The Magna Carta Manifesto
Liberties and Commons for All
Peter Linebaugh
"This is an original, powerful and ground breaking book. It is utterly fascinating and charts a path that gives me, and will give others, hope for a better future. Linebaugh sends an important message to a world that increasingly believes that private ownership of our resources can make us more prosperous. As we struggle to regain lost liberty The Magna Carta Manifesto makes us understand that freedom is about guaranteeing the economic and social rights that allow all of us to partake of political freedom."–Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights
"Ideas can be beautiful too, and the ideas Peter Linebaugh provokes and maps in this history of liberty are dazzling, reminders of what we have been and who we could be. In this remarkable small book, he traces one path of liberty back to the forests and the economic independence they represented for medieval Britons, another path to recent revolutionaries, another to the Bush Administration's assaults on habeas corpus, the Constitution, and liberty and he links the human rights charter that Magna Carta represented to the less-known Forest Charter, drawing a missing link between ecological and social well-being."–Rebecca Solnit, author of Storming the Gates of Paradise"There is not a more important historian living today. Period."–Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Ranging across the centuries, and from England to Asia, Africa and the Americas, Peter Linebaugh shows us the contested history of Magna Carta–how the liberties it invoked were secured and (as today) violated, and how generations of ordinary men and women tried to revive the idea of the commons in the hope of building a better world."–Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom
Description
This remarkable book shines a fierce light on the current state of liberty and shows how longstanding restraints against tyranny–and the rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and due process of law, and the prohibition of torture–are being abridged. In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful book demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on primary sources to construct a wholly original history of the Great Charter and its scarcely-known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created at the same time to protect the subsistence rights of the poor.
About The Author
Peter Linebaugh is Professor of History at the University of Toledo. He is the author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century and coauthor (with Marcus Rediker) of Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
$24.95, £14.95 hardcover
978-0-520-24726-0376 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
February 2008
Many Middle Passages
Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World
Edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker
California World History Library, 5
"Extends the concept of the Middle Passage to encompass the expropriation of people across other maritime and inland routes. No previous book has highlighted the diversity and centrality of middle passages, voluntary and involuntary, to modern global history."–Kenneth Morgan, author of Slavery and the British Empire
"This volume extends the now well-established project of 'Atlantic World Studies' beyond its geographic and chronological frames to a genuinely global analysis of labour migration. It is a work of major importance that sparkles with new discoveries and insights."–Rick Halpern, co-editor of Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850
Description
This groundbreaking book presents a global perspective on the history of forced migration over three centuries and illuminates the centrality of these vast movements of people in the making of the modern world. Highly original essays from renowned international scholars trace the history of slaves, indentured servants, transported convicts, bonded soldiers, trafficked women, and coolie and Kanaka labor across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. They depict the cruelty of the captivity, torture, terror, and death involved in the shipping of human cargo over the waterways of the world, which continues unabated to this day. At the same time, these essays highlight the forms of resistance and cultural creativity that have emerged from this violent history. Together, the essays accomplish what no single author could provide: a truly global context for understanding the experience of men, women, and children forced into the violent and alienating experience of bonded labor in a strange new world. This pioneering volume also begins to chart a new role of the sea as a key site where history is made.
About The Editors
Marcus Rediker is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and author of The Slave Ship: A Human History. Cassandra Pybus is Research Professor of History at the University of Sydney, Australia, and author of Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Question for Liberty. Emma Christopher is an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia, and author of Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargos, 1730-1807.
$60.00, £35.00 hardcover
978-0-520-25206-6
$24.95, £14.95 paperback
978-0-520-25207-3
274 pages, 6 x 9 inches
September 2007
Sensing the Past
Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History
Mark M. Smith
"Smith's history of the sensate is destined to precipitate a revolution in our understanding of the sensibilities that underpinned the mentalities of past epochs."--David Howes, author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory
"Mark M. Smith presents a far-ranging essay on the history of the senses that serves simultaneously as a good introduction to the historiography. If one feels in danger of sensory overload from this growing body of scholarship, Smith's piece is a useful preventive."--Leigh E. Schmidt, author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality
"This is a masterful overview. The history of the senses has been a frontier field for a while now. Mark Smith draws together what we know, with an impressive sensory range, and encourages further work. A really exciting survey."--Peter N. Stearns, author of American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety
"Who would ever have guessed that a book on the history of the senses--seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling--could be informative, thought-provoking, and, at the same time, most entertaining? Ranging in both time and locale, Mark Smith's Sensing the Past makes even the philosophy about the senses from ancient times to now both learned and exciting. This work will draw scholars into under-recognized subjects and lay readers into a world we simply but unwisely take for granted."--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South
"Mark M. Smith has a good record of communicating his research to a broad constituency within and beyond the academy . . . This will be required reading for anyone addressing sensory history."--Penelope Gouk, author of Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth Century England"This is a fine cultural history of the body, which takes Western and Eastern traditions and their texts quite seriously. Smith views a history of the senses not only from 'below' but places it squarely in the historical imagination. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers."--Sander L. Gilman, author of Difference and Pathology
DESCRIPTION
Do we rely on different senses now than the ones we relied on in the past? How have our senses affected history? How have the senses themselves changed? What role have the senses played in the ways we discriminate? Exploring illuminating examples from antiquity to the twenty-first century, this lively, concise introduction to the essential, emerging field of sensory history presents a new way of looking at the past that takes the everyday, the average, and the banal as seriously as it takes the history of elites, the intellect, and the exceptional. Considering each of the five senses, Mark M. Smith explores diverse subjects: visual culture in Victorian Britain and South America, sound in nineteenth-century Australia and France, gender politics and touch in early modern Europe and in native America, "race" and olfaction in the United States and scent in ancient Christianity, and the role of taste in shaping national identity in modern China and early America.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark M. Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, is the author of several books including How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses and Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South, co-winner of the Organization of American Historians' Avery O. Craven Award and the South Carolina Historical Society's Book of the Year.
