Simon Lewis – författare

John Wesley and George Whitefield are remembered as founders of Methodism, one of the most influential movements in the history of modern Christianity. Characterized by open-air and itinerant preaching, eighteenth-century Methodism was a divisive phenomenon, which attracted a torrent of printed opposition, especially from Anglican clergymen. Yet, most of these opponents have been virtually forgotten. Anti-Methodism and Theological Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England is the first large-scale examination of the theological ideas of early anti-Methodist authors. By illuminating a very different perspective on Methodism, Simon Lewis provides a fundamental reappraisal of the eighteenth-century Church of England and its doctrinal priorities. For anti-Methodist authors, attacking Wesley and Whitefield was part of a wider defence of 'true religion', which demonstrates the theological vitality of the much-derided Georgian Church. This book, therefore, places Methodism firmly in its contemporary theological context, as part of the Church of England's continuing struggle to define itself theologically.

'Brilliantly written and genuinely one of the most important books I have ever read' - Ellie Mae O'Hagan An engrossing exploration of the science, history and politics of the Anthropocene, one of the most important scientific ideas of our time, from two world-renowned expertsMeteorites, methane, mega-volcanoes and now human beings; the old forces of nature that transformed Earth many millions of years ago are joined by another: us. Our actions have driven Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time in our home planet's 4.5-billion year history a single species is dictating Earth's future.To some the Anthropocene symbolises a future of superlative control of our environment. To others it is the height of hubris, the illusion of our mastery over nature. Whatever your view, just below the surface of this odd-sounding scientific word, the Anthropocene, is a heady mix of science, philosophy, religion and politics linked to our deepest fears and utopian visions. Tracing our environmental impact through time to reveal when humans began to dominate Earth, scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin masterfully show what the new epoch means for all of us.

Belarus is often regarded as "Europe’s last dictatorship", a sort-of fossilized leftover from the Soviet Union. However, a key factor in determining Belarus’s development, including its likely future development, is its own sense of identity. This book explores the complex debates and competing narratives surrounding Belarus’s identity, revealing a far more diverse picture than the widely accepted monolithic post-Soviet nation. It examines in a range of media including historiography, films and literature how visions of Belarus as a nation have been constructed from the nineteenth century to the present day. It outlines a complex picture of contested myths – the "peasant nation" of the nineteenth century, the devoted Soviet republic of the late twentieth century and the revisionist Belarusian nationalism of the present. The author shows that Belarus is characterized by immense cultural, linguistic and ethnic polyphony, both in its lived history and in its cultural imaginary. The book analyses important examples of writing in and about Belarus, in Belarusian, Polish and Russian, revealing how different modes of rooted cosmopolitanism have been articulated.

The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project (AHOB) funded by the Leverhulme Trust began in 2001 and brought together researchers from a range of disciplines with the aim of investigating the record of human presence in Britain from the earliest occupation until the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago. Study of changes in climate, landscape and biota over the last million years provides the environmental backdrop to understanding human presence and absence together with the development of new technologies. This book brings together the multidisciplinary work of the project. The chapters present the results of new fieldwork and research on old sites from museum collections using an array of new analytical techniques.

Features an up-to-date treatment of the record of human presence in the British Isles during the Palaeolithic period�(700,000 - 10,000 years before present) Takes multidisciplinary approach that includes archaeology, geochemistry, geochronology, stratigraphy and sedimentology Coincides with the culmination of the AHOB project in 2010, providing a benchmark statement on the record of human occupation in Britain that can be utilized and tested by future research

Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe.This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn.Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.

Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin’s emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe.This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland’s leaders en route to Katyn.Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe’s future.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) was once the largest country in Europe—a multicultural republic that was home to Belarusians, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Ruthenians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and other ethnic and religious groups. Although long since dissolved, the Commonwealth remains a rich resource for mythmaking in its descendent modern-day states, but also a source of contention between those with different understandings of its history. Multicultural Commonwealth brings together the expertise of world-renowned scholars in a range of disciplines to present perspectives on both the Commonwealth’s historical diversity and the memory of this diversity. With cutting-edge research on the intermeshed histories and memories of different ethnic and religious groups of the Commonwealth, this volume asks how various contemporary conceptions of multiculturalism can be applied to the region through a critical lens that also seeks to understand the past on its own terms.

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln's promise of a "new birth of freedom" in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America's Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln's promise of a "new birth of freedom" in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America's Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

Inspector Jian is a Chinese cop from the Siberian borders who thinks he's seen it all. But his search for his missing daughter brings him to the meanest streets he's ever faced - in rural England.Migrant worker Ding Ming is distressed - his gangmaster's making demands, he owes a lot of money to the snakeheads and no one will tell him where his wife has been taken. Maybe England isn't the `gold mountain' he was promised.....Two desperate men, uneasy allies in a baffling foreign land, are pitted against a band of ruthless criminals. There's BAD TRAFFIC ahead.

Bored of the 'mango smoothie' trail and keen to spice up their Facebook albums, and perhaps also their sex lives, Jake and Will take a tour into China's jungle borderland with Burma. Their guide, however, has his own agenda and gradually the two gap-year students slip into a nightmarish spiral of murder and moral decay; their chance of survival determined by a game of hide and seek played out with deadly crossbows.A fast paced, adrenaline ride of a novel: Deliverance meets Lord of the Flies.

