An interdisciplinary reassessment of a vital and understudied field. Material remains of houses and textual evidence for private living are crucial to our understanding of the architectural and decorative characteristics of the ancient house and the way private space was used. As buildings in which both private and public activities could take place, ancient dwellings provide a window onto the social, economic, political, and religious aspects of societies. However, despite its invaluable significance for our knowledge of ancient times, housing still largely remains an underestimated field of research. This edited volume includes papers presented at the 8th International ANAMED Annual Symposium, held at Istanbul's Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in 2013. The contributions focus on the developments, continuities, and changes in private housing across the Mediterranean during Roman, Late Antique, and Early Islamic times. The volume sheds light on the interaction between houses of various regions and time periods, exploring the architectural features, layout and interior, and builders and users of private houses.

In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.

In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger’s kiss.… Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse—a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers: Oleg, a New York locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They’ve each lost something important—a wife, a lover, a sister, a direction in life—and what they will find in Palimpsest is more than they could ever imagine.

This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas—Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.

Situated on idyllic Taylors Island, off the coast of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, Loblolly House inaugurates a new, more efficient way of building. Through the use of state-of-the-art building information modeling, the architects were able to streamline the design-build process. This is a manual for the componentized prefab.