Examines the many reasons and motivations for the destruction of books throughout history, citing specific acts from the smashing of ancient Sumerian tablets to the looting of libraries in post-war Iraq.

By examining the history of universal history from the late Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century we trace the making of the global. Early modern universal history can be seen as a response to the epistemological crisis provoked by new knowledge and experience. Traditional narratives were no longer sufficient to gain an understanding of events. Inspired by recent developments in theory of history, the volume argues that the relevance of universal history resides in the laboratory of intense, diverse and mainly unsuccessful attempts at thinking history and universals together. They all shared the common aim of integrating all time and space: assemble the world and keep it together.

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a "new humanism," one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.

The essays in this volume discuss the questions at the core of Kant's pioneering work in the philosophy of history.

The Universal History (Patmutʻiwn tiezerakan) of Stepʻanos Tarōnecʻi is a history of the world in three books, composed by the Armenian scholar at the end of the tenth century and extending from the era of Abraham to the turn of the first millennium. It was completed in 1004/5 CE, at a time when the Byzantine Empire was expanding eastwards across the districts of historic Armenia and challenging key aspects of Armenian identity. Stepʻanos responded to these changing circumstances by looking to the past and fusing Armenian tradition with Persian, Roman, and Islamic history, thereby asserting that Armenia had a prominent and independent place in world history. The Universal History was intended to affirm and reinforce Armenian cultural memory. As well as assembling and revising extracts from existing Armenian texts, Stepʻanos also visited monastic communities where he learned about prominent Armenian scholars and ascetics who feature in his construction of the Armenian past. During his travels he gathered stories about local Armenian, Georgian, Persian, and Kurdish lords, which were then repeated in his composition. The Universal History therefore preserves a valuable narrative of events in Byzantium, Armenia, and the wider Middle East in the second half of the tenth century. This volume presents the first ever English translation of this work, drawing upon Manukyan's 2012 critical edition of the text, and is also the first study and translation of the Universal History to be published outside Armenia for a century. Fully annotated and with a substantial introduction, it not only provides an accessible guide to the text, drawing on the most up-to-date scholarship available, but also offers valuable new insights into the significance of an often overlooked work, the intellectual and literary contexts within which it was composed, and its place in the Armenian tradition.

This is an expanded version of a lecture given in the Departments of History and Classics at Harvard in 1998. Starting from a methodological point of view, this book show the evolution of the idea of world history through the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Ctesias, Ephorus, Polybius and others up to the historians of the Augustan epoch.

This wide-ranging book presents the linguistic achievements of four major cultures to readers presumably conversant with modern theoretical linguistics. The chapter on India discusses in detail Pan?ini's (c. 400 B.C.) grammar Ast-adhy-ay-i as well as the work of his commentators Katyayana, Patanjali, and Bhartr?hari. In the Chinese tradition, the Confucian doctrine of the Rectification of Names' is singled out for treatment. Arabic linguistics is represented by Sibawaihi's (d. 793) grammar al-Kitab, in particular its syntax, as well as the subsequent commentary tradition. The chapter on Europe, which is the most comprehensive of the four, covers the time span from antiquity to the 20th century; special attention is devoted to the contributions of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Varro, Apollonius Dyscolus, and the Modistae. The achievements of the cultures in linguistics are treated throughout from a deliberately value-laden point of view. The achievements of Western antiquity and the Middle Ages are shown to be much more than the average linguist is inclined to believe. Even more importantly, it is shown that the Indian and the Arab traditions have been superior to the European tradition at least until the 20th century. The fact that a linguistic theory created some 2,400 years ago is fully as adequate as our best theories today must have far-reaching implications for the notion of 'scientific progress'. More precisely, it proves necessary to distinguish between 'progress in the human sciences' and 'progress in the natural sciences'. These issues, which pertain to the general philosophy of science, are treated in the final chapter of the book.