In 1756, Jacob Frank, an Ottoman Jew who had returned to the Poland of his birth, was discovered leading a group of fellow travelers in a suspect religious service. At the request of the local rabbis, Polish authorities arrested the participants. Jewish authorities contacted the bishop in whose diocese the service had taken place and argued that since the rites of Frank's followers involved the practice of magic and immoral conduct, both Je ...
In Britannien herrscht eine unsichere Ruhe. Northumbriens Wikingerfurst Sigtryggr und Merciens Konigin ?thelfl?d haben einen Waffenstillstand vereinbart. So sieht Uhtred, der gro?te Krieger Englands, die Chance zur Ruckeroberung der Bebbanburg, die ihm einst sein verraterischer Onkel raubte und die noch immer von seinem intriganten Cousin gehalten wird. Doch Uhtreds Eide hindern ihn an der Verwirklichung seines Plans. Dazu erscheint ein neuer Ge ...
Since 2005, a series of significant developments has been unfolding in the area of the Tongking Gulf under the rubric of an ambitious project called «Two Corridors and One Rim.» Proposed by Vietnam in 2004 and enthusiastically embraced by China, the project is designed to link their shared shores and hinterlands by superhighways and high-speed rail. An area that had seemed a backwater for two hundred years has suddenly become a dynamic engine of ...
Through their teaching of early Christian history and theology, Elizabeth A. Clark contends, Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Divinity School, and Union Theological Seminary functioned as America's closest equivalents to graduate schools in the humanities during the nineteenth century. These four Protestant institutions, founded to train clergy, later became the cradles for the nonsectarian study of religion at ...
In 1821, at the age of seventy-seven, Thomas Jefferson decided to «state some recollections of dates and facts concerning myself.» His ancestors, Jefferson writes, came to America from Wales in the early seventeenth century and settled in the Virginia colony. Jefferson's father, although uneducated, possessed a «strong mind and sound judgement» and raised his family in the far western frontier of the colony, an experience that contributed t ...
Premodern Chinese described a great variety of the peoples they encountered as «black.» The earliest and most frequent of these encounters were with their Southeast Asian neighbors, specifically the Malayans. But by the midimperial times of the seventh through seventeenth centuries C.E., exposure to peoples from Africa, chiefly slaves arriving from the area of modern Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, gradually displaced the original Asian «blacks» i ...
