Even in the panoply of Roman history, Hadrian stands out. Emperor from 117 to 138 ad, he was at once a benevolent ruler and a ruthless military leader, known for his restless and ambitious nature, his interest in architecture, and his passion for Greek culture. This book moves beyond the familiar image of Hadrian to offer a new appraisal of this Emperor’s contradictory personality, his exploits and accomplishments, his rule, and his military role, against the backdrop of his twenty-one-year reign.

Lavishly illustrated with key works of art and objects, celebrated and little-known sculptures, bronzes, coins and medals, drawings, and watercolors from museums around the globe, the book conveys a vivid sense of the world Hadrian inhabited. Thorsten Opper shows the emperor from many angles—as a complex individual, as a military leader and strategist, as the amateur architect who created magnificent buildings such as his villa at Tivoli (an empire in miniature), as the lover who deified his male lover Antinous after his mysterious death in the Nile, and, finally, as the traveler who tirelessly roamed his empire and its boundaries.

From his place in Roman history to his legacy, which even makes its way into the popular culture of our day, the Hadrian who emerges from these pages is no longer larger than life; rather, he has all the depth and complexity, the color and shadings and detail of life itself.

The tenth volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s celebrated Youth Biography Series examines the life of a man who helped define college basketball in the twentieth century and became an icon of American sports—John Wooden. He was born in the small Indiana town of Martinsville near the start of the last century. His claim to fame came first as an accomplished athlete, helping his high school basketball team compete in three state championship games, then earning All-American honors three times in his home state as a starting guard at Purdue University. After briefly teaching high school English and coaching several sports in Dayton, Kentucky, Wooden returned to Indiana, where he launched a successful career coaching basketball at South Bend Central High School and later at Indiana State Teachers College (now Indiana State University) in Terre Haute. In 1948, at age thirty-seven, Wooden moved west, as did many Americans in the post-World War II era. He took over the head basketball job at the University of California at Los Angeles, a school with virtually no basketball tradition. He took his family and his coaching skills with him. He also took his midwestern values. For the next six decades he remained in Southern California, creating a basketball dynasty at UCLA and solidifying his place as one of the sporting world’s greats. When he died on June 4, 2010, at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, he was four months shy of his hundredth birthday. Wooden’s success as a college coach was unprecedented and, in pure numbers, staggering. From 1964 to 1975, he led the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team to ten National Collegiate Athletic Association national basketball championships, including seven in a row—a feat that may never be matched. During that string of championships, he coached the Bruins to four perfect 30–0 seasons, an NCAA men’s record that still stands. He also coached UCLA to an eighty-eight-game winning streak, yet another unrivaled men’s record. Over the course of his twenty-seven seasons at UCLA, he mentored All-Americans such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton, earned the respect of legions of players, and inspired countless would-be roundballers and coaches alike. These achievements put Wooden in the company of legendary coaches throughout the field of sports. Even in that elite company, he fared especially well. In 2009 Sporting News magazine asked more than one hundred coaches and sports experts to name the greatest coach of all time in any sport. Not surprisingly, coaching giants such as the Green Bay Packers’s Vince Lombardi, Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne, the Boston Celtics’s Red Auerbach, and New York Yankees’s Casey Stengel ranked in the top ten; Wooden stood at number one the list. Long before that ranking, however, awards and honors flowed Wooden’s way. In 1973 he was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as coach, making him the first to be honored as both a player and a coach. (He received the honor as a player in 1960.) In 1977 college basketball’s annual player-of-the-year award was named for him. The NCAA bestowed its highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt award, on Wooden in 1995. And in 2006 the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Missouri, honored him as a member of the founding class, along with basketball inventor Doctor James Naismith. Accolades also poured in from outside the sports world. In 2003 President George W. Bush awarded Wooden the Presidential Medal of Freedom, American’s highest civilian honor. Two years later, Indiana bestowed on him its highest honor, the Sachem, an award recognizing a lifetime of excellence and virtue. In earlier decades, entities ranging from service clubs to faith-based organizations to universities rushed to salute not only his accomplishments but also his character.

Brothers Anton and Tolik reunite at their family home to bury their recently deceased mother. An otherwise natural ritual unfolds under extraordinary circumstances: their house is on the front line of a war ignited by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Isolated without power or running water, the brothers’ best hope for success and survival lies in the declared cease fire—the harvest truce. But such hopes are swiftly dashed, as it becomes apparent that the conflagration of war will not abate.

