This introductory textbook goes beyond both traditional textbooks and books of readings; the authors focus on contemporary empirical and theoretical developments in their fields and react to them rather than simply report. In this way each chapter develops arguments about issues such as education, poverty, violence and human rights, and the environment that are both interesting and relevant. The result is an engaging introduction for students, with questions and reading lists, and a stimulating portrait of the discipline.

During the First World War and after, conscientious objectors were vilified, assaulted, imprisoned and, on occasion, executed. This radical and refreshing book combines gender studies, criminology and sociology to explore the treatment of war resisters and the relationship between patriotism and conscience. Drawing on diaries, government papers, legal records, newspapers, magazines and fiction, it examines notions of masculinity and manliness, and explores the different ways in which COs were viewed: as cowards, heroes, criminals, degenerates or upstanding moral figures.

Clare Anderson's study uses biographical fragments of the lives of convicts, captives, sailors, slaves, indentured labourers and indigenous peoples to build a picture of 19th-century colonial life in the Indian Ocean. Critical Perspectives on Empire series. No jacket.

Was homosexuality in the Victorian era really 'the love that dare not speak its name'? This study argues that even before Oscar Wilde and the rise of sexual science there was an open, public discussion of same-sex desire that went to the heart of Victorian notions of masculinity, class and civil society. Cocks examines the paradox of how homosexuality came to be identified as secret, unknowable and nameless when the Victorians regularly described its existence as widespread and threatening.

Building on, but rethinking and adding substantially to his earlier, widely read Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth Century England (1979), Andrew Scull presents a new examination of the 'intractable dilemmas the Victorians confronted in coping with unreason'. He explores the evolution of the treatment of lunacy in England and Wales, discussing topics including 'the chimera of the curative asylum', transformations in social practices and beliefs, and the new profession of psychiatry.

Using the evidence of complex societies ranging from the ancient Sumerians and Persians to the Chinese Manchus of the 17th century, this book, originally published in 1989, gives an overview of the constraints under which civilization operated before the Industrial Revolution. Patricia Crone (1945-2015) identifies the characteristics shared by such cultures: she analyses the organization of their agriculture, economy and politics, the role played by religion, and the relationship between society and the individual. Please note that the book is printed badly, although the text remains legible.

A study of the meaning of the Acropolis in contemporary Greece addressing how global ideas are adopted by local cultures and how Greeks deal with their classical heritage.

The American scholar William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) was among the first to adopt the descriptive concept of sociology, and he undertook a search of ancient and modern customs around the world in order to understand the ways in which mores are formed, how they grow or decay and how they endure. Among the many topics he discusses are labour and wealth, slavery, abortion and infanticide, cannibalism, marriage, sports and asceticism. Reprint of the original edition, 1907.

This volume offers an integrative approach to the application of evolutionary theory in studies of cultural transmission and social evolution and reveals the enormous range of ways in which Darwinian ideas can lead to productive empirical research. The 21 essays include studies by archaeologists, evolutionary theorists and ethnographers and cover a wide range of time periods, localities, cultural groups and artefacts.

Published in 2000, this study of London and some of its localities (the West End, East End and the City) explores 'the changing contours of power and inequality as the imperial capital has given way to a multicultural, global city'. No jacket.

This catalogue of the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, highlights the unique insights it provides into the history of slavery from the mid 16th to the early 20th century. More than 600 artefacts and works of art, many illustrated here for the first time, are examined. Ten essays by leading scholars set the items in their historical context, demonstrating the scale and brutality of slavery, the extent of African resistance, and the efforts to achieve abolition and emancipation.

Drawing on the archives of National Geographic, this collection of 280 photographs spans more than a century: from Julia Margaret Cameron's portrait of Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll's inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, to grieving villagers photographed in Kosovo in 2000, each picture tells its own story and together they show how photographic portraiture has evolved in creative response to new technologies, new eras and new ideas. Accompanying the photographs are essays by five National Geographic photographers.

Warning against accepting the history of sexuality in Europe simply as a story of increasing liberalization, Herzog examines the complex issues involved, including backlashes against liberalizing efforts.

