Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Multivolume Reference/Humanities Work was central to medieval life. Religious and secular authorities generally expected almost everyone to work. Artistic and literary depictions underlined work's cultural value. The vast majority of medieval people engaged in agriculture because it was the only way they could obtain food. Yet their work led to innovations in technology and production and allowed others to engage in specialized labor, helping to drive the growth of cities. Many workers moved to seek employment and to improve their living conditions. For those who could not work, charity was often available, and many individuals and institutions provided forms of social welfare. Guilds protected their members and created means for the transmission of skills. When they were not at work, medieval Christians were to meet their religious obligations yet many also enjoyed various pastimes. A consideration of medieval work is therefore one of medieval society in all its creativity and complexity and that is precisely what this volume provides. A Cultural History of Work in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on economies, representations of work, workplaces, work cultures, technology, mobility, society, politics and leisure.

Explores how foreign policy was used to promote American nationalism by creating external threats in the early republic.

Written by the renowned authority on ancient ships and seafaring Lionel Casson, The Ancient Mariners has long served the needs of all who are interested in the sea, from the casual reader to the professional historian. This completely revised edition takes into account the fresh information that has appeared since the book was first published in 1959, especially that from archaeology's newest branch, marine archaeology. Casson does what no other author has done: he has put in a single volume the story of all that the ancients accomplished on the sea from the earliest times to the end of the Roman Empire. He explains how they perfected trading vessels from mere rowboats into huge freighters that could carry over a thousand tons, how they transformed warships from simple oared transports into complex rowing machines holding hundreds of marines and even heavy artillery, and how their maritime commerce progressed from short cautious voyages to a network that reached from Spain to India.

For more than four decades, historians have devoted ever-increasing attention to the affinites that linked Scotland with the American colonies in the eighteenth century. This volume moves beyond earlier discussions in two ways. For one, the geographical coverage of the papers extends beyond the territories that became the United States to include what became Canada, The Carribean and even Africa. For another, the volume attends not only those areas in which Scotland was closely linked to the Americas, but also to those where it was not.