives of enslaved peoples and slave masters in early New England, Slavery in the Age of Reason analyzes the results of extensive archaeological excavations at the Isaac Royall House and Slave Quarters, a National Historic Landmark and museum in Medford, Massachusetts. Isaac Royall (1677-1739) was the largest slave owner in Massachusetts in the mid- eighteenth century, and in this book the Royall family and their slaves become the central characters in a compelling cultural-historical narrative. The family's ties to both Massachusetts and Antigua provide a comparative perspective on the transcontinental development of modern ideologies of individualism, colonialism, slavery, and race. Alexandra A. Chan examines the critical role of material culture in the construction, mediation, and maintenance of social identities and relationships between slaves and masters at the farm. She explores landscapes and artifacts discovered at the site not just as inanimate objects or "cultural leftovers," but rather as physical embodiments of the assumptions, attitudes, and values of the people who built, shaped, or used them. These material things, she argues, provide a portal into the mind-set of people long gone-not just of the Royall family who controlled much of the material world at the farm, but also of the enslaved, who made up the majority of inhabitants at the site, and who left few other records of their experience. Using traditional archaeological techniques and analysis, as well as theoretical per- spectives and representational styles of post-processualist schools of thought, Slavery in the Age of Reason is an innovative volume that portrays the Royall family and the people they enslaved "from the inside out." It should put to rest any lingering myth that the peculiar institution was any less harsh or complex when found in the North. Alexandra A.Chan currently works in cultural resource management as an archaeolog- ical consultant and principal investigator. As assistant professor of anthropology at Vassar College, 2001-2004, she also developed numerous courses in historical archaeology, archaeological ethics, comparative colonialism, and the archaeology of early African America. She was the project director of the excavations at the Isaac Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, 2000-2001, and continues to serve on the Academic Advisory Council of the museum.

"Called the ""Reader's Digest of New England Archaeology,"" by experts in the field, this book covers all finds and sits by amateur and professional ancient artifact hunters since America was first settled. Hundreds of messages were cut into stone by unknown ancient settlers. Carved faces, well-made homes of rock, Celtic ritual sites, dolmens, and other ancient remnants are scattered throughout the New England states, making it quite apparent that visitors from other lands lived here hundreds of years before Columbus discovered America. Ancient coins, weapons, lamps, containers and art objects have been uncovered as well -- all well documented and described, with photos in this fascinating book."

This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. The meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profit and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction. Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications, this book shows how Improvement’s twin meanings of profit and betterment unfolded unevenly across early 19th century New England. The Improvement movement in Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.

A unique introduction to the history of Boston through archaeological objects