Understanding world history: historical case studies & short biographies
Understanding the Protestant Reformation from the Unusual Perspective of Wolfgang Capito
Understanding Spanish Colonialism from the Unusual Perspective of Diego Fernández de Córdoba
Understanding Spanish Colonialism from the Unusual Perspective of Diego Fernández de Córdoba
This historical case study and short biography tells the story of the Reformation through the experiences of a cautious theologian who helped bring Protestantism to Strasbourg, France. After 1517, Capito devoted himself to seeking compromise and conciliation between various Protestant factions. The futility of his persistent efforts illustrate the irreconcilable theological differences between Anabaptists, Calvinists, Catholics, and Lutherans. The chapter also examines the importance of Erasmus, humanism, the Holy Roman Empire, and scholasticism. historical case studies short biographies
Understanding Spanish Colonialism from the Unusual Perspective of Diego Fernández de Córdoba
Understanding Spanish Colonialism from the Unusual Perspective of Diego Fernández de Córdoba
Understanding Spanish Colonialism from the Unusual Perspective of Diego Fernández de Córdoba
This historical case study and short biography analyzes Spanish colonial governance in the early seventeenth century by examining the career of Diego Fernández de Córdoba. Fernández served as viceroy of both New Spain (Mexico) and Peru during a period that featured strained race relations, new socio-economic tensions, and conflicts between Catholic religious orders. His measured responses to Jews, the Inquisition, the status of women, and local rebellions reveal a man determined to hold a vast empire together through the power of compromise. What emerges is a new understanding of an often-overlooked period in Latin American history. historical case studies short biographies
Understanding Tokugawa Japan from the Unusual Perspective of Emperor Go-Mizunoo
Understanding Spanish Colonialism from the Unusual Perspective of Diego Fernández de Córdoba
Understanding the Dutch Golden Age from the Unusual Perspective of Gisbert Heeck
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies investigates the life of the Japanese emperor who abdicated in 1629 and then dedicated the rest of his life to promoting Japanese cultural traditions and artistic forms as a poignant resistance to the assertion of Tokugawa authority. The story of Go-Mizunoo’s defiance, which was deeply tied to the development of Buddhist sects in Japan, presents the familiar story of the rise of the shoguns from an unexpected perspective that helps us to understand the complexities of seventeenth century Japan in a new way.
Understanding the Dutch Golden Age from the Unusual Perspective of Gisbert Heeck
Understanding the French Enlightenment from the Unusual Perspective of Julie de Lespinasse
Understanding the Dutch Golden Age from the Unusual Perspective of Gisbert Heeck
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies utilizes the compelling but little-known journal of a surgeon in the Dutch East India Company to explore the social history of seventeenth century Holland, South Africa, Indonesia, and Thailand. Gisbert Heeck’s vivid account stands as one of the great travel narratives of his era and provides us with a unique lens to explore everything from the history of medical science to mercantilism, from the tradition of Dutch still life painting to Amsterdam’s Jewish life. What emerges is a rich portrait of a global economy and the people who participate in it.
Understanding Mughal India from the Unusual Perspective of Jahanara
Understanding the French Enlightenment from the Unusual Perspective of Julie de Lespinasse
Understanding the French Enlightenment from the Unusual Perspective of Julie de Lespinasse
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies utilizes the compelling but little-known journal of a surgeon in the Dutch East India Company to explore the social history of seventeenth century Holland, South Africa, Indonesia, and Thailand. Gisbert Heeck’s vivid account stands as one of the great travel narratives of his era and provides us with a unique lens to explore everything from the history of medical science to mercantilism, from the tradition of Dutch still life painting to Amsterdam’s Jewish life. What emerges is a rich portrait of a global economy and the people who participate in it.
Understanding the French Enlightenment from the Unusual Perspective of Julie de Lespinasse
Understanding the French Enlightenment from the Unusual Perspective of Julie de Lespinasse
Understanding the French Enlightenment from the Unusual Perspective of Julie de Lespinasse
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies explores the life and relationships of Julie de Lespinasse, a thirty-four-year old woman who broke with convention and opened her own salon in Paris in 1764. What she created was a place where both established and nascent intellectuals were free to express themselves candidly. The novelty of that atmosphere regularly allowed Lespinasse to attract the leading figures of the Enlightenment to her salon, including d'Alembert, Diderot, Hume, and Rousseau. What emerges from these interactions and Lespinasse’s biography is a new perspective on the critical transition from Europe’s Age of Reason to the Age of Romanticism.