With echoes of Waiting for Godot, Serhiy Zhadan’s A Harvest Truce stages a tragicomedy in which the commonplace experiences of death, birth, and the cycles of life marked by the practices of growing and harvesting food are rendered futile and farcical in the wake of the indifferent juggernaut of war.

The man whom Indian nationalists perceived as the “George Washington of India” and who was President of the Indian National Congress in 1938–1939 is a legendary figure. Called Netaji (“leader”) by his countrymen, Subhas Chandra Bose struggled all his life to liberate his people from British rule and, in pursuit of that goal, raised and led the Indian National Army against Allied Forces during World War II. His patriotism, as Gandhi asserted, was second to none, but his actions aroused controversy in India and condemnation in the West.

Now, in a definitive biography of the revered Indian nationalist, Sugata Bose deftly explores a charismatic personality whose public and private life encapsulated the contradictions of world history in the first half of the twentieth century. He brilliantly evokes Netaji’s formation in the intellectual milieu of Calcutta and Cambridge, probes his thoughts and relations during years of exile, and analyzes his ascent to the peak of nationalist politics. Amidst riveting accounts of imprisonment and travels, we glimpse the profundity of his struggle: to unite Hindu and Muslim, men and women, and diverse linguistic groups within a single independent Indian nation. Finally, an authoritative account of his untimely death in a plane crash will put to rest rumors about the fate of this “deathless hero.”

This epic of a life larger than its legend is both intimate, based on family archives, and global in significance. His Majesty’s Opponent establishes Bose among the giants of Indian and world history.

March of the emperors.

The Historia Augusta is a biographical work roughly following the model of the imperial biographer Suetonius (LCL 31, 38) and covering the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117–138) to Carinus (r. 283–285), with a lacuna between the lives of the Gordians and the Valerians. Although the work comes down to us as a collection of thirty books written by six different authors, it is now generally considered to be the creation of a single individual writing under several pseudonyms no earlier than the late fourth century. It is a thoroughly enigmatic work whose origins, nature, and purpose remain obscure; the very beginning of the life of Hadrian is lost, and with it any general introduction that may have existed.

While the Historia Augusta is our most detailed surviving source for the second and third centuries, often providing details beyond the Greek accounts, it is not a trustworthy source for historical information: too many of the details are anachronistic, unsupported, or preposterous, or contradicted internally or by better sources, and many documents, speeches, acclamations, and inscriptions that it quotes or cites are entirely fictional.

The Historia Augusta nevertheless has its attractions: for the connoisseur of biography the author provides plenty of wordplay, puns, allusions, literary games, and mock-scholarly digressions, and for the casual reader he offers vivid characterizations of emperors both good and bad.

This revision of the original Loeb edition by David Magie offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.

March of the emperors.

The Historia Augusta is a biographical work roughly following the model of the imperial biographer Suetonius (LCL 31, 38) and covering the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117–138) to Carinus (r. 283–285), with a lacuna between the lives of the Gordians and the Valerians. Although the work comes down to us as a collection of thirty books written by six different authors, it is now generally considered to be the creation of a single individual writing under several pseudonyms no earlier than the late fourth century. It is a thoroughly enigmatic work whose origins, nature, and purpose remain obscure; the very beginning of the life of Hadrian is lost, and with it any general introduction that may have existed.

While the Historia Augusta is our most detailed surviving source for the second and third centuries, often providing details beyond the Greek accounts, it is not a trustworthy source for historical information: too many of the details are anachronistic, unsupported, or preposterous, or contradicted internally or by better sources, and many documents, speeches, acclamations, and inscriptions that it quotes or cites are entirely fictional.

The Historia Augusta nevertheless has its attractions: for the connoisseur of biography the author provides plenty of wordplay, puns, allusions, literary games, and mock-scholarly digressions, and for the casual reader he offers vivid characterizations of emperors both good and bad.

This revision of the original Loeb edition by David Magie offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.

March of the emperors.

The Historia Augusta is a biographical work roughly following the model of the imperial biographer Suetonius (LCL 31, 38) and covering the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117–138) to Carinus (r. 283–285), with a lacuna between the lives of the Gordians and the Valerians. Although the work comes down to us as a collection of thirty books written by six different authors, it is now generally considered to be the creation of a single individual writing under several pseudonyms no earlier than the late fourth century. It is a thoroughly enigmatic work whose origins, nature, and purpose remain obscure; the very beginning of the life of Hadrian is lost, and with it any general introduction that may have existed.

