This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1874 edition by Henry S. King & Co., London.

Excavating Victorians examines nineteenth-century Britain's reaction to the revelations about time and natural history provided by the new sciences of geology and archaeology. The Victorians faced one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history: the bottom dropped out of time, and they had to reinvent their relationship to the earth and to time and history. These new sciences took the Victorians by storm, inundating them with fossils, skeletal remains, and potsherds--artifacts, or traces, that served at once as relics from the past, objects in the present, and markers of time's passage. Virginia Zimmerman explores how the Victorians utilized a nexus of literature, excavation, and reflections on time to ease anxieties about the individual's fate in the face of time's overwhelming expanse. The function of artifacts is also considered through careful readings of Tennyson's The Princess and Dickens's Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. Zimmerman shows how these literary works make use of the language, tropes, and even generic conventions of excavation, and how they participate in the effort to rescue the individual from temporal insignificance. "This book is a sheer pleasure to read. Zimmerman has crafted an important and genuinely intriguing interpretation of the relationship between literature, geology, and archaeology in the period when these new sciences came into their own as separate disciplines. Zimmerman brings to her interpretations an impressive knowledge of many now forgotten episodes in the history of science. She examines a wide range of works and finds elegant and convincing ways to make them speak to each other.

It is twenty years after Nazi Germany's triumphant victory in World War II and the entire country is preparing for the grand celebration of the FÜhrer's seventy-fifth birthday, as well as the imminent peacemaking visit from President Kennedy. Meanwhile, Berlin Detective Xavier March -- a disillusioned but talented investigation of a corpse washed up on the shore of a lake. When a dead man turns out to be a high-ranking Nazi commander, the Gestapo orders March off the case immediately. Suddenly other unrelated deaths are anything but routine. Now obsessed by the case, March teams up with a beautiful, young American journalist and starts asking questions...dangerous questions. What they uncover is a terrifying and long-concealed conspiracy of such astonding and mind-numbing terror that is it certain to spell the end of the Third Reich -- if they can live long enough to tell the world about it.

Examines the deleterious effects of the U.S. failure to focus on protecting the Iraqi population for most of the military campaign in Iraq and analyzes the failure of a technologically driven counterinsurgency (COIN) approach. It outlines strategic considerations relative to COIN; presents an overview of the conflict in Iraq; describes implications for future operations; and offers recommendations to improve the U.S. capability to conduct COIN.
This monograph outlines strategic considerations relative to counterinsurgency campaigns; presents an overview of the current conflict in Iraq, focusing on counterinsurgency; analyzes counterinsurgency operations in Iraq; presents conclusions about counterinsurgency, based on the U.S. experience in Iraq; describes implications from that experience for future counterinsurgency operations; and offers recommendations to improve the ability of the U.S. government to conduct counterinsurgency in the future. For example, U.S. counterinsurgency experience in Iraq has revealed the need to achieve synergy and balance among several simultaneous civilian and military efforts and the need to continually address and reassess the right indicators to determine whether current strategies are adequate. The need to continually reassess counterinsurgency strategy and tactics implies that military and civilian leaders must have not only the will, but also a formal mechanism, to fearlessly and thoroughly call to the attention of senior decisionmakers any shortfalls in policies and practices, e.g., in Iraq, failure to protect the civilian population, as well as overreliance on technological approaches to counterinsurgency. The Iraq experience is particularly germane to drawing lessons about counterinsurgency. In essence, the conflict there is a local political power struggle overlaid with sectarian violence and fueled by fanatical foreign jihadists and criminal opportunists — a combination of factors likely to be replicated in insurgencies elsewhere.

This monograph begins by examining prewar planning efforts for postwar Iraq, in order to establish what U.S. policymakers expected the postwar situation to look like and what their plans were for reconstruction. The monograph then examines the role of U.S. military forces after major combat officially ended on May 1, 2003; the analysis covers this period through the end of June 2004. Finally, the monograph examines civilian efforts at reconstruction after major combat ended, focusing on the activities of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and its efforts to rebuild structures of governance, security forces, economic policy, and essential services prior to June 28, 2004, the day that the CPA dissolved and transferred authority to the Interim Iraqi Government. The authors conclude that the U.S. government was unprepared for the challenges of postwar Iraq for three reasons: a failure to challenge fundamental assumptions about postwar Iraq; ineffective interagency coordination; and the failure to assign responsibility and resources for providing security in the immediate aftermath of major combat operations.

