Society & Social Sciences

Kazakhstan, one of the largest countries on earth, was long hidden from the rest of the world behind the Iron Curtain, and continued to remain unnoticed among the stans of Central Asia that gained independence from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s...

Afghanistan is situated at the crossroads of Asia, a strategically important location that connects the Middle East with Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Down the ages it has been subjected to continuous foreign invasion and intervention from...

The country is besieged by bad news, but despite the political turmoil the everyday life of its people is more stable, rich, and rewarding than the media headlines would lead you to believe. A myriad local festivals and celebrations and a vibrant...

The Serbs are proud, passionate, and generous people with an independent streak. Since they first entered the region as warrior tribes allied with the Byzantine Empire, they have always had to fight for survival against powerful enemies, including the...

The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is comprised of two Caribbean islands and several islets off the coast of Venezuela. The vast majority of the population live on Trinidad, previously a colony of shifting ownership from Spain to France, Netherlands and...

This island nation is a very new society, forged over the past three centuries. Although similar in many ways to neighboring Reunion and the Seychelles where there is also a mixed population of African and Indian ancestry, Mauritius actually has a much...

Culture Smart! Armenia explains how to avoid cultural gaffes when out and about in the country. Giving the historical, political and cultural background, the guide reveals how to read body language and be aware of potential pitfalls in communication, and

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country of contradictions, where East meets West, and where several ideologies have come together to evolve into a vibrant, diverse culture. While there may be much that the Western visitor will find familiar in the day-to-day...

In this small and beautiful country, sea and mountains are within easy reach, and there is a great diversity of landscape, mentality, and lifestyles. Its rich and turbulent history can be traced back to ancient times, to long before the Greeks and Romans...

For a nation of around 1.3 million inhabitants, Estonia has made a real impression on the world stage since regaining its independence less than two decades ago. In the mid-1980s, it was known, if at all, as a Soviet backwater, but the collapse of...

Arriving in Panama, the broad cultural and ethnic diversity of this small country is one of its most outstanding and attractive attributes, and is reflected in its many customs. There is not just the beauty of the countryside to be discovered, but the...

We all know about giving and receiving gifts: they can be touching or puzzling, either strengthening bonds of friendship or becoming a burden. Gifts are an integral part of human societies and this volume explores how, over the centuries, books and...

'Long Live Freedom!'-Hans Scholl's last words before his executionThe White Rose (die Weie Rose) resistance circle was a group of students and a professor at the University of Munich who in the early 1940s secretly wrote and...

How long is an ell? What is the largest size of champagne bottle?How do you measure the heat of a chilli pepper? Why is the depth of water measured in fathoms? And what is a cubit?The Curious History of Weights & Measures tells the story of how we...

'There are few historical developments more significant than the realisation that those in power should not be free to torture and abuse those who are not.' Amal ClooneyOn 10 December 1948, in Paris, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an...

Rachel Owen's hauntingly beautiful illustrations for Dante's Inferno take a radically new approach to representing the world of Dante's famous poem. The images combine the artist's deep cultural and historical understanding of 'The Divine...

Dressy men as a type of celebrity have played a distinctive part in the cultural - and even in the political - life of Britain over several centuries. But unlike the twenty-first-century hipster, the dandies of the British past provoked intense degrees...

Accompanied by a range of arresting images, this book is a compilation of some of Lenin's most famous sayings, taken from speeches, tracts, letters and recorded conversations. These proclamations offer an insight into the atmosphere of Revolutionary...

The Bodleian Library is home to treasures from every corner of the globe that mark major milestones in cultural history. This book contains twenty-six pull-out postcards-one for each letter of the alphabet-each featuring a rare or beautiful manuscript...

What common condition can be treated with cow dung? How do crushed oystershells ease heartburn? Can eels cure deafness? And how do you stop a stubborn case of the hiccups? If someone was struck down by illness or injury in the late eighteenth century,...

How should men and women embark on a new relationship? Is it acceptable to flirt? Should one ever kiss in a canoe? What is the ideal age gap for marriage? What gifts are appropriate for a fiancee? How should one announce an engagement? Aimed at the...

Shepherd Mead, bestselling author of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, came to live in England with his family in 1958. Six years later he published a satirical handbook for fellow Americans to guide them through the nuances of British...

Xi Jinping wants to become the world's most powerful leader. To succeed, he must balance Mao's Little Red Book with the Analects of Confucius, and more.For Xi, the task ahead of China is to preserve the guiding ideology of Marxism, while challenging...

