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What does it mean to write a history of the night? Evening's Empire is a fascinating study of the myriad ways in which early modern people understood, experienced, and transformed the night. Using diaries, letters, and legal records together with representations of the night in early modern religion, literature and art, Craig Koslofsky opens up an entirely new perspective on early modern Europe. He shows how princes, courtiers, burghers and common people 'nocturnalized' political expression, the public sphere and the use of daily time. Fear of the night was now mingled with improved opportunities for labour and leisure: the modern night was beginning to assume its characteristic shape. Evening's Empire takes the evocative history of the night into early modern politics, culture and society, revealing its importance to key themes from witchcraft, piety, and gender to colonization, race, and the Enlightenment

European dominance of the shipping lanes in the early modern period was a prelude to the great age of European imperial power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet in the present age we can see that the pre-imperial age was in fact more an 'age of partnership' or an 'age of competition' when the West and Asia vied on even terms. The essays in this volume examine, on a global basis, the many different trading empires from the end of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century

Front cover -- Author -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of Acronyms -- Preface -- Introduction -- Section 1: Gay Liberation -- 1. Early Optimism -- 2. Early Images -- 3. 'Ostentatious Behaviour and Public Flaunting' -- Section 2: A Visible Subculture -- 4. Political Backlash -- 5. Conflicting Public Images -- 6. Gay Space -- Section 3: Joining the Mainstream -- 7. 'An End to Unjustifiable Discrimination' -- 8. Real Lives in the Media -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Back cover.

Since 1492, when Columbus 'discovered' America, the world has been moving toward an increasingly integrated global economy, higher population levels and consequently greater resource demands, and an increasingly precarious state of the biosphere. These developments play a major part in both modern history and in daily life. Understanding their interrelationships and development is crucial to the future of humanity and of the Earth, and is the unifying theme of this collection of readings

Ourselves Unborn examines how, from the nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century, Americans with disparate experiences, beliefs, values, and interests have participated in arguments about the legal identity, physiological condition, social value, cultural significance, and political status of the human fetus.

"Once the source of circumscribed local nuisances, the effects of human activities on the environment have turned into global pollution. The climate is warming, the seas are acidifying, the species are disappearing, the bodies are altered: to give an account from a historical point of view makes it possible not to sink in the stupefaction or the discouragement vis-a-vis a process which seems to have become inevitable. Because the great movement of contamination of the world that opens with industrialization is above all a social and political fact, marked by successive cycles, power relations, inertia, cultural transformations. By embracing the history of pollution over three hundred years, on a global scale, François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux explore conflicts and the organization of powers in the industrial age, but also the dynamics that have shaped capitalist modernity and his imaginary progress"--

A History of Drugs details the history of the relationship between drugs and freedom over the last two hundred years; thus disturbing and unravelling the 'naturalness' of the 'drug question', as it traces the multiple and heterogeneous lines of development out of which it has been assembled.

Volume IV examines the intersections of modernity and human sexuality through the forces, ideas, and events that have shaped the modern world. Through eighteen chapters, this volume examines connections between sexuality and the defining forces of modern global history including capitalism, colonialism, migration, consumerism, and war; sexuality in modern literature and print media; sexuality in dictatorships and democracies; and cultural changes such as sex education and the sexual revolution. The volume ends with discussions of the difficult issues we in the modern world continue to face, such as restrictions on reproductive rights, sex tourism, STDs and AIDS, sex trafficking, domestic violence, and illiberal attacks on sexuality.