In this sweeping and lavishly illustrated history, Katharina Galor and Hanswulf Bloedhorn survey nearly four thousand years of human settlement and building activity in Jerusalem, from prehistoric times through the Ottoman period. The study is struct...

In autumn 2001, U.S. and NATO troops were deployed to Afghanistan to unseat the Taliban rulers, repressive Islamic fundamentalists who had lent active support to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda jihadists. The NATO forces defeated and dismantled the Taliba...

The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine in the years following World War I. Viewing twentieth-century history through the l...

During the 1930s and 1940s, a unique and lasting political alliance was forged among Third Reich leaders, Arab nationalists and Muslim religious authorities. From this relationship sprang a series of dramatic events that, despite their profound impac...

Since the withdrawal of US occupying forces, international attention has shifted away from Iraq – but life for Iraqis has become no easier. Deadly bombings are still all too common, sectarian violence has soared and all-pervading corruption means tha...

Israel's victory in the June 1967 Six Day War provided a unique opportunity for resolving the decades-old Arab-Zionist conflict. Having seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, Israel for the first time in its...

From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. So a...

In February 2011, following an extraordinary eighteen days of continual protest by the Egyptian people, President Mubarak agreed to resign, bringing thirty years of a repressive and stagnant regime to an end. In June 2012, a new president was elected...

For more than 60 years, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have lived as Israeli citizens within the borders of the nation formed at the end of the 1948 conflict. Occupying a precarious middle ground between the Jewish citizens of Israel and the d...

<p>Situated north of the Himalayas, Tibet is famous for its unique culture and its controversial assimilation into modern China. Yet Tibet in the twenty-first century can only be properly understood in the context of its extraordinary history. Sam va...