This chapter introduces the Greek concept of stasis, which is the term archaic and classical authors most frequently apply to episodes of regime-threatening political violence. It also reviews existing scholarship on the nature of stasis; describes the elements and dynamics that are typical of stasis; defines this commonly misunderstood term; and introduces a set of criteria designed to enable accurate diagnosis of as many staseis as possible, allow for consistent implementation in a broad range of historical and evidentiary contexts, map onto fifth- and fourth-century understandings of stasis as closely as possible, and ensure that, when departures from that emic understanding are necessary, they are implemented in a way that strengthens the validity of the results obtained in Chapters 2–12.

This chapter surveys existing scholarship on the violence of stasis and outlines my approach to examining the types and (especially) the amounts of violence that stasis typically involved. Next, it introduces 14 types of violence that are characteristic of stasis: for example, surprise attacks, betrayals (prodosiai), and mass executions. Finally, it divides staseis into three broad categories vis-à-vis the types of violence they involved, elucidates these categories, and discusses their relation to each other.

The Introduction examines the historiography of the idea of the state in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Machiavellian scholarship. It analyses the empirical and methodological problems associated with this specialist literature, before then outlining a new way of reconstructing Machiavelli’s theory of lo stato – and of interpreting it as the very crux of his political philosophy – by laying out a new intellectual basis upon which to reorient our present understanding of the foundations of Machiavelli’s conceptualization of the state from his earliest writings onwards. It draws new attention to the formative role in Renaissance political discourse of a sequence of theories – subsequently discussed in each chapter of Part I of the book – which were drawn from classical Roman political, moral, rhetorical, and aesthetic thought and which came to shape decisively Machiavelli’s own theory. And it forwards the contention, substantiated in detail in Part II, that his theory underwent two redactions, first in The Prince and then in the Discourses. The Introduction closes by broaching the crucial question of whether, in classifying Machiavelli as a singularly pioneering theorist of the state in the early modern period, we should also see him as a theorist of state personality.

The Epilogue discusses how the narrative and arguments of the book can help us revisit the debates in Ottoman intellectual historiography over the concept of order (nizam), underlining how labor history and class perspectives can expand the scope of questions and offer new agendas for Ottoman and global histories of the modern era. It offers a conceptual discussion of reform, and highlights the distinctive characteristics of Ottoman Reform in the long nineteenth century, by focusing on its connections with modern capitalism. It emphasizes the capitalist characteristic of the order which the reformist elites struggled to institute throughout the nineteenth century. It underlines how focusing on a specific worksite, and, in particular, studying relations of production within an Ottoman military-industrial site, could help us to reveal these capitalist patterns and class dynamics in Ottoman reform processes. It points to the necessity of the dialogue between labor/social history and intellectual history to better understand how these capitalist practices shaped or were shaped by the mentalities and ideas of Ottoman state elites during this period.

Historiographies of modern literature are often dominated by a view that perceives modernity as emerging from a break with tradition. This chapter challenges that view by arguing that Hasidic hagiography, a devout religious genre, played a fundamental role in modernizing Jewish culture and shaping the Jewish masses as a new phenomenon in Jewish experience. It proposes a historical model that examines the negative dialectic tensions among fragments of literary history, drawing on Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of montage in film theory. The approach compares fragments of literary history as independent “shots” within a dynamic system. The chapter contrasts the Hasidic popular genre of the 1860s with the contemporary Hebrew writings that set the tone for literary canonization and historiography. It highlights how Hasidic literary, theological, and ideological values differed from and even threatened the teleological narratives of secular Hebrew literature while also complementing them. Hasidic popular stories provided lingual flexibility freeing rabbinical Hebrew from the confines of Halakhic writing and avoiding eschatological national and secular ideologies. This allowed the masses to achieve modern literacy without breaking with tradition. The historiographical montage enables a reconsideration of literary historiography as a dynamic network of convergences and ruptures.

