Oxford University Press

Using a wide array of archival documentation, including Inquisition records, wills, dowry contracts, folklore, and court cases, Poska examines how early modern Spanish peasant women asserted and perceived their authority within the family and community and how the large numbers of female-headed households in the region functioned in the absence of...

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In this vivid reconstruction of life in a seventeenth-century gentry household, the authors delve into the details of everyday life: how did a large, wealthy household in the English countryside acquire the goods and services it needed and wanted? Was household consumption an exclusively female sphere, or did men play an important role, too?...

This book identifies genocide as the culmination of conflicts over identity. Genocide is a pathologically defensive reaction made by people who feel that they are in danger of extinction. This poses a security dilemma that can only be broken by quelling the feelings of threat and fear that prompt mass violence. In this volume, noted thinkers and...

Here is a fascinating compact history of Chinese political, economic, and cultural life, ranging from the origins of civilization in China to the beginning of the 21st century. Historian Paul Ropp combines vivid story-telling with astute analysis to shed light on some of the larger questions of Chinese history. What is distinctive about China in...

Many U.S. Christians were profoundly moved by the liberation struggles in Central America in the 1980s. Most learned about the situation from missionaries who had worked in the area and witnessed the repression firsthand. These missionaries, Nepstad shows, employed the church's institutional resources and the symbolic capital of Christianity to...