Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.

"... a tour through the most influential images in science"--Jacket.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1859. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Imprisoned in the Tower of London after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, Sir Walter Ralegh spent seven years producing his massive History of the World. Created with the aid of a library of more than five hundred books that he was allowed to keep in his quarters, this incredible work of English vernacular would become a best seller, with nearly twenty editions, abridgments, and continuations issued in the years that followed. Nicholas Popper uses Ralegh’s History as a touchstone in this lively exploration of the culture of history writing and historical thinking in the late Renaissance. From Popper we learn why early modern Europeans ascribed heightened value to the study of the past and how scholars and statesmen began to see historical expertise as not just a foundation for political practice and theory, but as a means of advancing their power in the courts and councils of contemporary Europe. The rise of historical scholarship during this period encouraged the circulation of its methods to other disciplines, transforming Europe’s intellectual—and political—regimes. More than a mere study of Ralegh’s History of the World, Popper’s book reveals how the methods that historians devised to illuminate the past structured the dynamics of early modernity in Europe and England.

The collection of English books printed before 1801 in the University Library of the Vrije Universiteit at Amsterdam is one of the largest collections of such books outside the English-speaking world, and by far the largest in the Netherlands. The collection numbers 5,600 titles and covers all subjects, but is especially concentrated on (reformed) protestantism in Great Britain, the Netherlands and America, and the exchange of ideas between these countries. The collection of which the existence is practically unknown, contains many rare items from the 16th to the 18th century. It covers the periods of the well-known and widely used bibliographies of English printed books (STC, Wing, and ESTC); in a large number of cases the catalogue entries correct or supplement these bibliographies. The catalogue is aimed both at a general public of bibliographers, literary and book- historians working with books from the STC, Wing and ESTC periods, and at researchers in the Netherlands, Great Britain and elsewhere specialised in church history and the manifold historical and cultural relations between the British Isles and the Low Countries.