Isaac - Böcker

Landon Carter, a Virginia planter patriarch, left behind one of the most revealing of all American diaries. In this astonishingly rich biography, Rhys Isaac mines this remarkable document--and many other sources--to reconstruct Carter's interior world as it plunged into revolution. The aging patriarch, though a fierce supporter of American liberty, was deeply troubled by the rebellion and its threat to established order. His diary, originally a record of plantation business, began to fill with angry stories of revolt in his own little kingdom. Carter writes at white heat, his words sputtering from his pen as he documents the terrible rupture that the Revolution meant to him. Indeed, Carter felt in his heart he was chronicling a world in decline, the passing of the order that his revered father had bequeathed to him. Not only had Landon's king betrayed his subjects, but Landon's own household betrayed him: his son showed insolent defiance, his daughter Judith eloped with a forbidden suitor, all of his slaves conspired constantly, and eight of them made an armed exodus to freedom. The seismic upheaval he helped to start had crumbled the foundations of Carter's own home. Like Laurel Ulrich in her classic A Midwife's Tale, Rhys Isaac here unfolds not just the life, but the mental world of our countrymen in a long-distant time. Moreover, in this presentation of Landon Carter's passionate narratives, the diarist becomes an arresting new character in the world's literature, a figure of Shakespearean proportions, the Lear of his own tragic kingdom. This long-awaited work will be seen both as a major contribution to Revolution history and a triumph of the art of biography.

For more than seven centuries most of the Near East was part of the Roman empire. Yet no work exists which explores the means by which an ancient power originating in the western Mediterranean could control such a vast and distant region. What was the impact of the army presence on the population of the provinces? How did Rome respond to the challenge posed by the desert and its nomadic population? Professor Isaac here offers answers to these questions in the first comprehensive treatment of the Roman military presence in the Near East. Using both well-known and neglected sources, he reassesses the means by which Rome achieved and maintained her control over the region. He discusses the extent to which current vacillating views on imperialism can affect opinions concerning the character and mechanisms by which Rome ensured the integrity and expansion of her influence. Also considered here are problems of methodology, especially the use of archaeological remains for historical interpretation. Professor Isaac casts new light on an important issue which has far-reaching implications for the understanding of ancient and modern imperialism.

Historians have long understood that the notion of "the cold war" is richly metaphorical, if not paradoxical. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was a war that fell ambiguously short of war, an armed truce that produced considerable bloodshed. Yet scholars in the rapidly expanding field of Cold War studies have seldom paused to consider the conceptual and chronological foundations of the idea of the Cold War itself. This stands in contrast to the study of other historical epochs that are governed by grand but ambivalent rubrics: the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution. In Uncertain Empire, a group of leading scholars takes up the challenge of making sense of the idea of the Cold War and its application to the writing of American history. They interrogate the concept from a wide range of disciplinary vantage points; the scope of these different positions illustrates the diversity of methods and approaches in contemporary Cold War studies. Among the disciplines on which the book draws are diplomatic history, the history of science, literary criticism, cultural history, and the history of religion.Animating the volume as a whole is a question about the extent to which the Cold War was an American invention. Essays look at the Cold War as in need of a rigorous re-centering, after a decade in which historians have introduced expansive global and transnational perspectives on the conflict; as a uniquely American ideological project designed to legitimize the pursuit of an ambitious geopolitical agenda; as a geopolitical and transnational phenomenon; and other approaches. Uncertain Empire brings these debates into focus, and offers students of the Cold War a new framework for considering recent developments in the scholarship.