Tens of thousands of intellectuals - refugees, displaced people, voluntary immigrants and emissaries - have left their homeland in modern times and moved to other countries in Europe and overseas. In a world-wide panorama, Peter Burke describes the important figures in the great waves of immigration since the fifteenth century: starting with the Greeks who came to Italy following the conquest of Byzantium by the Ottomans and ending with those fleeing from the Bolsheviks, the Fascists and the Nazis in the twentieth century. The migrations in the early modern period were mostly for religious reasons - for example, the Jews and Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula, the Huguenots (French Calvinists) following the cancellation of the Edict of Nantes, and Catholics from Protestant countries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the migrations were mainly due to racial persecution and political and ideological reasons. Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge clarifies the difficulties of the scholars to integrate in the host countries and the choice between assimilation and seclusion in the expatriate community. But mainly he came to point out the enormous contribution of expatriates and immigrants to the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination, not only in immigration countries such as the United States and Israel, but in the entire world - from China in the East to Brazil in the West. Burke especially discusses the contribution of scholars in the humanities and social sciences: historians, researchers of the history of art and literature, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. Besides academics who managed to integrate into universities in the host countries, there were also other cultural mediators: printers and publishers, translators, merchants who settled for many years in distant lands, missionaries and scholars who were invited to the courts of rulers who sought to advance their country to modernity. The damage caused by the "brain drain" from the countries of origin eclipsed the gains produced by the world of knowledge as a whole: liberation from provincialism, bridging traditions, mutual fertilization. The detailed review in Peter Burke's book, which was written in 2015 as a warning against Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union), is intended to convey a very important message even today: the reception of immigrants and refugees enriches the local and global culture and is the main antidote against the depletion of the spirit and narrow horizons.

A bullet misses its target in Sarajevo, a would-be Austrian painter gets into the Viennese academy, Lord Halifax becomes British prime minister in 1940 instead of Churchill: seemingly minor twists of fate on which world-shaking events might have hinged. Alternative history has long been the stuff of parlor games, war-gaming, and science fiction, but over the past few decades it has become a popular stomping ground for serious historians. The historian Richard J. Evans now turns a critical, slightly jaundiced eye on a subject typically the purview of armchair historians. The book’s main concern is examining the intellectual fallout from historical counterfactuals, which the author defines as “alternative versions of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different outcome from the one we know actually occurred.” What if Britain had stood at the sidelines during the First World War? What if the Wehrmacht had taken Moscow? The author offers an engaging and insightful introduction to the genre, while discussing the reasons for its revival in popularity, the role of historical determinism, and the often hidden agendas of the counterfactual historian. Most important, Evans takes counterfactual history seriously, looking at the insights, pitfalls, and intellectual implications of changing one thread in the weave of history. A wonderful critical introduction to an often-overlooked genre for scholars and casual readers of history alike.

In this book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel, the famed historian G. W. Bowersock presents an examination of political developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of the rise of Islam. Recounting the growth of Christian Ethiopia and the conflict with Jewish Arabia, he describes the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the late Sassanian (Persian) Empire. He concludes that the Byzantine Empire's defeat of the Sassanian forces, which destabilized the region, provided the opportunity for the rise and military success of Islam in the seventh century. Using close readings of surviving texts, Bowersock sheds new light on the complex causal relationships among the Byzantine, Ethiopian, Persian, and emerging Islamic forces.

Early Modern European Civilization and Its Political and Cultural Dynamism presents Schilling's unique contribution to understanding the formation of the nation-state system in Europe. Schilling coined the concept of "confessionalization" - the consolidation of the regional churches and the deepening of Christianity into its nuances in Central and Western Europe, a process that began following the Reformation in the sixteenth century and led to the shaping of national identities. Within the framework of these developments, Schilling examines the effects of religious immigration and the role played by religious minorities in changing society, economy and culture in the early modern period.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Three Ways to Be Alien draws on the lives and writings of three figures cast adrift from their traditional moorings into an unknown world. The subjects includea "Persian" prince of Bijapur (in central India, no less) held hostage by the Portuguese at Goa; English traveler and global schemer, whose writings reveal a surprisingly nimble understanding of realpolitik in the emerging world of the early seventeenth century; and an insightful Venetian chronicler of the Mughal Empire in the later seventeenth century who drifted between jobs with the Mughals and various foreign entrepôts, observing all but remaining the eternal outsider. In telling the fascinating story of floating identities in a changing world, Subrahmanyam also succeeds in injecting humanity into global history and proves that biography still plays an important role in contemporary historiography.