While the Historia Augusta is our most detailed surviving source for the second and third centuries, often providing details beyond the Greek accounts, it is not a trustworthy source for historical information: too many of the details are anachronistic, unsupported, or preposterous, or contradicted internally or by better sources, and many documents, speeches, acclamations, and inscriptions that it quotes or cites are entirely fictional.

The Historia Augusta nevertheless has its attractions: for the connoisseur of biography the author provides plenty of wordplay, puns, allusions, literary games, and mock-scholarly digressions, and for the casual reader he offers vivid characterizations of emperors both good and bad.

This revision of the original Loeb edition by David Magie offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.

112 full-color artistic photographs of watermills still standing on the North American landscape
 
The scenic beauty of the watermill is undeniable. The iconic waterwheel has inspired romantics for generations with their warmth and charm. Watermills were once ubiquitous landmarks along brooks, creeks, and rivers across North America. Today, only a scattering of the old watermills grace the countryside, but through these mills, and the turning of their wheels and the whirling of their stones, a small but spectacular part of history lives on.
 
Through stunningly beautiful images, Historic Watermills of North America: A Visual Preservation presents 112 watermills still standing on the North American landscape. With idealized full-color photographs, Ken Boyd nostalgically hearkens back to a time after European settlement when these structures were the very heart of the communities whose livelihoods they made possible. These mills turned the power of flowing water into mechanical energy to grind corn and wheat into meal and flour, saw timber, loom wool and cotton cloth, and more for the benefit of their operators and communities.
 
At one time vital to their surrounding regions, most of these surviving mills are in rural areas that have been passed over by modern development. Their designs are as individual as their makers, and their settings are as varied as the landscape. Some have been converted into homes or museums or are part of local tourist attractions. Others have been abandoned but give witness to the significance of their heydays, and others are still in use, doing the same work they have done for generations.
 
Boyd’s beautifully rendered photographs preserve these extant structures and represent a variety of watermills across the United States and Canada. Each mill photograph is accompanied by a description providing the name of the mill, its location, date of construction, and brief comments highlighting its most noteworthy features. Additional photographs and commentary in the afterword explore the inner workings of watermills.
 

A literary cabinet of curiosities.

Aelian’s Historical Miscellany is a pleasurable example of light reading for Romans of the early third century. Offering engaging anecdotes about historical figures, retellings of legendary events, and enjoyable descriptive pieces—in sum: amusement, information, and variety—Aelian’s collection of nuggets and narratives could be enjoyed by a wide reading public. A rather similar book had been published in Latin in the previous century by Aulus Gellius; Aelian is a late, perhaps the last, representative of what had been a very popular genre.

Here then are anecdotes about the famous Greek philosophers, poets, historians, and playwrights; myths instructively retold; moralizing tales about heroes and rulers, athletes and wise men; reports about styles in dress, food and drink, lovers, gift-giving practices, entertainments, religious beliefs and death customs; and comments on Greek painting. Some of the information is not preserved in any other source. Underlying it all are Aelian’s Stoic ideals as well as this Roman’s great admiration for the culture of the Greeks (whose language he borrowed for his writings).

The Historical Miscellany is now added to the Loeb Classical Library, the Greek text facing a skillful and helpfully annotated new translation by Nigel Wilson. In his trenchant Introduction he discusses the literary genre of Aelian’s miscellany, its style and historical setting.

In History and Modern Media, John Mraz largely focuses on Mexican photography and his innovative methodology that examines historical photographs by employing the concepts of genre and function. He developed this method in extensive work on photojournalism; it is tested here through examining two genres: Indianist imagery as an expression of imperial, neo-colonizing, and decolonizing photography, and progressive photography as embodied in worker and laborist imagery, as well as feminist and decolonizing visuality.

The book interweaves an autobiographical narrative with concrete research. Mraz describes the resistance he encountered in US academia to this new way of showing and describing the past in films and photographs, as well as some illuminating experiences as a visiting professor at several US universities. More importantly, he reflects on what it has meant to move to Mexico and become a Mexican. Mexico is home to a thriving school of photohistorians perhaps unequaled in the world. Some were trained in art history, and a few continue to pursue that discipline. However, the great majority work from the discipline known as "photohistory" which focuses on vernacular photographs made outside of artistic intentions.

