The Pre-Columbian City

Author(s):  
WARWICK BRAY

This chapter attempts to visualize how Tenochtitlan may have looked and functioned before the Spanish invasion. This usually assumed barbaric society with a culture of sacrificing thousand of captives for the blood-thirsty Aztecs was truly a civilized city by any criteria used to define civilizations such as the existence of bureaucracy, sophisticated agricultural technology, ceremonials and monumental architecture. Aztec Tenochtitlan was built and has been civilized more than 2,000 years ago. This ancient Mexican city started in the year Two Reed, it proliferated into stone-built city larger than Europe and had functions and bureaucracy similar to that of the sixteenth century Madrid. In terms of agriculture, the Aztec city has sophisticated agricultural technology—the chinampas which provided for the Aztecs and which provided insight into the chinampa ownership history of this ancient civilization. Complex architectural buildings also graced the Aztec civilization before the invasion of the Spaniards. Palaces, temples and avenues were dominant in this old Mexican civilization. These buildings were characterized by their complex decorations of serpents, murals and sculpture celebrating the state, its rulers, its gods and their conquests.

Author(s):  
Chris Fitter

Introducing the relatively recent discovery by the ‘new social history’ of an intelligent and sceptical Tudor popular politics, incorporated into the functioning of the state only precariously and provisionally, often insurgent in the sixteenth century, and wooed by discontented elites inadvertently creating a nascent public sphere, this chapter discusses the varied types and fortunes of plebeian resistance. It also surveys the leading ideas of the new historiography, and suggests the need to rethink the politics of Shakespeare’s plays in the light of their exuberant or embittered penetration by plebeian perspectives. Finally, it examines Measure for Measure in the light of its resistance to the polarizing, anti-populist climate of the late Elizabethan ‘reformation of manners’.


1930 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-186
Author(s):  
W. E. D. Allen

In one of the recently published volumes of the Broadway Travellers Series (Don Juan of Persia; a Shi'ah Catholic, 1560—1604, translated and edited with an introduction by G. Le Strange) is an interesting account of Georgia and of some of the events of the Turko- Persian War which endured between the years 1578 and 1587. The Persian account throws much light on the state of Georgia at the end of the sixteenth century, and it serves as a valuable supplement to von Hammer Purgstall's history of the war, based mainly on Turkish sources, and published as books 38 and 40 of his Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman (in Vol. viii of the French edition).Neither the historian of Turkey nor the editor of Don Juan appear to have made use of the material from Georgian sources which is available for this period, namely the provincial histories of Kartli, Samtzkhé, Kakheti and Imereti collated by Prince Wakhusht of Kartli during the eighteenth century, and published by Brosset in his Histoire de la Géorgie, 2ième partie, 1iere livraison, Spb. 1856.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-267
Author(s):  
Apollinaria S. Avrutina

The article offers an insight into the history of the Muslim communities in the Russian capital city of St. Petersburg in the 18th –20th cent. The author identifies the problems, which gradually arose in course of implementation of the state national policy in various periods of the Russian history. Equally she outlines the problems, which may be an obstacle in the interfaith dialogue.


1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Haigh

Twenty years ago, when Patrick McGrath was writing Papists and Puritans, it made sense to present the history of Tudor Catholicism in terms of early decline and later heroic recovery. Our understanding of the sixteenth century was then dominated by two books, which seemed to demonstrate revolutions in religion and government that breached all continuities in ecclesiastical and political history. In A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation, an increasingly sophisticated laity, discontented with the moral laxity and spiritual torpor of the late medieval clergy, was shown to have accepted with enthusiasm the break with Rome and the new doctrines of Protestantism. Gentlemen, lawyers, merchants and artisans responded to the energetic evangelism of the early reformers, and abandoned medieval obscurantism. Secular and ecclesiastical politicians espoused reform for their own calculations of expediency or experience of spirituality, and threw the weight of the state behind the new doctrines, while conservatives lacked the commitment and imagination to resist change.