$55.00, hardcover
978-0-520-25495-4
$19.95, paperback
978-0-520-25496-1
192 pages, 6 x 9 inches,
February 2008
Historical Atlas of the United States
Derek Hayes
With Original Maps
Using more than five hundred historical maps from collections around the world, this stunning book is the first to tell the story of America’s past from a unique geographical perspective. Covering more than half a millennium in U.S. history--from conception to colonization to Hurricane Katrina--this atlas documents the discoveries and explorations, the intrigue and negotiations, the technology and the will that led the United States to become what it is today. Richly detailed, visually breathtaking maps are accompanied by extended captions that elucidate the stories and personalities behind their creation.Coasts and mountains, rivers and lakes, and peaks and plains are described by explorers encountering them for the first time. These maps can convey explorers’ ideas of what lay over the mountains ahead, their notions about what was discovered, and their explanations of the land’s potential for sponsors back home. The maps can also show a promoter’s attempt to sell his project to settlers or a general’s assessment of a coming battle. They chart the wars that created and molded the country: the French and Indian War and the War for Independence; the Mexican and Civil Wars; the numerous Indian wars; as well as more localized battles of conquest and survival. Readers can follow the progression of map creation and design as more knowledge was gained about the American continent.Distilling an enormous amount of information into one handsome volume, the Historical Atlas of the United States highlights the evolution of geographical knowledge at the same time that it presents a fascinating chronicle of the expansion and development of a nation. Copub: Douglas & McIntyre
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Derek Hayes is the author of Historical Atlas of the Pacific Northwest, The Historical Atlas of the Arctic, and Historical Atlas of Canada, among other books.
280 pages, 10 x 13-9/16” inches, 535 color illustrations, 52 b/w illustrations
October 2006
John James Audubon and The Birds of America
Lee A. Vedder
A Visionary Achievement in Ornithology Illustration
DESCRIPTION
John James Audubon’s sumptuous four-volume edition of Birds of America, published between 1827 and 1838, contains 435 hand-colored life-size prints of 1,065 individual American birds. A glorious union of science and art, it remains an unequaled achievement in ornithology illustration.In tracing Audubon’s quest to produce this groundbreaking work, Vedder draws on the artist and naturalist’s own writings and the latest scholarship on his life and on Birds of America. Plates from the Huntington Library’s double-elephant folio are reproduced in color, including the wild turkey, Baltimore oriole, bald eagle, and (once presumed extinct) ivory-billed woodpecker. Vedder provides with each plate a commentary on the unique characteristics of the species depicted, based on Audubon’s own observations in the field.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee A. Vedder is the Luce Curatorial Fellow in American Art at the New York Historical Society in New York City, serving as the primary curator of its painting and sculpture collections. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland and specializes in British and American art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
$24.95, £15.95 978-0-87328-217-8
104 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 21 color illustrations November 2006
The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital
Excavations in Annapolis
Mark P. Leone
"The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital is the work of a mature scholar reporting on one of the most important, large-scale, and long-range projects in contemporary American archaeology."--Randall McGuire, author of The Archaeology of Inequality
"Many would argue the Mark Leone is the most distinguished practitioner of historical archaeology in the United States, and one of the most prominent in the world."--Thomas C. Patterson, coeditor of Making Alternative Histories
DESCRIPTION
What do archaeological excavations in Annapolis, Maryland, reveal about daily life in the city's history? Considering artifacts such as ceramics, spirit bundles, printer's type, and landscapes, this engaging, generously illustrated, and original study illuminates the lives of the city's residents--walking, seeing, reading, talking, eating, and living together in freedom and in oppression for more than three hundred years. Interpreting the results of one of the most innovative projects in American archaeology, The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital speaks powerfully to the struggle for liberty among African Americans and the poor.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark P. Leone is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is coauthor, with Neil A. Silberman, of Invisible America (1995), and coeditor, with Parker B. Potter, of Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States (1988), among other books.
320 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 32 b/w photographs, 17 line illustrations, 13 tables
December 2005
Available worldwide
$39.95, £26.95 0-520-24450-8
Studies in the Cultural History of Letter Writing
Edited by Linda C. Mitchell and Susan Green
DESCRIPTION
This collection of essays shows how letters nimbly traverse the boundaries between the public and the private and examines the many roles of correspondence, from the domestic to the global. Contributors discuss a variety of engrossing subjects: documents of early exploration and diplomacy, including Columbus's texts and Amerigo Vespucci's reports of his experiences in America; the surprisingly large role that letters played in the success of the Jesuit order in the seventeenth century; English letter-writing manuals that provide model letters to be imitated while offering a vivid view into a cross section of lived experience; epistolary travel writings; and letter-writing instruction in nineteenth-century America, among other topics.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Linda C. Mitchell teaches English at San Jose State University and is the author of Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battlefield in 17th and 18th Century England . Susan Green is the editor of the Huntington Library Quarterly.
Categories: History ; Women's Studies; Letters
256 pages, 7 x 10 inches, 18 b/w illustrations
June 2005 Available worldwide
$26.95, £17.50 0-87328-205-1
May 13, 2008