When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.

On Deep History and the Brain

History

Smail, Daniel Lord

Historical Study & Educational Resources

University of California Press

When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.

Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present

Humans have always been interested in their origins, but historians have been reluctant to write about the long stretches of time before the invention of writing. In fact, the deep past was left out of most historical writing almost as soon as it was discovered. This breakthrough book, as important for readers interested in the present as in the past,brings science into history to offer a dazzling new vision of humanity across time. Team-written by leading experts in a variety of fields, it maps events, cultures, and eras across millions of years to present a new scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and more. Combining cutting-edge social and evolutionary theory with the latest discoveries about human genes, brains, and material culture, Deep History invites scholars and general readers alike to explore the dynamic of connectedness that spans all of human history. With Timothy Earle, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Clive Gamble, April McMahon, John C. Mitani, Hendrik Poinar, Mary C. Stiner, and Thomas R. Trautmann

Shryock, Andrew

World

Earle, Timothy

Feeley-Harnik, Gillian

This is a little book about 50,000 years of human history that finally connects modern history, and medieval history, and ancient history, and what's still called prehistory . Offering a fascinating digest of the significant scientific discoveries of recent years, Harvard History Professor Daniel Lord Smail presents a new paradigm for understanding changes in human culture, commerce, hierarchy, and civilization throughout time. First he debunks all the ways in which historians have justified continuing writing about 6,000 years of history by talking about writing, civilization, or historical consciousness. Then he guides the reader accessibly through an enormous literature on recent, 'hot' work on evolution, Paleolithic studies, and neuroscience--and shows how this can change our view of history, human life, and historical writing. Lastly he shows how history of all peoples at all times can be understood through psychotropy (humans using substances or actions to alter their own brain-body states). Through fascinating stories that range from religious ritual to coffee drinking, medieval knights to nineteenth-century gin, Smail finally brings the latest developments in the humanities and sciences together to put an entirely new, holistic cast on our understanding of ourselves.

Perseus - UCAL POD

As Europe began to grow rich during the Middle Ages, its wealth materialized in the well-made clothes, linens, and wares of ordinary households. Such items were indicators of one’s station in life in a society accustomed to reading visible signs of rank. In a world without banking, household goods became valuable commodities that often substituted for hard currency. Pawnbrokers and resellers sprang up, helping to push these goods into circulation. Simultaneously, a harshly coercive legal system developed to ensure that debtors paid their due.
Focusing on the Mediterranean cities of Marseille and Lucca, Legal Plunder explores how the newfound wealth embodied in household goods shaped the beginnings of a modern consumer economy in late medieval Europe. The vigorous trade in goods that grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries entangled households in complex relationships of credit and debt, and one of the most common activities of law courts during the period was debt recovery. Sergeants of the law were empowered to march into debtors’ homes and seize belongings equal in value to the debt owed. These officials were agents of a predatory economy, cogs in a political machinery of state-sponsored plunder.
As Daniel Smail shows, the records of medieval European law courts offer some of the most vivid descriptions of material culture in this period, providing insights into the lives of men and women on the cusp of modern capitalism. Then as now, money and value were implicated in questions of power and patterns of violence.

Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe

Business & Money

Economics

Harvard University Press

How, in the years before the advent of urban maps, did city residents conceptualize and navigate their communities? In his strikingly original book, Daniel Lord Smail develops a new method and a new vocabulary for understanding how urban men and women thought about their personal geography. His thorough research of property records of late medieval Marseille leads him to conclude that its inhabitants charted their city, its social structure, and their own identities within that structure through a set of cartographic grammars which powerfully shaped their lives.
Prior to the fourteenth century, different interest groups―notaries, royal officials, church officials, artisans―developed their own cartographies in accordance with their own social, political, or administrative agendas. These competing templates were created around units ranging from streets and islands to vicinities and landmarks. Smail shows how the notarial template, which privileged the street as the most basic marker of address, gradually emerged as the cartographic norm. This transformation, he argues, led to the rise of modern urban maps and helped to inaugurate the process whereby street addresses were attached to citizen identities, a crucial development in the larger enterprise of nation building.
Imaginary Cartographies opens up powerful new means for exploring late medieval and Renaissance urban society while advancing understanding of the role of social perceptions in history.

Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille

Travel

Cornell University Press

The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past)

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ideas and practices of justice in Europe underwent significant change as procedures were transformed and criminal and civil caseloads grew apace. Drawing on the rich judicial records of Marseille from the years 1264 to 1423, especially records of civil litigation, this book approaches the courts of law from the perspective of the users of the courts (the consumers of justice) and explains why men and women chose to invest resources in the law.Smail shows that the courts were quickly adopted as a public stage on which litigants could take revenge on their enemies. Even as the new legal system served the interest of royal or communal authority, it also provided the consumers of justice with a way to broadcast their hatreds and social sanctions to a wider audience and negotiate their own community standing in the process. The emotions that had driven bloodfeuds and other forms of customary vengeance thus never went away, and instead were fully incorporated into the new procedures.

Europe

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ideas and practices of justice in Europe underwent significant change as procedures were transformed and criminal and civil caseloads grew apace. Drawing on the rich judicial records of Marseille from the years 1264 to 1423, especially records of civil litigation, this book approaches the courts of law from the perspective of the users of the courts (the consumers of justice) and explains why men and women chose to invest resources in the law.
Smail shows that the courts were quickly adopted as a public stage on which litigants could take revenge on their enemies. Even as the new legal system served the interest of royal or communal authority, it also provided the consumers of justice with a way to broadcast their hatreds and social sanctions to a wider audience and negotiate their own community standing in the process. The emotions that had driven bloodfeuds and other forms of customary vengeance thus never went away, and instead were fully incorporated into the new procedures.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Smail, Daniel Lord. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Smail, Daniel Lord

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Smail, Daniel Lord. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

On Deep History and the Brain

On Deep History and the Brain

Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present

Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present

On Deep History and the Brain

Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe

Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille

The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past)

The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past)