The Challenge Of The West Peoples And Cultures From The Stone Age To 1640

This textbook provides a one-of-a-kind view of the history of the Western world. It weaves together all strands of history into easily grasped, chronologically organized chapters.-Back cover.

The eight essays collected in this volume examine the practice of gender history and its impact on our understanding of European history. Each essay takes up a major methodological or theoretical issue in feminist history and illustrates the necessity of critiquing and redefining the concepts of body, citizenship, class, and experience through historical case studies. Kathleen Canning opens the book with a new overview of the state of the art in European gender history. She considers how gender history has revised the master narratives in some fields within modern European history (such as the French Revolution) but has had a lesser impact in others (Weimar and Nazi Germany).Gender History in Practice includes two essays now regarded as classics?"Feminist History after the 'Linguistic Turn'" and "The Body as Method"--as well as new chapters on experience, citizenship, and subjectivity. Other essays in the book draw on Canning's work at the intersection of labor history, the history of the welfare state, and the history of the body, showing how the gendered "social body" was shaped in Imperial Germany. The book concludes with a pair of essays on the concepts of class and citizenship in German history, offering critical perspectives on feminist understandings of citizenship. Featuring an extensive thematic bibliography of influential works in gender history and theory that will prove invaluable to students and scholars, Gender History in Practice offers new insights into the history of Germany and Central Europe as well as a timely assessment of gender history's accomplishments and challenges.

This textbook provides a one-of-a-kind view of the history of the Western world. It weaves together all strands of history into easily grasped, chronologically organized chapters.-Back cover.

This book offers a comprehensive review and reassessment of the classical sources describing the cryptographic Spartan device known as the scytale. Challenging the view promoted by modern historians of cryptography which look at the scytale as a simple and impractical 'stick', Diepenbroek argues for the scytale's deserved status as a vehicle for secret communication in the ancient world. By way of comparison, Diepenbroek demonstrates that the cryptographic principles employed in the Spartan scytale show an encryption and coding system that is no less complex than some 20th-century transposition ciphers. The result is that, contrary to the accepted point of view, scytale encryption is as complex and secure as other known ancient ciphers. Drawing on salient comparisons with a selection of modern transposition ciphers (and their historical predecessors), the reader is provided with a detailed overview and analysis of the surviving classical sources that similarly reveal the potential of the scytale as an actual cryptographic and steganographic tool in ancient Sparta in order to illustrate the relative sophistication of the Spartan scytale as a practical device for secret communication. This helps to establish the conceptual basis that the scytale would, in theory, have offered its ancient users a secure method for secret communication over long distances.

The politics, educational policies, and social values perpetuated by Christian fundamentalists are exposed in this critical perspective on the religious right's role in American society. Statistics and studies of the movement are offered that provide insight into the causes and characteristics of fundamentalism and its effects on minority groups including women, children, African Americans, gays, and lesbians. Essays from a variety of authors consider the path to theocracy, the effect of the theology of inerrancy on politics, and the state of fundamentalism in the United States after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.