Syria

An "authoritative and informative" ("The Nation") primer on the countries caught in the crosshairs of the Bush administration, by three renowned experts. Ever since the "axis of evil" label was first applied by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address, the hawks in his administration ha... More

"This is great material, and Florence...handles it with dramatic flair....An excellent work of popular history."--"Publishers Weekly" Damascus, February 1840. A Capuchin monk and his servant disappear without a trace. By the end of the day, rumors point to the Jewish community, a tiny minority in th... More

In a pioneering reinterpretation, the authors challenge the orientalist perception of the Islamic city. By considering the histories of three Ottoman cities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they depart from the piecemeal methods of previous studies to emphasize the importance of these ci... More

In February 1840 an Italian monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. Many Jews in that city were charged with ritual murder and tortured until they confessed. The case turned into a cause celebre across much of the Western world, even becoming a factor in the major diplomatic conflicts of the p... More

This book covers Julia??'s life, and charts her travels throughout the Empire from Aswan to York during a period of profound upheaval, seeking the truth about this woman who inspired such extreme and contrasting views, exposing the instability of our sources about her, and characterizing a sympathet... More

John Hobson challenges the ethnocentric bias of mainstream accounts of the "Rise of the West" that assume that Europeans have pioneered their own development, and that the East has been a passive by-stander. Describing the rise of what he calls the "Oriental West," Hobson argues that Europe first as... More