Records of the Grand Historian

control. While Strauss’ article could be better enhanced by including the feelings of those who experienced either “fear” or “leniency,” her overall argument regarding the PRC’s tactic of gaining popular involvement and support is very agreeable, as historians have seen similar themes throughout other revolutionary…

Nigel Cliff, Holy War:How Vasco da Gama's Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations,2011] In the Palace the navigator was received with traditional hospitality, including a grand procession of at least 3,000 armed Nair's. The king while seated on a green couch below a silk canopy was wearing a string of pearls and a heart shaped emerald surrounded by rubies, the insignia of royalty.The presents that Gama sent to the Zamorin…

she used a lot of tools that social historians used, such as censuses, city directories, tax lists and maps. She used these maps to try and rebuild the 18th century Manhattan from the ground up and find out as much as she could about these men and women who confessed. She took the confessions…

After more conversation Berry discovered that Smokey had written over 100 songs and Berry ask to look and critique them, leading to a lifelong business and friendship between the two. This meeting would actually lead to the development of Motown Records, with Smokey Robinson becoming an integral part of the story. After receiving a mere $3.19 royalty check from his songwriting, Berry is told by Smokey Robinson that if that’s all you are making you might as well start your own company (Hirshey…

Australia, in the dry and desolate area of Nullarbor. This cave is significant because it is one of the multiple connecting caves formed by acidic water percolating through the limestone composition, which is a created environment for preserving fossil records. It is at Koonalda that the earliest human impressions of human hand incisions swirled throughout the interior that archaeologists can date the first documentation of hominid conception of abstract cognitive function and expression. This…

miles southeast of Prague. Even before the Cold War, Central Europe had gotten a bad rap, since historians touted the nation-state as the teleological endpoint of history. While the nation-states of the far west of Europe papered over their fractures early on with nominally unified central governments (pay no attention to lreland, the Basque Country and Belgium behind the curtain!), German historians had a hard time finding fig leaves, given Central Europe 's…

Eric Foner’s “A Short History of Reconstruction” is an updated, abridged edition of “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.” This book redefines how the Reconstruction Era is viewed, in ways historians have not done before. Foner chronologically starts with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to validate his statement that “Reconstruction was not only a specific time period, but also the beginning of an extended historical process: the adjustment of American society to the end of…

Freedom is Slavery: The idea behind "Freedom is Slavery" is a simple. How can one man build a bridge, a building, or anything of grand structure on his own? The simple answer is that an individual cannot build these things alone. Thus, the individual is powerless. He is forced to seek help from a force or community larger than himself. Meaning that in order to do anything grand, a person yield his own freedoms and submit to those of a larger force. The only true freedom a person has is the…

only after 1947 that the debate on Indian feudalism gained momentum with the coming of the writings of D. D. Kosambi R.S. Sharma, BNS Yadav, Harbans Mukhia and other promienent scholars. Though, Irfan Habib, the leading marxist historian of the period, however, put on record his distance from 'Indian feudalism' even as he vehemently criticised the Asiatic Mode of…

Wang Aihe’s Cosmology and Political Culture reexamines the relation between cultural heritage of cosmology and political heritage of the Chinese empires through Shang to Han dynasty by taking a closer look into the transition from sifang 四方(“four quarters”) to wuxing五行(“five phases”) cosmology. In this ambitious book, she effectively argues that Chinese “cosmology and political power were mutually constructive” (p. 210) instead of being static and self-existing, and in so doing, successfully…