The Roman Republic in the Perspective of Political Thought deals with the Roman Republic and the ways in which it was perceived as a political system. It appeals to a wide audience of historians, writers, political science researchers and educated readers interested in the political thought of the west in antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times. The book is based on the lectures given by Professor Miller in 1997 as a guest of the Menachem Stern Jerusalem Forum for History, on behalf of the Israel Historical Society.

Giving gifts for its merits and expression in the different periods can create friendship and closeness, or alternatively lead to quarrels and discord. The gift is sometimes a voluntary action and sometimes fulfilling an obligation. Some of it is in terms of giving a bribe and some of it is an expression of gratitude. Many times, it paves the way for social advancement or political engagement. The giving of the gifts was accompanied by significant etiquette and created special patterns. How can we differentiate between a gift and a bribe? What is the place of gifts in alliances and conflicts in society and in the family? How do they affect economic relations, politics and religion? These questions are important for understanding past and present social relations, and they are at the heart of this book. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France offers a new way of understanding the subject of gifts, which took a permanent place in social relations throughout the various periods. The book examines the ways and meanings of gift exchange in French society in the sixteenth century, from the generosity of kings to the beggar's contribution. This fascinating book proves that examining the meaning of gifts can help us understand not only the social relationships in the past but also how to behave pleasantly with others nowadays.

Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire examines the formation of the "poor" as a distinct social class in Roman society, a class for which the church claimed special responsibility. This is the story of a society that gradually saw itself as responsible for a certain group of people, a group that previously no one cared about, and of those who benefited from this change in priorities. "The poor" serve as a kind of lens that reveals with wonderful clarity the delicate network of connections and social relations that made the late Roman Empire a changing world. Peter Brown seeks to restore the condition of the poor before the rise of Christianity, to stand for the true nature of the Christian rhetoric about the love of the poor: were its motives always sincere or were they sometimes selfish? Brown uses not only Greek and Latin sources, but also Jewish sources, to document the interrelationships between Middle Eastern societies and Roman classical traditions. He succeeds in shedding light on a crucial aspect of the transition from classical culture to Christian culture, the main point of which is the growth of a new concept regarding the debt owed by society and the church to the poor.

"History, Rhetoric, Proof... the idea that historians need or can prove something is, in the eyes of many, an idea that has lost its necessity, and is perhaps even downright ridiculous. However, even those who feel uncomfortable in the face of the prevailing intellectual atmosphere, almost always believe that rhetoric and proof are not consistent. I, on the other hand, wish to show, first, that proof was considered an inseparable part of rhetoric in the past. Second, that this fact, which was self-evident in the past, and has been forgotten in the meantime, alludes to an image of the working methods of historians, including contemporary historians, which is much more realistic and complex than that reflected in contemporary fashion." With these words, Carlo Ginzburg, one of the most innovative historians of our generation, opens his fascinating essay on the relationship between rhetoric and history. While looking originally at a wide variety of texts belonging to different periods, cultures and types, Ginzburg seeks to show that rhetoric, if the compromise is understood correctly, concerns not only the style of the historian, but a garden for his pursuit of proof and historical truth.

The Nation in History describes the main historiographical controversies about the place of the nation in history, and presents in greater detail the advantages of the ethnic-symbolic approach, of which Smith is one of the prominent representatives. For thirty years and more, Anthony Smith has been considered one of the central theorists in the study of nationalism. One by one, he published an impressive series of books that are considered landmarks in understanding the phenomenon of nations and ethnicities. His research work excels both in conceptual sharpness and theoretical sophistication as well as in extensive historical knowledge and understanding. His writing is characterized by a consistent search for the connection between pre-modern ethnicity and the nationalism that came after it, and a tireless pursuit of a unifying theory or an agreed-upon paradigm that would encompass most of the problems and issues included in nationalism. In his book The Nation in History , some of his guiding ideas on these topics matured and reached the point of formation.