Experience the world's most significant battles through bold, easy-to-grasp maps. Covering everything from the battlefields of the ancient world to the bomb-scarred landscapes of World War II and beyond, this ebook includes engrossing maps telling the story of history's most famous battles. Using brand new, in-depth maps and expert analysis, see for yourself how legendary military milestones were won and lost, and how tactics, technology, vision, and luck have all played a part in the outcome of wars throughout history. Additionally, historic paintings, photographs, and objects take you to the heart of the action; profiles introduce famous commanders and military leaders and analyze their achievements; and the impact of groundbreaking weapons and battlefield innovations is revealed. Bursting with lavish illustrations and full of fascinating detail, Battles Map by Map is the ultimate history ebook for map lovers, military history enthusiasts, and armchair generals everywhere.

Frederick Barbarossa, born of two of Germany’s most powerful families, swept to the imperial throne in a coup d’état in 1152. A leading monarch of the Middle Ages, he legalized the dualism between the crown and the princes that endured until the end of the Holy Roman Empire. This new biography, the first in English in four decades, paints a rich picture of a consummate diplomat and effective warrior. John Freed mines Barbarossa’s recently published charters and other sources to illuminate the monarch’s remarkable ability to rule an empire that stretched from the Baltic to Rome, and from France to Poland. Offering a fresh assessment of the role of Barbarossa’s extensive familial network in his success, the author also considers the impact of Frederick’s death in the Third Crusade as the key to his lasting heroic reputation. In an intriguing epilogue, Freed explains how Hitler’s audacious attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 came to be called “Operation Barbarossa.”

Forgetting about Spain’s civil war (1936–9) and subsequent dictatorship was long seen as a necessary safeguard for the democracy that emerged after General Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. Since the early 2000s, however, public discussion of historical memory has awakened efforts to remember this past through the personal testimonies of Spaniards who experienced it firsthand. Untold Stories expands accounts of twentieth-century Spain by presenting an ethnography of an ignored population: the impoverished men and women who fled Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s, participating in a wave of labour migration to northern Europe. Now in their eighties, they were born around the time of the civil war and came of age during its repressive aftermath before leaving Spain as young adults. The book features a community of such Spaniards, who gather regularly at a senior centre on the outskirts of Paris. Drawing on concepts from linguistic anthropology, David Divita analyses conversational encounters recorded among the seniors to demonstrate how a turbulent past shapes mundane moments of social interaction in the present. Documenting what is said as well as what is not, Divita reveals through detailed textual analysis how silence can pervade the creation of social meanings – such as belonging, authority, and legitimacy. Untold Stories illuminates the impact of a harrowing historical period on some of Spain’s most marginal citizens in the early years of the dictatorship.

This book offers a highly readable account of warfare in Europe and the Mediterranean from the Battle of Poitiers to the Wars of the Roses. With an emphasis on superb full-colour cartography and illustration, The Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: The Middle Ages, 768 1487 focuses on military strategy, debunking some of the prevailing myths of medieval warfare. Often characterized as an era dominated by lone knights and long sieges, the Middle Ages in fact had a military culture as sophisticated and complex as our own, with organized armies and a high degree of tactical intelligence. This complexity is detailed in maps, plans, and an informative text. Development of naval warfare, cavalry, and siege tactics are all covered, as is the nature of contemporary logistics and contemporary understanding of the science of warfare.

How do objects mediate human relationships, and possess their own social and political agency? What role does material culture – such as prestige consumption as well as commodity aesthetics, biographies, and ownership histories – play in the production of social and political identities, differences, and hierarchies? How do (informal) consumer subcultures of collectors organize and manage themselves? Drawing on theories from anthropology and sociology, specifically material culture, consumption, museum, ethnicity, and post-socialist studies, Materializing Difference addresses these questions via analysis of the practices and ideologies connected to Gabor Roma beakers and roofed tankards made of antique silver. The consumer subculture organized around these objects – defined as ethnicized and gendered prestige goods by the Gabor Roma living in Romania – is a contemporary, second-hand culture based on patina-oriented consumption. Materializing Difference reveals the inner dynamics of the complex relationships and interactions between objects (silver beakers and roofed tankards) and subjects (Romanian Roma) and investigates how these relationships and interactions contribute to the construction, materialization, and reformulation of social, economic, and political identities, boundaries, and differences. It also discusses how, after 1989, the political transformation in Romania led to the emergence of a new, post-socialist consumer sensitivity among the Gabor Roma, and how this sensitivity reshaped the pre-regime-change patterns, meanings, and value preferences of prestige consumption.

