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In the last thirty years, there have been fierce debates over how civilizations develop and why the West became so powerful.The Measure of Civilizationpresents a brand-new way of investigating these questions and provides new tools for assessing the long-term growth of societies. Using a groundbreaking numerical index of social development that compares societies in different times and places, award-winning author Ian Morris sets forth a sweeping examination of Eastern and Western development across 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He offers surprising conclusions about when and why the West came to dominate the world and fresh perspectives for thinking about the twenty-first century. Adapting the United Nations' approach for measuring human development, Morris's index breaks social development into four traits--energy capture per capita, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity--and he uses archaeological, historical, and current government data to quantify patterns. Morris reveals that for 90 percent of the time since the last ice age, the world's most advanced region has been at the western end of Eurasia, but contrary to what many historians once believed, there were roughly 1,200 years--from about 550 to 1750 CE--when an East Asian region was more advanced. Only in the late eighteenth century CE, when northwest Europeans tapped into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, did the West leap ahead. Resolving some of the biggest debates in global history,The Measure of Civilizationputs forth innovative tools for determining past, present, and future economic and social trends.

Frustrated with the state of interactive coursework and classroom technology since before he dropped out of Harvard in the mid-1970s; Bill Gates yearned to experiment with entirely new approaches. Gates is now prepared to fund personally, outside his foundation, a new way to teach history in America. Taught by Australian professor David Christian as a college course, Gates wanted to introduce Big History as a course in high schools all across America. Big History put forward a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth.

John Tracy Ellis, the dean of American Catholic historians of the mid- to late-twentieth century, never published a treatise on historical methodology, but did write about the subject when faced with the most difficult challenge of his academic career. In 1960, David Francis Sweeney, Ellis's student at The Catholic University of America, unearthed allegations that John Lancaster Spalding, bishop of Peoria, had conducted a sexual affair for nearly twenty years. In numerous letters, Ellis and Sweeney agonized about how to handle this information. Neither Ellis nor Sweeney believed the accusation was true, but both recognized that it had influenced Spalding's career, which was the focus of Sweeney's dissertation. Ellis concluded that Spalding's story should not be told in full, yet set the stage for future historians not only to revisit Spalding's career but also to explore Ellis's deliberations, and thus to reconsider what he routinely had encouraged—telling the whole truth.

[...]for those Christian historians working on subjects in religious or church history who want very consciously to be operating as light and salt in the academy, the American Society of Church History (or other organizations that deal with religious and church history subjects) might well be viewed as contexts that permit their lives and their work to have a greater impact for the Kingdom. [...]in understanding the context of our organization today compared with the context of the late 1960s, we need to recognize that there is also a changed atmosphere within conservative Christianity, as well as in the academy. [...]we are part of the community of educators, those who are called to invite others into the joys of historical study, some of whom will become themselves historians, others who will simply live deeper and richer lives because they have learned to think and live in the light of history. [...]we want the study of history to call people beyond themselves, and the insularity of their own lives, their own communities, their own times, to greater self understanding, to greater understanding of the complexity of the world, and to a greater sense of how to serve as effective agents of God's grand plan to reconcile the world to Himself.

The Kelley family asked that media stay away from the service because of what they saw as a disrespectful fixation on the dog's life at the expense of their loved one and their grieving during the weeklong coverage. Because their loss was barely acknowledged in the media coverage, the Kelley family wasn't interested in granting that same media access to their grieving. According to police, Mr. Kelley was impervious to their Tasers because of the layers of clothing he wore.