Belarus is often regarded as "Europe’s last dictatorship", a sort-of fossilized leftover from the Soviet Union. However, a key factor in determining Belarus’s development, including its likely future development, is its own sense of identity. This book explores the complex debates and competing narratives surrounding Belarus’s identity, revealing a far more diverse picture than the widely accepted monolithic post-Soviet nation. It examines in a range of media including historiography, films and literature how visions of Belarus as a nation have been constructed from the nineteenth century to the present day. It outlines a complex picture of contested myths – the "peasant nation" of the nineteenth century, the devoted Soviet republic of the late twentieth century and the revisionist Belarusian nationalism of the present. The author shows that Belarus is characterized by immense cultural, linguistic and ethnic polyphony, both in its lived history and in its cultural imaginary. The book analyses important examples of writing in and about Belarus, in Belarusian, Polish and Russian, revealing how different modes of rooted cosmopolitanism have been articulated.

A first-person account of sudden, unexpected tragedy and life-affirming courage, this remarkable tale of regeneration imparts lessons both medical and spiritual.

An examination of the1808 international slave trade ban and its impact on the American South and Atlantic WorldIn March 1807, within a few weeks of each other, both the United States and the United Kingdom passed laws banning the international slave trade. Two hundred years later, Great Britain, an instigator of the slave trade and the chief source of slaves sold into continental North America, was awash nationwide in commemorations of the ban. By contrast the bicentennial of the ban received almost no attention in the United States. Ambiguous Anniversary aims to remedy that omission and to explain the discrepancy between the two commemorative responses. Edited by David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis, this volume examines the impact that closing the international slave trade in 1808 had on Southern American economics, politics, and society. Recasting the history of slavery in the early Republic and the memory of slavery and abolition in American culture, the foreword, introduction, and ten essays in this volume present a complex picture of an important but partial step in America's long struggle toward the ambitious but ambiguous goal of liberty and justice for all.

In an attempt to counter the insular narratives of much of the sesquicentennial commemorations of the Civil War in the United States, editors David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis present this collection of essays that examine the war as more than a North American conflict, one with transnational concerns. The book, while addressing the origins of the Civil War, places the struggle over slavery and sovereignty in the United States in the context of other conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Additionally Gleeson and Lewis offer an analysis of the impact of the war and its results overseas. Although the Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history and arguably its single most defining event, this work underscores the reality that the war was by no means the only conflict that ensnared the global imperial powers in the mid-nineteenth century. In some ways the Civil War was just another part of contemporary conflicts over the definitions of liberty, democracy, and nationhood. The editors have successfully linked numerous provocative themes and convergences of time and space to make the work both coherent and cogent. Subjects include such disparate topics as Florence Nightingale, Gone with the Wind, war crimes and racial violence, and choices of allegiance made by immigrants to the United States. While we now take for granted the nation's values of freedom and democracy, we cannot understand the impact of the Civil War and the victorious ""new birth of freedom"" without thinking globally.The contributors to The Civil War as Global Conflict reveal that Civil War-era attitudes toward citizenship and democracy were far from fixed or stable. Race, ethnicity, nationhood, and slavery were subjects of fierce controversy. Examining the Civil War in a global context requires us to see the conflict as a seminal event in the continuous struggles of people to achieve liberty and fulfill the potential of human freedom. The book concludes with a coda that reconnects the global with the local and provides ways for Americans to discuss the war and its legacy more productively.

'No Exit is a cracker... Elmore Leonard was a fan of Inspector Jian's first outing and he would have loved this too.' James Owen, The TimesBook of the Month in Crime TimeBook of the Month in The CriticFebruary pick in The TimesInspector Jian and his daughter Weiwei just want to go back to their home in China: but Jian is facing a corruption charge in his absence and risks arrest. Instead he tries to scrape a living on London's meanest streets as an illegal immigrant, reduced to hustling Mah Jiang for cash. A bleak future looks to be growing bleaker still when a triad gang blackmail him into tracking down an unlikely young robber.In No Exit Jian and Weiwei scramble between London's grimiest bedsits and its swankiest penthouses as they penetrate the glittering world of 'princelings' - the rich children of the Chinese elite, who treat the city as their playground. Locked in a desperate struggle, with no way out in sight, It will take all their wiles, as well as some lucky gambles, to come out of this latest venture alive.

“Regions of memory” are a scale of social and cultural memory that reaches above the national, yet remains narrower than the global or universal. The chapters of this volume analyze transnational constellations of memory across and between several geographical areas, exploring historical, political and cultural interactions between societies. Such a perspective enables a more diverse field of possible comparisons in memory studies, studying a variety of global memory regions in parallel. Moreover, it reveals lesser-known vectors and mechanisms of memory travel, such as across Cold War battle lines, across the Indian Ocean, or between Southeast Asia and western Europe.Chapters 1 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

“Regions of memory” are a scale of social and cultural memory that reaches above the national, yet remains narrower than the global or universal. The chapters of this volume analyze transnational constellations of memory across and between several geographical areas, exploring historical, political and cultural interactions between societies. Such a perspective enables a more diverse field of possible comparisons in memory studies, studying a variety of global memory regions in parallel. Moreover, it reveals lesser-known vectors and mechanisms of memory travel, such as across Cold War battle lines, across the Indian Ocean, or between Southeast Asia and western Europe.Chapters 1 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.