One of Canada's best-known and most-honoured biographers turns to the raw material of his own life in Writing History. A university professor, prolific scholar, public intellectual, and frank critic of the world he has known, Michael Bliss draws on extensive personal diaries to describe a life that has taken him from small-town Ontario in the 1950s to international recognition for his books in Canadian and medical history. His memoir ranges remarkably...

According to Sprague, doubling in Lessing's novels is a perfect correlative for the complexity and contradiction Lessing perceives as central to the private and collective human experience. Her doubles and multiples not only indicate the fracturing or the formation of identity but they also are among the several strategies used to project complex private and societal concerns. This study of Lessing's dialectical imagination extends and revises earlier...

Ottoman historical writing of the 15th and 16th centuries played a significant role in fashioning Ottoman identity and institutionalizing the dynastic state structure during this period of rapid imperial expansion. This volume shows how the writing of history achieved these effects by examining the implicit messages conveyed by the texts and illustrations of key manuscripts. It answers such questions as how the Ottomans understood themselves within...

This course of 15 half-hour lectures presents different procedures for locating sources of ancestors' records in America.

"Sankovitch goes on a quest through the history of letters to discover and celebrate what is special about the handwritten letter, examining not only historical letters but also the letters in epistolary novels, her husband's love letters, and dozens more sources. Sankovitch reminds us that the letters we write are as important as the ones we wait for"--

"After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire, with literacy reserved for the elite few. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's greatest and most daunting challenge was a linguistic one. Just as important as China's technological and industrial advances and political maneuvers was the century-long fight to make the Chinese language-with its many dialects...