A central premise of the book is that knowing the cultures of the past and of the other is crucial in societies dominated by short-term and parochial thinking, and that today's hyper-audiovisuality requires historians to use modern media to offer their knowledge as alternatives to the "perpetual present" in which we live.

Adventurous history.

Quintus Curtius was apparently a rhetorician who lived in the first century of the Roman empire and, early in the reign of Claudius (AD 41–54), wrote a history of Alexander the Great in ten books in clear and picturesque style for Latin readers. The first two books have not survived—our narrative begins with events in 333 BC—and there is material missing from books 5, 6, and 10. One of his main sources is Cleitarchus who, about 300 BC, had made Alexander’s career a matter of marvelous adventure.

Curtius is not a critical historian; and in his desire to entertain and to stress the personality of Alexander, he elaborates effective scenes, omits much that is important for history, and does not worry about chronology. But he does not invent things, except speeches and letters inserted into the narrative by traditional habit. “I copy more than I believe,” he says. Three features of his story are narrative of exciting experiences, development of a hero’s character, and a disposition to moralize. His history is one of the five extant works on which we rely for the career of Alexander the Great.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Quintus Curtius is in two volumes.

Adventurous history.

Quintus Curtius was apparently a rhetorician who lived in the first century of the Roman empire and, early in the reign of Claudius (AD 41–54), wrote a history of Alexander the Great in ten books in clear and picturesque style for Latin readers. The first two books have not survived—our narrative begins with events in 333 BC—and there is material missing from books 5, 6, and 10. One of his main sources is Cleitarchus who, about 300 BC, had made Alexander’s career a matter of marvelous adventure.

Curtius is not a critical historian; and in his desire to entertain and to stress the personality of Alexander, he elaborates effective scenes, omits much that is important for history, and does not worry about chronology. But he does not invent things, except speeches and letters inserted into the narrative by traditional habit. “I copy more than I believe,” he says. Three features of his story are narrative of exciting experiences, development of a hero’s character, and a disposition to moralize. His history is one of the five extant works on which we rely for the career of Alexander the Great.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Quintus Curtius is in two volumes.

A fresh, stimulating look at Adolf Hitler and his dictatorship throughout the study of ten key aspects.
 
Hitler’s tyranny is still difficult to understand today. In this book, Ralf Georg Reuth examines ten aspects of this catastrophe. Among other things, he asks: Was anti-Semitism more pronounced in Germany than elsewhere? Was Versailles really responsible for Hitler’s rise and why did the Germans follow a racial fanatic like him? How did his war differ from all others before it? The disturbing answers provide an overall picture that shows Hitler was not the consequence of the depths of German history, but the result of chance, deception, and seduction.

This thought-provoking new study takes aim at several of the norms of Hitler scholarship from the past forty years. Reuth interrogates and challenges a range of orthodox views on such topics as how mainstream politicians facilitated Hitler’s rise to power, the Führer’s infamous pact with Stalin, and the complicity of ordinary Germans in his genocidal tyranny. Eschewing a conventional chronological approach in favor of a forensic analysis of Hitler’s mainsprings of action both as chancellor and military commander, Reuth portrays Hitler as the apotheosis of what he argues is a specifically German strain of militarism and imperialism, shifting the focus firmly back to the mindset and modus operandi of Hitler himself. The portrait that emerges is one of a murderous fantasist and political opportunist driven by an all-embracing ideology of racial superiority. Reuth’s account courts controversy on a number of points and offers a fascinating counterpoint to much recent scholarship.
 

“So much is so skillfully crammed into this little book that the reader comes to admire Pratt’s zest while wondering how she could possibly have endured. . . . A splendid introduction by Molly Gloss, author of The Jump-Off Creek, enhances the book with a biography of the author and a study of her writings.” —Oregon Historical Quarterly

In 1911 Alice Day Pratt, single and nearing forty, boarded a train and left the east coast to file claim on 160 acres of land in the Central Oregon high desert. She was one among tens of thousands of people who took up homesteads in the arid West in the early twentieth century. Perhaps as many as 20 percent of these settlers were single women. Yet homesteading women are largely missing from the literature and histories of the West.

