BiblioVault - Books about Past

Bioarchaeology of the American Southeast

Approaches to Bridging Health and Identity in the Past

Edited by Shannon Chappell Hodge and Kristrina A. Shuler

University of Alabama Press, 2018

A timely update on the state of bioarchaeological research, offering contributions to the archaeology, prehistory, and history of the southeastern United States.

Building on the 1991 publication What Mean These Bones? Studies in Southeastern Bioarchaeology, this new edited collection from Shannon Chappell Hodge and Kristrina A. Shuler marks steady advances over the past three decades in the theory, methodology, and purpose of bioarchaeology in the southeastern United States and across the discipline. With a geographic scope that ranges from Louisiana to South Carolina and a temporal span from early prehistory through the nineteenth century, the coverage aims to be holistic.

Bioarchaeology of the American Southeast: Approaches to Bridging Health and Identity in the Past is organized into two main parts. The first, “Context and Culture History in Bioarchaeology,” focuses on the fundamentals of archaeology—figuring out who lived at an archaeological site, when they lived there, what they did, and how they lived their lives.

This builds the framework that allows archaeologists to answer deeper questions, such as the ones addressed in the second part, “Social Identities in Bioarchaeology.” Here contributors explore questions of identity, ethnicity, gender and the status of women, social status, class, power and exploitation, migration, and conflict. These chapters implement and contribute to anthropological theory and showcase improved methods, such as innovative statistical analyses, and incorporate newer technology, including a DNA and geographic information system applications.

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Bring Out Your Dead

The Past as Revelation

Anthony Grafton

Harvard University Press, 2001

The work of the Renaissance humanists comes to life in Anthony Grafton’s exploration of the primary sources and modern scholarship, classical and modern elements in the world of European letters from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.Tracing the ties that bound the world of humanistic learning in early modern Europe to other social and cultural spheres, Grafton defines the current state of the art of scholarship on early modern European cultural and intellectual history while simultaneously demonstrating how entertaining, enlightening, and relevant that history can be.Covering a dazzling variety of topics and authors as different as Alberti and Descartes, Grafton maps the grand and meticulous efforts of the past to connect the realm of nature with that of books, the realm of everyday experience with that of passionate reading in massive tomes, and the realm of codes of etiquette and institutions with that of extravagant and joyous erudition—efforts that this book itself brilliantly carries on.

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The Burden of the Past and the English Poet

Walter Jackson Bate

Harvard University Press, 1970

The Burden of the Past

Problems of Historical Perception in Japan-Korea Relations

Kan Kimura; Translated by Marie Speed

University of Michigan Press, 2019

The Burden of the Past reexamines the dispute over historical perception between Japan and South Korea, going beyond the descriptive emphasis of previous studies to clearly identify the many independent variables that have affected the situation. From the history textbook debates, to the Occupation-period exploitation of “comfort women,” to the Dokdo/Takeshima territory dispute and Yasukuni Shrine visits, Professor Kimura traces the rise and fall of popular, political, and international concerns underlying these complex and highly fraught issues.

Utilizing Japanese and South Korean newspaper databases to review discussion of the two countries’ disputed historical perceptions from the end of World War II to the present, The Burden of the Past provides readers with the historical framework and the major players involved, offering much-needed clarity on such polarizing issues. By seeing behind the public discourse and political rhetoric, this book offers a firmer footing for a discussion and the steps toward resolution.

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Buried Indians

Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town

Laurie Hovell McMillin

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

In Buried Indians, Laurie Hovell McMillin presents the struggle of her hometown, Trempealeau, Wisconsin, to determine whether platform mounds atop Trempealeau Mountain constitute authentic Indian mounds. This dispute, as McMillin subtly demonstrates, reveals much about the attitude and interaction-past and present-between the white and Indian inhabitants of this Midwestern town.
McMillin's account, rich in detail and sensitive to current political issues of American Indian interactions with the dominant European American culture, locates two opposing views: one that denies a Native American presence outright and one that asserts its long history and ruthless destruction. The highly reflective oral histories McMillin includes turn Buried Indians into an accessible, readable portrait of a uniquely American culture clash and a dramatic narrative grounded in people's genuine perceptions of what the platform mounds mean.

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Burying the Past

Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict, Expanded and Updated Edition

Nigel Biggar, Editor

Georgetown University Press, 2003

No one can deny how September 11, 2001, has altered our understandings of "Peace" and "Justice" and "Civil Conflict." Those have become words with startling new life in our vocabularies. Yet "making" peace and "doing" justice must remain challenges that are among the highest callings of humanity—especially in a terror-heightened world. Nigel Biggar, Christian ethicist and editor of this now more than ever "must read" (Choice) volume, newly expanded and updated, addresses head-on the concept of a redemptive burying of the past, urging that the events of that infamous date be approached as a transnational model of conflict-and suggesting, wisely and calmly, that justice can be even the better understood if we should undertake the very important task of locating the sources of hostility, valid or not, toward the West.

Burying the Past asks these important questions: How do newly democratic nations put to rest the conflicts of the past? Is granting forgiveness a politically viable choice for those in power? Should justice be restorative or retributive? Beginning with a conceptual approach to justice and forgiveness and moving to an examination of reconciliation on the political and on the psychological level, the collection examines the quality of peace as it has been forged in the civil conflicts in Rwanda, South Africa, Chile, Guatemala and Northern Ireland.

There are times in history when "making peace" and "doing justice" seem almost impossible in the face of horrendous events. Those responses are understandably human. But it is in times just like these when humanity can—and must—rise to its possibilities and to its higher purposes in order to continue considering itself just and humane.

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