For generations, historians have argued that Carolingian free landowners were gradually impoverished by powerful magnates, transforming the military and social structure of the Frankish world. David Bachrach examines the surviving evidence to see if it actually supports this long-standing theory.
In the years between the First World War and the Second World War, the historians W E B Du Bois and Carter G Woodson challenged this misrepresentation, stressing the profits made by US slave traders and owners, and underscoring the cruelty of bondage in the US. Later, the historians Frederic Bancroft and Kenneth M Stampp followed suit, noting the ubiquity of family separation and sexual violence, and the near-impossibility of emancipation.
The overall model for understanding the ancient Egyptian afterlife in scholarship and popular culture alike is well known: The ancient Egyptians believed in a post-mortem judgement that would determine their fate in the afterlife, being either rewarded with an eternal life of bliss or punished with painful annihilation. However, in my new book Yearning for Immortality, I argue that for the most part these ideas were in place well before the decipherment of hieroglyphs
Bernie and I had never considered or even discussed the possibility of writing a global history of warfare, or even one that "merely" covered Eurasia and the Mediterranean world. Our first foray into this type of work was in 2014, when we pitched the idea to Routledge that would eventually become Warfare in Medieval Europe. That book took almost two years to write because of the need to synthesize a vast range of scholarship outside of our own areas of specialization.
You have to dig deep into Pierre Nora's dazzling career to find the slightest hint of anything unseemly: reports that "the English essayist Perry Anderson criticized for its 'consensual blandness'" without mentioning Anderson's leftist politics and the controversy sparked by Nora's public refusal to translate and publish The Age of Extremes , a highly acclaimed book written by English historian and Marxist Eric Hobsbawm.