I have recently been renewing my acquaintance with Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling the poet, that is, as distinct from Rudyard Kipling the short-story writer and part-time novelist. R.K. the poet is very much out of favour at present, and has been these twenty years. I suppose this disfavour springs from his identification with the spirit of Empire, with the Raj, with the Great White Sahib, wit...

That definition of bibliotheca – the most common Latin term for library – is taken from the Etymologies of Isidore, Bishop of Seville, a ‘vastly important conduit for classical antiquity into the medieval world’.2 Composed in the first decades of the seventh century AD, by which time most of the Iberian peninsula had been part of the Visigothic kingdom for nearly two centuries, the Etymologies ...

The primary goal of the long-term Subgroup A is to promote collaboration and exchange among nuclear reaction code developers internationally. This document reports on the Subgroup A activities in 2004-2005, both in view of individual codes (TALYS, EMPIRE, GNASH/McGNASH) development, and in regard to the common development of the ModLib library. Notably, several important new code releases were ...

The research project Germania Sacra provides a comprehensive prosopographical database, that makes structured and comparable data of the Church of the Holy Roman Empire available for further research. The database contains approximately 31,000 records of premodern persons, new data is continuously added. This digital index of persons is supplemented by the "Database of Monasteries, Convents and...

This is a fascinating, highly readable, and well-illustrated tome that looks at Muscovite maps created in the seventeenth century as a still poorly exploited source that can inform our understanding of the politics and culture of the time. The book comprises two distinct parts. Chapters 1–4 focus on spatiality in the heartland, scrutinizing local maps drawn to substantiate and defend positions ...

"Civilizations" and "world systems" are alternative labels for the largest macropolitical entities that have existed in human history. These historical civilizations/world systems may be seen as having two polar types of power structure, the "states system" and the "universal empire." Each form has certain characteristic accompaniments, which may promote it, be promoted by it, or both. For stat...

Missionaries are no strangers to students and researchers of the British Empire. The hackneyed image of the rough-hewn Anglican vicar preaching salvation, Christ, and colonialism to legions of natives is one of the enduring archetypes of British colonialism. This image, like so many similar ones, is not without basis in historical fact. Missionaries played a notable role in British imperial exp...

There are many demonstrations of political interrelation of Turk kaganate and Mongol empire. The article deals with one of the points of Turk-Mongol interrelation as the ceremony of ascending the khan to the throne. It is historically proved that the ascending to the throne ceremony takes origin from Turk kaganate period by comparing the materials, concerning the facts of the history of both st...

A great Empire Health Congress is about to be held at Wembley where, among many other remarkable things, there is a series of exhibits relating to tropical diseases of such importance that the King directed attention to them in the speech in which he opened the Exhibition. The British Empire has been the pioneer in sanitary enterprise, and it must be at once its duty and its pride to preserve a...