More from African History Extra
The eastern plateau of South Africa, known as the Highveld, is dotted with the ruins of numerous stone towns founded at the end of the Middle Ages.
A bewildering variety of currencies circulated freely in the various states and societies of Africa during the pre-colonial period.
A century before Mansa Musa’s famous pilgrimage, the political and cultural landscape of medieval West Africa was dominated by the empire of Kānem.
Up to 90% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s material cultural legacy is kept outside of the continent, according to a French government-commissioned 2018 report by Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and French historian Bénédicte Savoy.
No single body of primary sources in the literary heritage of West Africa has attracted as much attention and attained as much celebrity as the fabled manuscripts of Timbuktu.
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This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived. Last time, we started looking at the subsistence of peasant agriculture by considering the productivity of our … Continue reading Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVc: Rent and Extraction →
Babar's Moon Trip was a pop-up book I had never come across before. It seems influenced a little by the space race and the American efforts to get to the Moon. They face problems like: not achieving escape velocity for the Moon, failure of stage separation, failure to adjust quickly to reduced gravity on the Moon, and a very short exploration time to obtain samples before their launch window :) It is not really a "pure" pop-up book but rather has some pop-ups and various flaps and tabs you can pull (for action.) de Brunhoff, Laurent. Babar's Moon Trip. New York: Random House. (18 p.) 1968.
Today I attended in New York, at Columbia University (which still looks a bit like a fortress because of the students protests that took place there about 1.5 years ago) a conference at the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Institute for Policy Dialogue.
The dragon of Revelation is one of the symbols that needs no interpretation. The Bible provides the interpretation unequivocally. To fully understand the dragon’s influence, however, we must consider the immediate context of Revelation, the book’s relation to the totality of scripture, and the ancient Near Eastern mythology that influenced the Israelite authors. The […]