This opening chapter sets out the framework for a more systematic discussion of ancient Greek personal religion in the subsequent chapters. It starts from a working definition of personal religion by clarifying its relationship to the much better documented civic dimension of ancient Greek religion. Its core consists of a substantial historiographic section that grounds the study of personal religion in the larger trends that have shaped and continue to shape the study of the religions of the ancient world – including parallel developments in the study of Roman religion. Taking stock of where we stand helps us to sketch out what is at stake in foregrounding individual religious beliefs and practices and how they fit into our understanding of ancient Greek religion more broadly conceived.

This chapter considers conceptual books, conceptual writing and concrete poetries, while distinguishing conceptual books and writing from other experimental work. It analyses several examples to demonstrate how their very structure forms a critique of dominant knowledge systems, including structures of settler colonialism and nation. It also considers the relationship between conceptual art and conceptual writing, and the focus on materials, processes and practices surrounding the poem or book’s existence, value and consumption. It discusses the role of visualism in much of conceptual writing. It discusses how conceptual writing has troubled both First World and North-centric mappings and influences, creating parahistoriographies that might be considered parallel to, and separate from, dominant histories.

This introduction provides an overview of the theories and methodologies necessary to reveal the social, economic, and political lives of Afro-descended Mexicans after the abolition of slavery and caste. Beginning with the cofradía del Rosario in what is now Morelia, it sets the stage for the collection by showing how references to Afro-descended communities continued after independence in 1821. The introduction argues that the limited sources about Afro-descended Mexican citizens do not preclude the study of these communities after emancipation. Instead, it requires careful, often against the grain, readings of racial identities as well as of individual and collective agency, historical themes related to slavery and freedom that are better known in the colonial period. Ultimately, the introduction attempts to provide a roadmap for future studies into the history of Afro-Mexicans in the nineteenth century.

This chapter explores the methods and theories used in anthropology and music to understand Mexico's African presence and its relevance after the 1910 Revolution. Despite disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical differences at midcentury, Mexican scholars, chiefly anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and musicologist Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, focused on the colonial period and the postrevolutionary present. Their histories glossed over the nineteenth century. Their debates about how to study Afro-Mexico in the 1940s—and the research methodologies that buttressed them—elucidate why the history of nineteenth-century Afro-Mexico continues to be ignored in the historiography about Mexico’s place in the African diaspora. The intellectual and cultural histories explored in this chapter also explore why concerns about Mexico’s African presence have continued to loom over the field of Afro-Mexican studies.

The introduction explores the idea of an Islamic legal philosophy within the broader history and historiography of Islamic thought. It situates Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s career and reputation in historical and contemporary sources and situates his contribution in the fields and debates of Islamic intellectual and legal history. It explains the importance of the study and the key contributions it makes. Finally, it presents an overview of the sources used in the study and an outline of each of the book’s chapters.

The Conclusion considers the implications of the revisionist framework that seeks to hold the histories of Eastern Amazon together, even if there is much tension and conflict between its constituent parts. Specifically, the study forces a reconsideration of three aspects: the making of Indigenous territories in the sertão; how the concept of the sertão can be reworked in Brazilian historiography; and a reconsideration of the ways in which historical periods are conventionally broken up. Regardless of the changing meanings and varying human interactions with the Amazon environment, the enduring character that shapes human societies and the spaces they inhabit lies in its flowing waters. Understanding the Amazon through the aforementioned spatial history involves seeing it as a geographical place shaped by the interactions between the peoples who have lived there. To understand the Amazon today, these histories must be woven together, as the region was shaped by conflict and dispossession – legacies that persist to this day.

This book examines contemporary progress rhetoric and its history by focusing on medicine, a field that has become the touchstone of the focus on progress. In recent decades, the term progress has been used by a wide range of people, including politicians, scientists, engineers, physicians, and patients, to make sense of medicine’s past developments, current achievements, and desired future. Large, private companies such as Meta and Google, for example, link artificial intelligence research and genomic analysis to progress in medicine and praise their own contributions for that reason. Using a philosophically informed historical approach, this book argues that debates about progress in medicine are always political debates underpinned by different interests, which reflect distinct approaches to persons, health, and society. It draws on academic engagements with the history and philosophy of progress, as well as the insights of physicians, patients, and tech actors, to show how medical progress can hold multiple meanings simultaneously.

