History's Place explores nostalgia as one of the defining aspects of the relationship between France and North Africa. Dr. Seth Graebner argues that France's most important colony developed a historical consciousness through literature, and that post-colonial writers revised it while retaining its dominant effect.

Hailed as a masterpiece when it was first published in France in 1977, The Desert tells the story of al-Mammi, a young exiled prince of a now-destroyed Jewish kingdom in southern Morocco in the late fourteenth century. Fighting battles in the service of kings and narrowly escaping imprisonment, the prince travels the Islamic world absorbing lessons, often painfully, on how to govern himself, as well as a country. At that same time, al-Mammi engages upon a spiritual journey to obtain inner wisdom rather than material riches. Memmi chronicles the prince’s fortunes as they rise and fall, drawing upon the traditions of Maghrebian storytelling and Arabian tales to offer a highly imaginative and allegorical novel that provocatively blends history with fiction.

Taxonomy provides the basic building blocks of our understanding of the diversity of life on this planet. It stems from innate human curiosity; confronted with an unknown species or object we ask "what is it?" Taxonomists recognize species and other systematic unities (the taxa), define them and place them within the framework of known organisms, providing the means for their subsequent identification. The Catalogue of Palaearctic Coleoptera (edited by I. & D. Löbl) gives a taxonomic overview of the most diverse group of all living things in the world's largest biogeographical area. It fixes nomenclature needed for unambiguous transfer of information, gives information about the occurrence of species and subspecies, and contains references that provide key information of over 40,000 systematic units. The work is a scaffold for biotic surveys, ecological studies, and nature conservation. It responds also to the urgent need of assessment of the still left forms of life, actually threatened by the on-going destruction of habitats. Contributors are: Robert B. Angus, Martin Fikáček, Elio Gentili, Manfred A. Jäch, Fenglong Jia, Tomáš Lackner, Ivan Löbl, Sławomir Mazur, Yusuke Minoshima, Alfred F. Newton, Michel Perreau, Alexander Prokin, Marek Przewoźny, Jan Rŭžička, Sergey K. Ryndevich, Michael Schülke, André Skale, Aleš Smetana, Mikael Sörensson. The publication of the work was supported by the Muséum de la Ville de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland.

This book examines the significance of the cotton trade in the Mediterranean traffic in the Later Middle Ages and evaluates its effects on the economy of the Occident. It covers all aspects of the production of, commerce and trade in cotton. The merchants of Venice, Genoa, Barcelona and Florence played the most important role in the cotton trade in the Mediterranean. The massing of supplies of raw material by the merchants of the four maritime cities led to the mass fabrication of cotton products. In this way Western society saw a remarkable growth in the consumption of cotton products in the Later Middle Ages.