2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Medha Kudaisya

This article recounts the story of the Bombay Plan of 1944, a bold vision of economic transformation for postwar India put forth by business leaders. The Plan represented a turning point in the history of Indian business. It marked the institutionalization of a long relationship between business and nationalist leadership as well as a historic moment when business groups, for the first time, unhesitatingly aligned themselves with nationalist aspirations. Underlying the Bombay Plan was the idea of a close partnership between business and the state. Yet, within a decade, this optimism died out as the autarchic features of economic policy became increasingly pronounced in independent India. The story of the Bombay Plan provides an insight into the relations between business and state in the context of development planning in India.


1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Rogers

The purpose of this article is to present to a wide public the documents relating to the construction of Süleymaniye published by the late ömer Lutfi Barkan and his team of collaborators in Süleymaniye Camii ve Inşaati, Vols. I, II (Ankara 1972, 1979). They strikingly illustrate the ability of the Ottoman central administration to co-ordinate complex operations minutely from a distance; and nothing of such detail exists for any monument of Istanbul before the early seventeenth century, or for any other building in the Islamic world.Some topics have already been considered in detail by Barkan, which explains the present choice of the sections of the accounts relating to furnishing and decorating Süleymaniye. They offer a mass of material of considerable intrinsic interest and of considerable value for the history of the luxury trades, both domestic and foreign, in sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkey. But simple translation is not enough: there are too many variant or dubious readings; the technical vocabulary is often recondite and the senses of certain terms must be a matter for conjecture; and the identification or designation of many of the materials is problematic.


2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Yong Hoon

ArgumentThis paper aims to show how a nineteenth-century Korean scholar's mathematical study reflects the Korean intellectual environment of his time by focusing on the rule of false double position and the method of root extraction. There were two major trends in Korean mathematics of the early nineteenth century: the first was “Tongsan,” literally “Eastern Mathematics,” which largely depended on Chinese mathematics of the Song and Yuan period adopting counting rod calculation; the second trend was Western mathematics, which was transmitted by the Jesuits and their Chinese collaborators from the late sixteenth century. There was also an intellectual transition in late eighteenth-century Korea when mathematics, which had been of only minor interest for Confucian scholars, became an important part of Confucian pursuits. We can gain an insight into the history of mathematics in Korea by examining and understanding Hong Kil-chu's (1786–1841) mathematical studies and the context of the academic world of his time.


Author(s):  
Ali Unsal

This article attempts to explain the state of contemporary Islamic Intellectualism. Additionally, it proposes a set of abilities, attributes, and responsibilities that Muslim scholars should possess to develop Islamic Intellectualism. To achieve this, this article first provides an analysis of the history of Islamic civilization, and the role of traditional Islamic Intellectualism in pushing the civilization towards new heights in the realms of societal organization, politics, culture, economics, and theology. Islam, as such, had experienced its first renaissance from the eighth to the sixteenth century. Today, the Muslim world is in need of a second renaissance. This is the context in which this article situates the ‘standards’ to which contemporary Muslim intellectuals must strive towards.


Author(s):  
Matthew Suriano

The remains of Judahite mortuary practices provide invaluable insight into the historical role of the dead in the culture of the biblical writers. The events of the eighth and seventh centuries proved formative for the kingdom of Judah, and the development of the state during this period became intricately tied to mortuary practices. Burying the dead in a particular way became part of being Judahite. Collective interments served to identify ancestors and connect living communities to the surrounding landscape. These actions involved distinct notions of family and religion, and the use of mortuary culture to express these ideas impacted the area long after the Southern Kingdom was destroyed. I offer the following history based on the inscriptions and material culture that have been collected and reviewed up to this point....


1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Bradshaw

The single most intriguing problem posed by the history of the Reformation in Ireland is the failure of the state-sponsored religion to take root in any section of the indigenous population. Perhaps because this outcome has been taken so much for granted a satisfactory explanation of it has yet to be offered. Historians are now coming to recognize that the central question cannot be properly discussed without a prolegomenon ranging over the political, social and intellectual history of the period. What follows is intended as a contribution to such a series of preliminary studies. It investigates the sources of tension within reforming circles in sixteenth-century Ireland and considers the implications of this aspect of its internal history for the external history of the movement.


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