This article is divided into three sections. The first argues that the significance of David Hume's History of England as an inspiration for Gibbon's Decline and Fall has been underestimated, and that Momigliano's famous account of Gibbon's originality needs to be adapted to take account of the fact that Gibbon was, in effect, a disciple of Hume. Hume and Gibbon, I argue, shaped our modern understanding of \"history\" by producing narratives rather than annals, encyclopedias, or commentaries. Moreover, they made history primarily the study of the remote past, not the recent past. In order to test my claim that \"histories\" had generally been quite different in character from those written by Hume and Gibbon, I survey the histories of the early church available to Gibbon. Of Gibbon's critics, East Apthorp, I suggest, is most alert to the novelty of his enterprise. The second section analyzes the argument of chapter fifteen of the Decline and Fall, the first chapter on Christianity. I argue that Gibbon deliberately assembles all the arguments against belief in Christianity that were current (or that one may presume were current) in the first century. But I also argue that Gibbon intends the alert reader to notice that ancient arguments against Christianity and modern ones largely overlap, so that he is at the same time offering a conspectus of eighteenth-century arguments against religious faith. At one point only do the modern arguments differ from the ancient ones, and that is in the attitude to miracles expressed in Conyers Middleton's Free Enquiry and Hume's essay \"Of Miracles.\" The last section criticizes David Womersley's claim that the attitude to religion expressed in the later books of the Decline and Fall is significantly different from that in the first. I argue that Gibbon is throughout a more subtle historian of faith than is generally recognized (more subtle, certainly, than Hume), and that this is because Gibbon himself had once been a Catholic convert.

Forty years ago George Every called the attention of the scholarly world to the likelihood that in the oriental patriarchates after the time of John of Damascus the Arabic language increasingly became the language of the Melkite, or Roman (rūmī), community of Christians in the caliphate. They came to use Arabic, Every suggested, not only for scholarly purposes, but even for the divine liturgy, at least for the Scripture lessons.1 In the years since Every made these observations it has become increasingly clear that not only was there such an increase in the use of Arabic in the church during the first Abbasid century, but that the crescendo in the use of Arabic went hand in hand with the diminishment of Greek as a language of church scholarship in the monasteries of the Holy Land from early Abbasid times, perhaps even until the Ottoman period, when the so-called “Rūm Millet” reintroduced the control of Greek speakers in the Jerusalem patriarchate.2 Accordingly, one might speak of the first flowering of Christian life in Arabic in the Holy Land as having occurred during the three centuries stretching from 750, the beginning of the Abbasid caliphate, to around the year 1050, the eve of the crusader period in Near Eastern history.3 And the documentary evidence for the literary activity of the Holy Land monks who wrote in Arabic during this period is largely the archive of “old south Palestinian texts” which Joshua Blau studied for his Grammar of Chrtstian Arabic.4

According to the Venerable Bede, Gregory was strolling through the Roman slave markets when he saw a group of boys with fair skin and blond hair being sold as chattel. According to the authors, the story of Gregory and the Angles is \"a founding myth for white supremacist ideas about the past.\" [...]the authors also take up the thesis, which has now been embraced by most American educators, that Spain was lucky to be invaded by the Umayyad Caliphate in 711, and the only people who didn't want to be colonized by Berbers and Arabs were racists. According to the authors, support for the Reconquista-Spaniards fighting to reclaim Spain from their colonizers-was \"mainstreamed\" by \"Spanish nationalism and contemporary Roman Catholic reactionism, and then embraced by Franco's fascists just before World War II.\"

Coming millennium finds home in academia in new scholarly field: millennial studies; surge of interest among scholars in what they refer to as 'end-time' produces wave of books, papers, courses and conferences; last year Boston University created Center for Millennial Studies as clearinghouse for scholars; with so many focusing on millennium, new areas of research are opening up, ranging from reactions to first millennium, year 1000, to impact of apocalyptic tradition on nuclear age; photo (M)

The NBA understands the power of an icon. When Michael Jordan retired from basketball, the league's ratings began to fall. To bounce back, the NBA expanded overseas and lured foreign talent to the game. And there is no one who is as big an ambassador as Yao Ming. The NBA sees its salvation in the 7-foot, 6-inch Chinese sensation-and in 1.3 billion hoops fans.