Understanding 18th Century Atlantic Trade from the Unusual Perspective of Richard Oswald
Understanding Race, Labor, and Radicalism in the U.S. from the Unusual Perspective of Lucy Parsons
Understanding Race, Labor, and Radicalism in the U.S. from the Unusual Perspective of Lucy Parsons
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies focuses on Scottish businessman Richard Oswald, a man who epitomized the inter-connectivity of the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century, as well as the horrors that unity produced. By establishing his own triangular trade with a slave station in Sierra Leone, a plantation in Florida, and an office in London, Oswald became a wealthy man who benefited from the misery of others. Because he also served as the chief British negotiator in the Peace of Paris (1783) that ended the American Revolution, Oswald's life also provides us with a unique window into the diplomatic politics of a rapidly changing world.
Understanding Race, Labor, and Radicalism in the U.S. from the Unusual Perspective of Lucy Parsons
Understanding Race, Labor, and Radicalism in the U.S. from the Unusual Perspective of Lucy Parsons
Understanding Race, Labor, and Radicalism in the U.S. from the Unusual Perspective of Lucy Parsons
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies analyzes the life of the uncompromising Black labor leader and anarchist Lucy Parsons. Parsons’ vivid writings and the fascinating, if painful, ways in which she experienced Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, Progressivism, and the Red Scare of the 1920s shed a unique light on the issues of class, race, and gender through crucial transitional periods of our nation’s history.
Understanding Suffrage and Prohibition from the Unusual Perspective of Kate Sheppard
Understanding Christian Missionaries in the South Pacific from the Unusual Perspective of Ta'unga
Understanding Christian Missionaries in the South Pacific from the Unusual Perspective of Ta'unga
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies investigates the career of Kate Sheppard, the suffragette and prohibitionist who helped make New Zealand the first place in the world to grant women the right to vote at the national level. The book examines the competing goals and strategies of various organizations, including the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WTCU) and highlights the ways in which the Māori both did and did not factor into the British colony’s political calculus in the late nineteenth century.
Understanding Christian Missionaries in the South Pacific from the Unusual Perspective of Ta'unga
Understanding Christian Missionaries in the South Pacific from the Unusual Perspective of Ta'unga
Understanding Christian Missionaries in the South Pacific from the Unusual Perspective of Ta'unga
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies explores racism, imperialism, and indigenous resistance to nineteenth century Christian missionary activity in the South Pacific by shedding light on the experiences of a convert named Ta’unga. Born in the Cook Islands, Ta’unga dedicated his life to promoting Christianity in New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Samoa, but also struggled to have his work be fully appreciated by his supervisors in the London Missionary Society. As an intermediary between two worlds, Ta’unga’s struggles illustrate the complexities of the cultural interactions between Islanders and Europeans in an era of significant social and economic change in the Pacific.
Understanding the Cold War from the Unusual Perspective of Walter Ulbricht
Understanding Christian Missionaries in the South Pacific from the Unusual Perspective of Ta'unga
Understanding the PLA and 20th C. China from the Unusual Perspective of Xu Xiangqian
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies investigates the career of East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht, one of the few communist leaders to live long enough to experience the most important events of the twentieth century. Too often discounted or ignored by historians, this ever-calculating man survived World War I, Hitler’s rise to power, Stalinism, and World War II to become the architect of Berlin Wall and a man committed to creating a utopian socialist state at any cost. Ulbricht’s perspective helps us to understand Europe’s modern history in a new way.
Understanding the PLA and 20th C. China from the Unusual Perspective of Xu Xiangqian
Understanding the PLA and 20th C. China from the Unusual Perspective of Xu Xiangqian
Understanding the PLA and 20th C. China from the Unusual Perspective of Xu Xiangqian
This historical case study and short biography historical case studies short biographies presents the life of the Chinese general who amazingly survived the political turmoil of the Long March, the Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, and the Deng era, despite not always having been allied with Mao Zedong. Xu Xiangqian’s career with the People’s Liberation Army inspires and frightens, appalls and confounds. What emerges is the story of a survivor who provides a new look at an era the world is only beginning to understand.
Understanding Arab Nationalism from the Unusual Perspective of Ahmed Zaki Yamani
Understanding the PLA and 20th C. China from the Unusual Perspective of Xu Xiangqian
Understanding Arab Nationalism from the Unusual Perspective of Ahmed Zaki Yamani
This historical case study and short biography centers upon Saudi Arabia’s influential oil minister from 1962 to 1986, Ahmed Zaki Yamani. Yamani consistently pushed Western oil companies to acknowledge the Kingdom’s right to control its own resources, but did so while hoping to preserve profitable relationships with these companies. It was a strategy many OPEC members and Arab nationalists opposed, but Yamani skillfully managed the delicate balancing act for two and a half decades during a transformative period in the Middle East’s volatile history. historical case studies short biographies