In the aftermath of World War I, the beaten paths of tourism guided an increasing number of international tourists to the hinterlands of the Arab Eastern Mediterranean, where they would admire pyramids and Roman ruins. Yet they were not the only visitors: Arab nationalists gathered in summer resorts, and Yishuvi skiing clubs practised on Lebanese mountain slopes. By catering to these travellers, local tour guides and advocates of tourism development pursued their agendas. The book unearths unexpected connections between tourism and the emergence of nation-states in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Arab middle-class actors striving for independence, Zionist settlers and mandate officials presented their visions of the post-Ottoman spatial order to an international audience of tourists. At the same time, mobilities and infrastructures of tourism shaped the material conditions of this order. Tourism thus helps us to understand the transformations of Arab societies in their global context, and its history is a colourful story of the emergence of the modern Middle East.

Pearls of Meanings offers a collection of essays by J. T. P. (Hans) de Bruijn, a pivotal and leading scholar of Persian studies. The volume covers a number of essential domains of Persian culture, with a particular emphasis on poetry and Sufism. Poetry and the reception of Persian literature in Europe both play pivotal roles in these essays, thereby representing the studies of a generation of Persian cultural scholars such as A. Reland (1676–1718), C. H. Ethé (1844–1917), J. F. von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), and E. G. Browne (1862–1926). Pearls of Meanings is an essential cornerstone for scholars working in Persian studies.
 

Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourse of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. Black Transnationalism and Japan introduces the diverse activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and African American people. While some Pan-Asianisms and Pan-Africanisms urged a uniting of colonized spaces against the colonizer, and were often expressed in the form of decolonization movements, this volume introduces various transnational phenomena that transcended such dichotomies. Black American-Japanese transnational encounters often occurred on the non-state level from within the two new competing empires of America and Japan. Such transnational encounters reveal not only heretofore hidden historical actors, friendships, and solidarities, but also innovative cultural productions that challenged hierarchies of race, culture, and imperialism.

The work of Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) should have revolutionized the way the field of archaeology thinks about the passage of time and constructs narratives throughout it. Braudel’s more general theories deeply affected archaeological theory, yet his three different timescales, as well as his insights into duration as the inner dialectic between different temporalities, remain largely unexplored by practicing archaeologists. Even today, ceramic chronology-building in archaeology still relies on two main variables: time-space and pottery styles. This book seeks to upset that paradigm,  proposing instead a radical new approach to creating chronology. This endeavor begins in the valley of Juigalpa, in central Nicaragua, using materials—especially ceramics—as complex palimpsests, through which a chronology that includes five different intervals based on ceramic technologies is presented, from the first traces of human practices in 300 CE through to the present.

 

Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes, World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting. Key themes, such as communication, trade, order, slavery, religion, war, identity, modernity, norms and ecology, are linked to specific world regions, which tell a story about how local ideas and individual contacts developed, started to overlap and became globally understood and used by ever larger groups of people. These themes are brought to life by a diverse set of key primary sources, such as a book, a letter, a medal, a temple and an epic, to showcase how historians have used sources to tell these stories and conduct debates. The book provides an introductory resource into the study of history and includes detailed suggestions for further study.