This book is the first of its kind to engage explicitly with the practice of conceptual history as it relates to the study of the Middle Ages, exploring the pay-offs and pitfalls of using concepts in medieval history. Concepts are indispensable to historians as a means of understanding past societies, but those concepts conjured in an effort to bring order to the infinite complexity of the past have a bad habit of taking on a life of their own and inordinately influencing historical interp...

How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy. The book is pioneering in bringing together historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages with scholars of post-medieval European empires, while a genuinely world-his...

Former FBI special agent, author, and television writer/producer Jim Clemente selects the best true crime writing from the past year, aided by series editor Peter Crooks, to produce an eclectic lineup of fascinating, mysterious, and provocative true tales.The second edition of this annual collection offers a fascinating variety of essays and expertly reported crime stories, taken from regional, national, and international publications. Among the stories is a decade...