The commonly held image of frontier women as powerless and dependent helpmates stems in part from the scarcity of written accounts by homesteading women. Alice Day Pratt’s powerful memoir presents a rare, fascinating account of the life of a woman homesteader and chronicles her single-handed efforts to overcome the obstacles that faced all homesteaders—men and women—in the dryland West.

Pratt’s independent and adventurous spirit allowed her to hang on to her “homesteading dream” for more than a decade after most other homesteaders had packed their belongings and left the desert. By exploring the life she lived and the choices she made, Pratt offers an important glimpse into the social and cultural history of the American West.

With their courageous and engaging critique of Communism in the 1950s, these critically acclaimed Slovak classics demask one of the founding myths of modern Slovakia.

The Hours and The Minutes was first published in Bratislava in 1956, the year of Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” in which the Soviet leader formally acknowledged Stalin’s tyranny and opened the way for political reform throughout the Eastern Bloc. Alfonz Bednár’s writing was one of the first free of nationalist and communist propaganda, rejecting earlier ideologization of life by both the fascist right and Stalinist left and finding more empathetic ways to explore the complexity of human experience. His novellas defy traditional heroic depictions and portray the human individual, his relations, and morality as the subject of history rather than a utopian, collectivist ideology.

In these five novellas, Bednár is preoccupied with the insensitive, even inhuman, rootless, and amoral modernity that the war and Communist Party import into traditional Slovak life. The destruction of the traditional Slovak countryside during the twentieth century through modernization and urbanization, and with it a particular approach to life, forms his central theme. His spare, epic style and devotion to plot and dynamic narration render The Hours and The Minutes a genuine and gripping read.

An 11 year-old boy moves with his parents who have been evicted from a family farm in Wisconsin to live near his maternal grandparents in central Illinois. There, he discovers abandoned mine shafts which he explores with his grandfather's dog that suffers from flatulence. A stranger in town, the narrator is keenly aware of his outsider status and takes refuge in family, the dog, and his secret place in one of the abandoned coal mine shafts cut into the bank of the river bottoms under his grandparent's house. His acumen as an explorer comes in handy when another student--son of the local banker--goes missing.

This book is specifically dedicated to film history’s own history: It provides insights into the fabrication of film histories and the discourses on their materials and methods in the past in order to better understand and reconsider film history today. The interventions unpack unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas that determine film historiography until today, also with the aim to act as a critical reflection on the potential future orientation of the field. The edited volume proposes a transnational, entangled and culturally diverse approach towards an archaeology of film history, while paying specific attention to persons, objects, infrastructures, regions, institutional fields and events hitherto overlooked. It explores past and ongoing processes of doing, undoing and redoing film history. Thereby, in a self-reflective gesture, it also draws attention to our own work as film historians.

These chapters by eight Korea specialists present a new approach to human rights issues in Korea. Instead of using an external and purely contemporary standard, the authors work from within Korean history, treating the successive phases of Korea’s modern century to examine the uneasy fate of human rights and some of the ideas of human rights as they have developed in the Korean context. Beginning with the Independence Club of the late nineteenth century and continuing through to the constitutional and judicial structures underlying the Sixth Republic Government of Roh Tae Woo in South Korea, these papers illuminate the sometimes complex interactions between modern Korean human-rights issues and the legacies of Korean culture and colonial occupation.

The contributors provide a corrective to two common errors: one, an overemphasis on the tension between residual Confucian culture and human-rights concepts; two, the opposite error, a defensive nationalism that gives rise to ill-founded efforts to identify democratic antecedents in the Korean past. Instead, these authors allow each episode in the emergence of Korean human rights thought and action to stand in the context of its own time and of Korea’s modern history. The final sections deal with the usefulness and appropriateness of U.S. policies toward human rights in South Korea and comparatively with the overall issues raised in the volume.

Constantijn Huygens was a poet, composer and connoisseur of art and the classics. He was also secretary and confidant to three princes of Orange for 62 years. Hofwijck was also the place where Constantijn’s son Christiaan spent a significant part of his life. Christiaan Huygens was a member of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge and became one of the greatest inventors and scientists. At the end of his life, at Hofwijck, he wrote Cosmotheoros, his magnum opus on the universe. At Huygens’s Hofwijck we look at the seventeenth century through the eyes of these two versatile men. With Constantijn and Christiaan, the story is about literature, art, music, politics, the House of Orange, science and life at a seventeenth-century country estate.