This chapter traces the development of modern urban history scholarship across the twentieth century, its roots being found in several interdisciplinary fields interested in the shape and growth of urban areas and the changing experience of urban life over time. Urban history’s institutionalisation and internationalisation is then examined, which started in the 1960s and 1970s before gathering momentum in the following decades with the spread of teaching and exchange programmes at European level and the end of the Cold War. At its core, the objective of these programmes and initiatives was to map the history of urbanisation and the growth of towns and cities using a comparative methodology, both within nation states and, increasingly, using a transnational approach to compare across borders. Finally, the chapter considers several recent ‘turns’ within modern and contemporary urban history since the 1990s – cultural, spatial and environmental to name a few – to illustrate emerging and emergent themes prevalent across the subfield. Yet, notwithstanding the fact that these ‘turns’ reflect the changeable nature of wider historical scholarship, urban historians remain fundamentally interested in the people, places and processes that constitute our frame of reference.

The introduction explains how the Eastern Amazon was shaped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this means appreciating the diverse spaces and peoples of the Amazon and how they define one another. The introduction shows how this approach re-centres the Amazon as part of a continental space and elucidates its role in continental history by analysing the historical agency of the people who inhabited the region. Sections make the theoretical and methodological justification for analytically joining up the spaces and territories that are historically considered separate. It discusses the use of a spatial history approach, and how this perspective contributes to a new understanding of the Amazon, and presents a revisionist and historically anthropological framing of the argument along definitions of keywords used in the book.

An epilogue assesses the impact of the antiwar movement. Both activists and scholars disagree over its significance. Despite common misperceptions of the movement by the public, antiwar activists generally represented mainstream American political values. While the movement did not stop the war by itself, it imposed real limits upon presidential decisions to escalate American military expansion. Movement activists overwhelmingly waged peace using the tools of democracy to align the nation’s practice with its most righteous vision.

This introduction argues against analyzing the Democrat Party in terms of strict binaries such as liberal–illiberal, center–periphery, secular–reactionary, or victim–perpetrator. While the divisions that scholars emphasize are real enough to affect the lives of people in Turkey, these divides are multiple and cross-cutting. Instead, I present an account of the Democrat Party, its role in Turkey’s democratization, and its engagement with the emerging Cold War order that is mindful of the divides in Turkey but that also acknowledges the party’s ability to transcend those divides – or, at least, embody their multiple contradictions. This book presents a portrait of the Democrat Party that encompasses these contradictions while also emphasizing Democrat Party leaders’ connections to the domestic political order that preceded them and to the international order of the 1950s.

Adopting a microhistorical approach and narrowing the scale of observation offers Cold War historians invaluable heuristic and narrative opportunities, uncovering little-known, seemingly “small” stories that nonetheless hold significant illustrative and historiographical power. This approach repositions human agency at the center of historical narratives and examines its interplay with broader political, geopolitical, and ideological structures. Drawing on Edoardo Grendi’s famous “exceptional/normal” antinomy, the book reconstructs the story of the evangelical Church of Christ’s mission in Italy – a story that is, at first glance, highly exceptional, but on closer examination proves to be remarkably normal within its broader historical context. The analysis seeks to connect global history with microhistory, bridging the dynamics of world integration, such as the Cold War, with the bottom-up perspectives of long neglected actors. This methodological challenge is compounded by the abundance of primary sources available to historians of post-1945 international relations. By exploring the Church of Christ’s Italian mission, the book highlights the potential of microhistory to enrich global historical frameworks, weaving together large-scale structural forces with the intricate, human-scale dynamics that often drive historical change.