Although central topics of concern in contemporary Europe, migration, integration and multiculturalism have always been part of its history. A scholarly overview of migration within and into Europe since the 17th century, the Encyclopedia comprises 17 survey studies of the various regions and countries of Europe, followed by information on approximately 220 groups, from African slaves in early modern Britain to affluent British migrants to the Costa del Sol in the late 20th century.

The rise of radical Islam has placed British Muslims under unprecedented scrutiny. This ground-breaking study examines the complexities of their experience by focusing on Yemenis who settled in ports in the early 20th century. Through the stories of sailors in Cardiff, South Shields and Liverpool, and industrial workers in Sheffield, Birmingham and Manchester, it traces the development of community organizations and the impact of government policies, shedding valuable new light on Islam in Britain today.

Written for both academic and general readers, the volumes of the Berg Encyclopedia focus on the 19th to early 21st centuries and comprise essays on the full spectrum of issues relating to dress and body modification, with topics ranging from antebellum African American dress to military and civil uniforms. This volume contains more than 70 essays covering First Nations peoples, and European and other cultural groups in the USA and Canada.

Written for both academic and general readers, the volumes of the Berg Encyclopedia focus on the 19th to early 21st centuries and comprise essays on the full spectrum of issues relating to dress and body modification, with topics ranging from tooth staining in the Philippines to catwalk fashion in Southeast Asia. In this volume, 63 essays cover 15 countries, including India, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

A professor of geography at UCLA, Jared Diamond looks back to humans' former lifestyle through his own fieldwork in traditional societies that still exist or were recently in existence, such as the highland peoples of New Guinea, Andaman Islanders, African Hadza and North American Inuit. Diamond highlights the many crucial lessons to be gleaned from 'primitive' societies, pointing to life decisions that may help us live longer, healthier lives, enjoy old age, and raise self-confident children.

In contrast to our modern customs of death, with their mostly unostentatious brevity, the ritualized process of dying and commemoration in pre-industrial England was drawn out in ways which can sometimes seem bizarre. The focus of this book is the period's rich culture of visual artefacts connected with death - both the symbols and devices which warned the living to 'remember their end' and the monuments that were produced to keep alive the memory of the departed.

Angry, exhilarating and fiercely funny, Hatherley excoriates the effect of economic mismanagement on the places we live, exposing how cheap and nasty architecture exemplifies cheap and nasty politics.

Born a slave and freed in 1865 at the age of nine, Booker T Washington went on to become one of the most influential educationalists in US history. First published in 1909, this authoritative and eloquent classic charts the history of the slave trade, the exploitation of slaves in America, and how slavery came to be abolished. Washington also outlines his vision of how African- Americans might prosper in American society: a rallying-call that still resonates today.

In this critical introduction to the work of Max Weber (1864-1920), Allen argues that Weber's sociology cannot be divorced from his political standpoint as a 'class conscious bourgeois'. No jacket.

The debate on housework was central to the women's movement, and increasingly women strived for self-fulfilment. In this revised edition of Ellen Malos's economic and political history, she brings together writings about the domestic labour debate by leading figures from the 20th century. The book is brought up to date with a new chapter on how the debate has continued into the 1990s, revealing the continuing contradictions in the lives of women and work.

Sex is one of the most powerful human drives, and societies have sought to regulate it since the dawn of history. Meticulous, scholarly, yet laced with spicy anecdote, this chronological survey ranges from the brutal impalement of an adulteress in Mesopotamia to the trials of Oscar Wilde. Peopled with transvestites, rent boys, royal mistresses and gay charioteers, it demonstrates how what is 'normal' in one age is forbidden in another, exposing the futility of such attempts to constrain human sexuality.

Clive James was one of the most popular presenters of BBC Radio 4's A Point of View, talking for ten minutes about anything and everything that caught his attention. This book brings together his 60 talks, written amid the 'Swiftian scenario' offered by the years 2007-2009, and tackling everything from bankers to bad language in the certain knowledge that 'about three million of the brightest people in the country were within arm's reach of a button that could turn you off' - so his argument had better be good.