The studies collected here cover a period of about 33 years, from 1986 to 2019, and represent a sustained effort to understand the institutions of the Merovingian kingdom and its history. There has long been a predisposition to cast the Merovingian period in the dark colours of barbarism or to treat it with reference to personal relationships and archaic institutions. The present volume, instead, recognizes the Merovingian world not as an archaic, primitive intrusion on the Mediterranean c...

A group of men dig a tunnel under the threshold of a house. Then they go and fetch a heavy, sagging object from inside the house, pull it out through the tunnel, and put it on a cow-hide to be dragged off and thrown into the offal-pit. Why should the corpse of a suicide – for that is what it is– have earned this unusual treatment? In The Curse on Self-Murder, the second volume of his three-part Suicide in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray explores the origin of the condem...

In Egypt's Thousand Days of Revolution, author Alexander Murray provides a vivid and fascinating eyewitness account of Egyptian life in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. A Scotsman and confirmed Egyptophile, Murray first arrived in Cairo just weeks before the assassination of President Anwar Sadat and has returned to the country for many extended visits since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. In his remarkable book - part travel guide, part personal memoir, part sociopolitical commentary - the au...

Alexander Murray has long had an intellectual interest in the history of religion - struggling between his inbuilt anti-clericism and his pronounced monastic leanings. The five essays in Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church take on this dialectic, addressing the difficult relationship between private conscience and public authority in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In any organization, political, military, commercial, or religious, the relationship of conscience...

The brainchild of Daniel Alexander Payne Murray, Banneker: The Afro-American Astronomer was first conceived after Murray discovered what he found to be a beautifully written letter to Thomas Jefferson by a then unknown writer of color. Aided in his research by Will A. Allen, the pair discovered the man to be one Benjamin Banneker, a mathematician and astronomer.An extraordinary mind in a time where most people of African descent in the United States were denied the right t...

Georgius Florentius Gregorius, better known to posterity as Gregory, Bishop of Tours, was born about 538 to a highly distinguished Gallo-Roman family in Clermont in the region of Auvergne. Best known for his 10-book Histories (often called the History of the Franks), Gregory left us detailed accounts of his own times as well as those of the early Merovingian kings, known as the "long-haired kings," who united the Franks and took control of most of Gaul in the late fifth a...

‘the Light’ explores a world where you wake up and know this is the day you die. How would such a world shape the way we think, our views on each other and society, how we conduct our personal and financial affairs; how we live and how we will die?On a daily basis, people are required to take the Light; a device that ascertains whether this will be their last day. Between investigating this new world order and the story of one ordinary person forced to cope in extraordinary circums...

‘the Light’ explores a world where you wake up and know this is the day you die. How would such a world shape the way we think, our views on each other and society, how we conduct our personal and financial affairs; how we live and how we will die?On a daily basis, people are required to take the Light; a device that ascertains whether this will be their last day. Between investigating this new world order and the story of one ordinary person forced to cope in extraordinary circums...

On March 14, 2006, a truck bomb destroyed the Alden Federal Building in Washington, D.C. Thirty-eight people died. Within weeks, the FBI had its man: Daniel Ray Mercer — beloved children's television host, Vietnam veteran, a man America had loved for seventeen years as "Mr. Chuckles."The evidence was overwhelming. The van. The fibers. The tape.But Colonel Nathan Cross, the investigator brought in to close the case, kept finding the things that didn't fit. A confession that ...

THE UNTOLD, INSIDE STORY OF MY LIFE AT RANGERS FC AND IN BUSINESSSir David Murray’s life story is a truly remarkable tale of never-say-die triumph over unimaginable adversity.For 50 years he has been a towering figure in Scottish business, sport and philanthropy. His family name is synonymous with steel but his rise to power owes as much to mettle as it does to metal.At the age of 24 he was involved in a horrific car crash in which he lost both of his legs. As his l...

With the cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. and the lyricism of Langston Hughes, the great civil rights activist Pauli Murray’s sole book of poems finally returns to print.There has been explosive interest in the life of Pauli Murray, as reflected in a recent profile in The New Yorker, the publication of a definitive biography, and a new Yale University college in her name. Murray has been suddenly cited by leading historians as a woman who contributed far...

Featuring artists ranging from Miles Davis to Kendrick Lamar, dive into this stunningly illustrated celebration of the history of Black music in America by the award-winning author of The Undefeated**.**Listen to the sound of survival, courage, and democracy—the soundtrack of America. Hear Billie Holiday's raspy, mournful voice, and tap your foot to Louis Armstrong's trumpet. Scream with James Brown and bop your head to Gr...