Felix Meritis, the remarkable 'Temple of Enlightenment', adorns the Amsterdam canals since 1788. The building accommodated the most ambitious attempt in the Netherlands for the integration of activities regarding literature, music, the visual arts, commerce, and the sciences. What so far went unnoticed is that, from the very start, Felix Meritis was also equipped with an astronomical and meteorological observatory. In fact, it was the first scientific observatory in the Netherlands designed f...

The contributions in this volume cover the period between roughly 1850 and 1950, focusing for the most part on Dutch science. We find out why the world-famous Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory lost its leading position in the 1930s, how research on hormones and vitamins was established in the Netherlands, and how the discipline of modern experimental physics was strongly influenced by practices in astronomy.

By the first half of the twentieth century, fundamental research had acquired an almost invi...

The League against Imperialism explores the dramatic and engaging story of a global institution that brought together activists across geographical and political borders for the goal of eradicating colonial rule worldwide. The League against Imperialism (LAI) attracted anticolonial activists like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, as well as prominent figures like Albert Einstein, Ernst Toller, Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair, Mohandas Gandhi, and M...

Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes, World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting. Key themes, such as communication, trade, order, slavery, religion, war, identity, modernity, norms and ecology, are linked to specific world regions, which tell a story about how local ideas and individual contacts developed, started to overlap and ...

In this book, Hein Pirenne, the great Belgian economic historian, traces the character and general movement of the economic and social evolution of Western Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the middle of the fifteenth century. From the breakup of the economic equilibrium of the ancient world to the revival of commerce, the redevelopment of credit, the trade of commodities, the origins of urban industry, and the rebirth of new forms of protectionism, mercantilism, and capitalism, Pir...

In the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27 the Communist International played a very great role, depicted in this book quite comprehensively. We would, however, seek in vain in the library of the Communist International for a single book which attempts in any way to give a rounded picture of the Chinese Revolution. Instead, we find scores of “conjunctural” works’ which docilely reflect each zigzag in the politics of the Communist International, or, more correctly, of Soviet diplomacy in Chi...

Edward William Lane (17 September 1801 – 10 August 1876) was a British orientalist, translator and lexicographer. He is known for his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and the Arabic-English Lexicon, as well as his translations of One Thousand and One Nights and Selections from the Kurán.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Andris Kursietis has been a researcher of military history for fi ft y years, using re-sources that span the globe. His latest book, “Bulgaria’s Military Leadership 1900 - 1945” contains the military biographies of the senior generals and admirals who served the Kingdom of Bulgaria during the fi rst forty-fi ve years of the 20th Century, a period during which Bulgaria was involved in three wars: the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), World War I (1915-1918) and World War II (19...

In March 1945, the German desperate offensive on the Danube began. While the Sixth SS Armored Army came out of positions to establish bridgeheads across the river, the STAVKA, Russia’s supreme command, was already making plans for the attack on Vienna. For ten days the German army plodded eastward until it was left exhausted. The big breakthrough did not materialize. On March 16, the Vienna operation began. The attacker became the defender, and between Budapest and Vienna the German army fo...

It has been seventy yeas since the battle of Stalingrad ended. The city at the river Wolga drew German troops to it like a magnat. Hitler had officially declared the city as ‘fallen’, but then the Red Army encircled the German 6th Army. What followed was a major human tragedy. Honderds of thousands were trapped in the city. Food and ammunition were scarce and an attempt to break through from the South failed. The German troops were left with an air bridge. The daily air transport flew on ...