The societies that developed in the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age produced the most prolific and diverse range of stone vessel traditions known at any time or anywhere in the world. Stone vessels are therefore a key class of artifact in the early history of this region. In this book, Andrew Bevan considers individual stone vessel industries in great detail. He also offers a highly comparative and value-led perspective on production, consumption and exchange logics throughout the eastern Mediterranean over a period of two millennia during the Bronze Age (ca. 3000-1200 BC).

This book is an attempt to blend traditional empirical, objective archaeological analysis with the study of changing patterns of landscapes and, through them, people and places and the relationships between them. The author focuses on late Iron Age southern Scandinavia through to early medieval polity of Denmark, a time of regional transformation from many autonomous, complex, middle-range societies into a unified, centralized state.

In the Second-Temple period non-Jews were attracted to Judaism's communal life, religious observance and theological imagination. On the Jewish side, this was matched by the development of several discrete patterns of universalism ways in which Jews were able to conceive of a positive place for Gentiles within their symbolic world. In this book Terence Donaldson collects and comments on all of the texts (to the end of the second Jewish rebellion in 135 CE) that deal with Gentile sympathizers, proselytes, ethical monotheists and participants in end-time redemption. In impressive detail, Donaldson identifies, defines, and describes these "patterns of universalism."

We now have Raymond Bowman's long awaited edition of the Aramaic texts from Persepolis, unearthed during the expedition by the University of Chicago under Erich F. Schmidt between 1936 and 1938. Bowman has assembled important data on the chronology of Persepolis during the first half of the fifth century B.C. from the personal names and official titles listed in the Aramaic texts. He shows acumen in attacking certain textual problems, and his commentary and introduction provide the scholar with information necessary for a proper understanding of this corpus of some two hundred brief, formulaic inscriptions written on various stone implements-mortars and pestles, plates and trays-found in the treasury at Persepolis. [From an article by Baruch A. Levine in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 92 (1972) 70-79].

From Apostle Andrew to the conclusion of Soviet authority in 1990, Daniel Shubin presents the entire history of Christianity in Russia in a 3-volume series. The events, people and politics that forged the earliest traditions of Russian Christianity are presented objectively and intensively, describing the rise and dominance of the Russian Orthodox Church, the many dissenters and sectarian groups that evolved over the centuries (and their persecution), the presence of Catholicism and the influx of Protestantism and Judaism and other minority religions into Russia. The history covers the higher levels of ecclesiastical activity including the involvement of tsars and princes, as well as saints and serfs, and monks and mystics. This, the first volume, deals with the period from Apostle Andrew to the death of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, just prior to the election of the first Russian Patriarch, a period of almost 1600 years.

From Apostle Andrew to the conclusion of Soviet authority in 1990, Daniel Shubin presents the entire history of Christianity in Russia in a 3-volume series. The events, people and politics that forged the earliest traditions of Russian Christianity are presented objectively and intensively, describing the rise and dominance of the Russian Orthodox Church, the many dissenters and sectarian groups that evolved over the centuries (and their persecution), the presence of Catholicism and the influx of Protestantism and Judaism and other minority religions into Russia. The history covers the higher levels of ecclesiastical activity including the involvement of tsars and princes, as well as saints and serfs, and monks and mystics. This, the first volume, deals with the period from Apostle Andrew to the death of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, just prior to the election of the first Russian Patriarch, a period of almost 1600 years.

Volume III The Synodal Era and the Sectarians, 1725 to 1894 covers the period 1725 through 1894, which is known as the Synodal Era of Russian Orthodoxy. This is the era of Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, and the great tsars of 19th-century Russia. The Synodal Era includes the rise of the dissenters and sectarians. The history of Old Believers is discussed, along with the Iconoclasts, Judaizers, Dukhabors, Molokans, Khlisti, Skoptzi, and Stundists of Russian Christianity, and the many other small sects, as well as the Christian philosophies of Grigori Skovoroda and Leo Tolstoy.

In Volume IV, The Orthodox Church 1894 to 1990 Tsar Nicholas II to Gorbachev's Edict on the Freedom of Conscience, the initial chapters cover the decline of the power of Russian Orthodoxy, the rise of Rasputin, and the last tsar Nicholas II; then the struggle of Russian Orthodox Christianity to survive as the Russian Empire falls to the Soviets is discussed. The balance of the volume deals with the dramatic era of the Soviet regime's efforts to bring down Russian Orthodoxy, ending with the reversal under Gorbachev in 1990 and the Church's resurgence.