According to the United Nations, Myanmar's Rohingyas are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. Only now has the media turned its attention to their plight at the hands of a country led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet the...

When South Sudan's war began, the Beatles were playing their first hits and reaching the moon was an astronaut's dream. Half a century later, with millions massacred in Africa's longest war, the continent's biggest country split in two.It was an...

Without an understanding of the Communist Party no one can understand the China in which the Party has dominated the country. This book follows the development of the Communist Party and of Marxism in China from the early years. For the years 1921-49, it...

Japan's post-war armed forces are a paradox, both embarrassing remnants of the past and valuable repositories of experience. This book charts the development of the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) from 1954 as both unorthodox military institutions and...

The military victories of ISIS have overturned the geopolitical map of the Middle East. Media attention has focused on ISIS' savage treatment of its enemies and its ability to attract foreign fighters. However, in order to explain its success, a...

Jeremy Henzel-Thomas argues that educational reform is the biggest challenge facing Muslim societies, Richard Pringle highlights the purpose of education, Abdelwahab El-Affendi suggests how Muslim education should be reconfigured, Abdulkader Tayob argues...

Why are relations between politically mobilised ethnic identities and the nation-state sometimes peaceful and at other times fraught and violent? Madurika Rasaratnam's book sets out a novel answer to this key puzzle in world politics through a detailed...

New York Times Book of the Year The Blood Telegram is an unprecedented chronicle of a pivotal but little-known chapter of the Cold War. Gary J. Bass shows how Nixon and Kissinger supported Pakistan's military dictatorship as it brutally quashed the...

In this volume of his work, the author starts a debate taking two full volumes to answer the objections that are often raised concerning social mixing and keeping a woman's face uncovered in Muslim society. This is a tradition in Islamic studies, when...

This 8-volume series is the author's abridged version of his longer work with the same title, spanning a 25-year study of the main sources of Islamic teachings: the Qur'an and the authentic sunnah. The author's study comprised 14 great anthologies of...

The emancipation of women cannot be complete unless it is coupled with the emancipation of men. This can only be accomplished by drawing our social values from the Qur'an and the sunnah. In this volume, the author shows that mixed social life was the...

The emancipation of women cannot be complete unless it is coupled with the emancipation of men. This can only be accomplished by drawing our social values from the Qur'an and the sunnah. In this volume, the author shows that mixed social life was the...

The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) established complete equality between men and women as he said, "Women are full sisters of men". Yet both have their respective special functions. This volume draws out the features of the Muslim woman's character as outlined...

This is the untold story of black music its triumph over racism, segregation, undercapitalised record labels, media discrimination and political anxiety told through the perspective of the most powerful office in the world: from Louis...

Elemental, fierce and full of wonder, the Cairngorm mountains are the high and rocky heart of Scotland. To know them would take forever, to love them demands a kind of courageous surrender.In The Hidden Fires, Merryn Glover undertakes that challenge with...

In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at...

Detroit 67 is the story of Motor City in the year that changed everything. Twelve chapters take you on a turbulent year-long journey through the drama and chaos that ripped through the city in 1967 and tore it apart in personal, political and interracial...

Critically acclaimed author Malachy Tallack returns in the Autumn of 2016 with a brand new excursion into the beautiful, mysterious and mythical landscapes of the world with Un-Discovered Islands. Gathered in this book are over twenty...

Meadow explores the intimate and complex relationship between people, place and plants which, over many centuries, has shaped the colour and character of the classic hay meadows of the British Isles.The surviving hay meadows of the British Isles are an...

This beautiful book is a celebration of the mighty oak, through the passion and vision of artist Mark Frith.Mark has drawn large scale portraits of 22 of Britain's oldest living oaks, with exceptional detail conveyed in these intricate graphite works,...

This volume addresses, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the philosophical question of how to understand other cultures. In so doing, it brings into conversation Wittgensteinian and other cultural philosophical traditions, stemming notably from Japan,...

Journeys to school are an important time and space of transition between homes and schools for children around the world.This book comprises various chapters providing insights on children's experiences of this essential part of their lives and schooling...

While the alt right and post-truth attitudes render democracy fragile, so does professional journalism when it reports on the most vulnerable subjects in society but rarely addresses them as the imagined audience. A dialogical critique of divisions in...

Visit a place where your accent is an aphrodisiac, invites a Las Vegas tourist board ad on the London Underground. Just the right amount of wrong, offers another from The Cosmopolitan Hotel. Clearly, it works. Over forty million people a year travel to...