A recent surge of interest in network approaches to the study of the ancient world has enabled scholars of the Roman Empire to move beyond traditional narratives of domination, resistance, integration and fragmentation. This relational turn has not only offers tools to identify, map, visualize and, in some cases, even quantify interaction based on a variety of ancient source material, but also provides a terminology to deal with the everyday ties of power, trade, and ideology that operated within, below, and beyond the superstructure of imperial rule. Thirteen contributions employ a range of quantitative, qualitative and descriptive network approaches in order to provide new perspectives on trade, communication, administration, technology, religion and municipal life in the Roman Near East and adjacent regions.

Longarm GIANT novels…the biggest and best in Western adventure! Down in the driest parts of the southwest, gals are scarcer than water—and some men, crazy from lust and the scorching sun, have sent away for mail-order brides. But when the womenfolk never show, these hombres want answers. Some claim the Mormons are kidnapping the ladies for their polygamous beds. Others say it’s the Turks. So they hire on gunslinger Custis Long to do what he does second-best: skirt-chasing. After making his way up the Old Spanish Trail and snooping around some, he learns that this time, it’s the women who’re in the know—Mexican barmaids, Mormon girls, squaw sisters, a Spanish widow—all willing to give Longarm his answers. That is, in return for the French lessons that have made him famous clear across the Old West…

The articles of this comprehensive edited volume offer a multidisciplinary, global and comparative approach to the history of empires. They analyze their ends over a long spectrum of humankind’s history, ranging from Ancient History through Modern Times. As the main guiding question, every author of this volume scrutinizes the reasons for the decline, the erosion, and the implosion of individual empires. All contributions locate and highlight different factors that triggered or at least supported the ending or the implosion of empires. This overall question makes all the contributions to this volume comparable and allows to detect similarities, differences as well as inconsistencies of historical processes.

Longarm’s settling a war—on his terms. There’s a bloody war brewing between money-hungry gold-diggers and the fierce San Carlos Apaches over the most desirable element in nature— water. U.S. Marshal Custis Long is assigned to settle this situation in the deadliest part of Arizona, Canyon City. But he’s not alone. He’s getting a little help from an unlikely lot including an old fogy named Gassy, a temperamental donkey named Ugly, and a striking Apache woman, Donita Ramirez. Longarm soon discovers that this dispute is far more complex than even he imagined. He’ll just have to give both sides a greater concern than their precious water— and it will be whether or not they’re the next to face down his smoking derringer.

This fantastical tale tells of a world where spirits and humans collide and battle lines are clearly drawn between good and evil. When select humans realize that unlikely events are not bad luck but an unusual curse they must depend on the wit of a talking goat and a man born of a virgin to provide salvation.

Longarm heads to a town called Hardwater to find out why the dying is easy… When hard-livin’ bully Cracker Marner finally ran out of luck, dying came easy. A few shots to the chest by a smaller man with a bigger hat. That’s all anyone at the saloon remembers about the killer. Then in early spring, another stranger bellies up to the same bar and shoots the barkeep at point-blank range…just because he couldn’t “remember.” Now the problem is federal—with Marshal Custis Long on the case. There are two places Longarm can look for answers: Cracker’s hot-tempered widow and his ma. But the hardest question still isn’t who could’ve wanted this unpopular man dead, it’s who could’ve wanted him alive…

Heroes are a dime a dozen… Longarm the hero of a dime Western novel? Why, the very idea is preposterous! Yet the lovely Delia Wilson, aka novelist Dakota Walker, wants to use the lawman’s past—and current—exploits as fodder for her fiction. Longarm scoffs at her nonsense, but Delia can be very persuasive… When Longarm heads to Reno in pursuit of a marshal’s kidnapped daughter, Delia is right by his side to get the story firsthand. As a twisted tale of murder, thievery, opium addiction, sex slavery, and greed unfurls, Longarm just hopes he can deliver a happy ending…

Empire Unbound argues that European empires were not the bounded, stable entities that imperialists imagined. Gavin Murray-Miller demonstrates that the era of 'new imperialism' which arose in the late 19th century fostered connections and synergies between regional powers that influenced the trajectories of imperial states in fundamental ways.

If scholars no longer necessarily find the essence and origins of what came to be known as Christianity in the personality of a historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it nevertheless remains the case that the study of early Christianity is dominated by an assumption of the force of Jesus's personality on divergent communities. In The Godman and the Sea, Michael J. Thate shifts the terms of this study by focusing on the Gospel of Mark, which ends when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome discover a few days after the crucifixion that Jesus's tomb has been opened but the corpse is not there. Unlike the other gospels, Mark does not include the resurrection, portraying instead loss, puzzlement, and despair in the face of the empty tomb. Reading Mark's Gospel as an exemplary text, Thate examines what he considers to be retellings of other traumatic experiences—the stories of Jesus's exorcising demons out of a man and into a herd of swine, his stilling of the storm, and his walking on the water. Drawing widely on a diverse set of resources that include the canon of western fiction, classical literature, the psychological study of trauma, phenomenological philosophy, the new materialism, psychoanalytic theory, poststructural philosophy, and Hebrew Bible scholarship, as well as the expected catalog of New Testament tools of biblical criticism in general and Markan scholarship in particular, The Godman and the Sea is an experimental reading of the Gospel of Mark and the social force of the sea within its traumatized world. More fundamentally, however, it attempts to position this reading as a story of trauma, ecstasy, and what has become through the ruins of past pain.