"Produced by members of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, this collection introduces the idea of an imaginative and creative approach to anthropological inquiry, one that is collaborative, open-ended, embodied, affective, and experimental. Rather than structuring the book around traditional methods like interviewing, participant observation, and documentary research, the authors organize their thoughts around different methodologies--sensing, walking, writing, performing, and recording. As well, innovative, practical exercises are included that allow ethnographers to not just 'talk the talk', but also 'walk the walk' so they can deepen, complicate, and extend ethnographic inquiry. A list of additional resources at the end of each chapter provide rich support for those who want to pursue more imaginative and creative methodologies."--

The contributors gathered here revitalize “ethnographic performance”—the performed recreation of ethnographic subject matter pioneered by Victor and Edith Turner and Richard Schechner—as a progressive pedagogy for the 21st century. They draw on their experiences in utilizing performances in a classroom setting to facilitate learning about the diversity of culture and ways of being in the world. The editors, themselves both students of Turner at the University of Virginia, and Richard Schechner share recollections of the Turners’ vision and set forth a humanistic pedagogical agenda for the future. A detailed appendix provides an implementation plan for ethnographic performances in the classroom.

Based on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Syria, Exemplary Life focuses on the life of a Damascus woman, Myrna Nazzour, who serves as an aspirational figure in her community. Myrna is regarded by her followers as an exemplary figure, a living saint, and the messages, apparitions, stigmata, and oil that have marked Myrna since 1982 have corroborated her status as chosen by God. Exemplary Life probes the power of examples, the modelling of sainthood around Myrna’s figure, and the broader context for Syrian Christians in the changing landscape of the Middle East. The book highlights the social use of examples such as the ones inhabited by Myrna’s devout followers and how they reveal the broader structures of illustration, evidence, and persuasion in social and cultural settings. Andreas Bandak argues that the role of the example should incite us to investigate which trains of thought set local worlds in motion. In doing so, Exemplary Life presents a novel frame for examining how religion comes to matter to people and adds a critical dimension to current anthropological engagements with ethics and morality.

The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography reviews and expands the field and scope of sensory ethnography by fostering new links among sensory, affective, more-than-human, non-representational, and multimodal sensory research traditions and composition styles. From writing and film to performance and sonic documentation, the handbook reimagines the boundaries of sensory ethnography and posits new possibilities for scholarship conducted through the senses and for the senses. Sensory ethnography is a transdisciplinary research methodology focused on the significance of all the senses in perceiving, creating, and conveying meaning. Drawing from a wide variety of strategies that involve the senses as a means of inquiry, objects of study, and forms of expression, sensory ethnography has played a fundamental role in the contemporary evolution of ethnography writ large as a reflexive, embodied, situated, and multimodal form of scholarship. The handbook dwells on subjects like the genealogy of sensory ethnography, the implications of race in ethnographic inquiry, opening up ethnographic practice to simulate the future, using participatory sensory ethnography for disability studies, the untapped potential of digital touch, and much more. This is the most definitive reference text available on the market and is intended for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers in anthropology, sociology, and the social sciences, and will serve as a state-of-the-art resource for sensory ethnographers worldwide.

In 1095 the First Crusade was launched, establishing a great military endeavour which was a central preoccupation of Europeans until the end of the thirteenth century. In Western warfare in the age of the Crusades, 1000-1300 John France offers a wide-ranging and challenging survey of war and warfare and its place in the development of European Society, culture and economy in the period of the Crusades. Placing the crusades in a wider context, this book brings together the wealth of recent scholarly research on such issues as knighthood, siege warfare, chivalry and fortifications into an accessible form. Western warfare in the age of the Crusades, 1000-1300 examines the nature of war in the period 1000-1300 and argues that it was primarily shaped by the people who conducted war - the landowners. John France illuminates the role of property concerns in producing the characteristic instruments of war: the castle and the knight. This authoritative study details the way in which war was fought and the reasons for it as well as reflecting on the society which produced the crusades.