While everyone is familiar with the legend of Robin Hood, few can speak as knowledgably about other British outlaws and their traditions. Uncovering a popular history that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, Bandit Territories takes as its main subject English, Welsh, and Scottish outlaws and considers their traditions in light of their unique landscapes, cultural histories, and adaptations into ballet, theatre, film and children's literature. Introducing figures such as Little John and William Wallace--the character portrayed by Mel Gibson in Braveheart--this volume explores the figure of the bandit, who lives between civil society and the wilderness, and offers an engaging portrait of his iconic masculinity and nationalist propaganda.

A study of banditry in Republican China, describing the cycles whereby banditry spread from the impoverished margins (geographically and socially) of late Qing society into entire provinces by the 1920s.

The Nazi campaign against European resistance fighters

This book is an overview and analysis of the global tradition of the outlaw hero. The mythology and history of the outlaw hero is traced from the Roman Empire to the present, showing how both real and mythic figures have influenced social, political, economic and cultural outcomes in many times and places. The book also looks at the contemporary continuations of the outlaw hero mythology, not only in popular culture and everyday life, but also in the current outbreak of global terrorism. The book also presents a more general argument related to the importance of understanding folk and popular mythologies in historical contexts. Outlaw heroes have a strong purchase in high and popular culture, appearing in film, books, plays, music, drama, art, even ballet. To simply ignore and discard such powerful expressions without understanding their origins, persistence and especially their ongoing cultural consequences, is to refuse the opportunity to comprehend some profoundly important aspects of human behaviour. These issues are pursued through discussion of the processes through which real and mythical outlaw heroes are romanticised, sentimentalised, sanitised, commodified and mythologised. The result is a new position in the continuing controversy over the existence the 'social bandit' that highlights the central role of mythology in the creation and perpetuation of outlaw heroes.

She is the legitimate daughter of the Duke Jingguo, the daughter of general Huang Yi. However, she lives a life of fighting for food with dogs and is almost insulted to death by her brother. Since goodness is useless, discard it! Break the feet of the insidious second sister, kill the hypocritical second daughter, betray the cold father, destroy the third sister's face, and remarry her husband. She was forced to be a wife of nine thousand years old, who looks like an immortal, powerful and vicious? OK, let's see who makes it difficult!

Tom Lampert reconstructs the lives of eight people in Nazi Germany based on exhaustive research in archives all over the world. Among them is Miriam P., a troubled young woman deported from Palestine to Germany in 1933, who finds herself on a path to the gas chamber. And then there is the rabid Nazi Wilhelm K., who assumes the position of commissioner general in Belorussia only to fight for the lives of Jews in the Minsk ghetto. Karl L., the only Jew Commissioner K. is able to save, is transferred to Theresienstadt, where he takes control of the Ghetto Guard and relentlessly pursues any violation of concentration camp rules. As the stories of people on both sides of the rift unfold, their interconnected lives branch out in unexpected patterns, shaped by brutal racist policies as well as by simple accidents of fate. Documentary history or gripping literature? One Life is both. A unique document, beautifully crafted, it re-creates the horrors of that time and transforms an overly interpreted past into an open present. Book jacket.

Daniel Gray is about to turn thirty. Like any sane person, his response is to travel to Luton, Crewe and Hinckley. After a decade's exile in Scotland, he sets out to reacquaint himself with England via what he considers its greatest asset: football. Watching teams from the Championship (or Division Two as any right-minded person calls it) to the South West Peninsula Premier, and aimlessly walking around towns from Carlisle to Newquay, Gray paints a curious landscape forgotten by many. He discovers how the provinces made the England we know, from Teesside's role in the Empire to Luton's in our mongrel DNA. Moments in the histories of his teams come together to form football's narrative, starting with Sheffield pioneers and ending with fan ownership at Chester, and Gray shows how the modern game unifies an England in flux and dominates the places in which it is played. Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters is a wry and affectionate ramble through the wonderful towns and teams that make the country and capture its very essence. It is part-football book, part-travelogue and part-love letter to the bits of England that often get forgotten, celebrated here in all their blessed eccentricity.