Daily religious devotion in the Greek and Roman worlds centered on the family and the home. Besides official worship in rural sacred areas and at temples in towns, the ancients kept household shrines with statuettes of different deities that could ha...

The history of the Hungarian theatre of war from late August 1944 to the end of March 1945 is a special chapter of the history of the Eastern Front during World War II. The Soviet 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts had encircled Budapest by Christmas 1944,...

For sale in CIS only! Over the last half century, sub-Saharan Africa has not had one history, but many – histories that have intertwined, converged and diverged. They have involved a continuing saga of decolonisation and state-building, conflict, ec...

During the Victorian era, new laws allowed more witnesses to testify in court cases. At the same time, an emerging cultural emphasis on truth-telling drove the development of new ways of inhibiting perjury. Strikingly original and drawing on a broad...

Although southern Poland and western Ukraine are not often thought of in terms of decisive battles in World War I, the impulses that precipitated the Battle for Galicia in August 1914?and the unprecedented carnage that resulted?effectively doomed the...

Nineteenth-century Brazil's constitutional monarchy credibly committed to repay sovereign debt, borrowing repeatedly in international and domestic capital markets without default. Yet it failed to lay the institutional foundations that private financ...

When we talk about the Civil War, we often describe it in terms of battles that took place in small towns or in the countryside: Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness. One reason this picture has persisted...

Hitler's last gamble, the Battle of the Bulge, was intended to push the Allied invaders of Normandy all the way back to the beaches. The plan nearly succeeded, and almost certainly would have, were it not for one small Belgian town and its tenacious...

Water may seem innocuous, but as a universal necessity, it inevitably intersects with politics when it comes to acquisition, control, and associated technologies. While we know a great deal about the socioecological costs and benefits of modern dams,...

For sale in CIS only! Between 1983 and 2009 Sri Lanka was host to a bitter civil war fought between the Government and the Tamil Tigers, which sought the creation of an independent Tamil state. In May 2009 came the war's violent end with the crushi...