This pioneering study charts the one-way traffic of cultural and historical objects during five centuries of European colonialism. Former colonies consider this as a historical injustice that has not been undone.

Every day, more and more kinds of historical data become available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This updated and expanded book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding the underlying algorithms at work in search engines or designing and using their own tools to process large amounts of information.Demonstrating what digital tools have to offer and also what 'digital' does to how we understand the past, the authors introduce the many different tools and developing approaches in Big Data for historical and humanistic scholarship, show how to use them, what to be wary of, and discuss the kinds of questions and new perspectives this new macroscopic perspective opens up. Originally authored 'live' online with ongoing feedback from the wider digital history community, Exploring Big Historical Data breaks new ground and sets the direction for the conversation into the future.Exploring Big Historical Data should be the go-to resource for undergraduate and graduate students confronted by a vast corpus of data, and researchers encountering these methods for the first time. It will also offer a helping hand to the interested individual seeking to make sense of genealogical data or digitized newspapers, and even the local historical society who are trying to see the value in digitizing their holdings.

Winner of the 2019 Menno Hertzberger Encouragement Prize for Book History and Bibliography In Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century Arthur der Weduwen presents the first comprehensive account of the early newspaper in the Low Countries. Composed of two volumes, this survey provides detailed introductions and bibliographical descriptions of 49 newspapers, surviving in over 16,000 issues in 84 archives and libraries. This work presents a crucial overview of the first fledgling century of newspaper publishing and reading in one of the most advanced political cultures of early modern Europe. Seventy years after Folke Dahl’s Dutch Corantos first documented early Dutch newspapers, Der Weduwen offers a brand-new approach to the bibliography of the early modern periodical press. This includes, amongst others, a description of places of correspondence listed in each surviving newspaper. The bibliography is accompanied by an extensive introduction of the Dutch and Flemish press in the seventeenth century. What emerges is a picture of a highly competitive and dynamic market for news, in which innovative publishers constantly adapt to the changing tastes of customers and pressures from authorities at home and abroad.

Masterpiece of medieval manuscript production and decoration, its Latin text glossed throughout in Old English, the Lindisfarne Gospels is a vital witness to the book culture, art, and Christianity of the Anglo-Saxons and their interactions with Ireland, Italy, and the wider world. The expert studies in this collection examine in turn the archaeology of Holy Island, relations between Ireland and Northumbria, early Northumbrian book culture, the relationship of the Lindisfarne Gospels to the Church universal, the canon table apparatus of the manuscript, the decoration of its Canon Tables, its systems of liturgical readings, the mathematical principles underlying the design of its carpet pages, points of comparison and contrast with the Book of Durrow, the Latin and Old English texts, the nature of the glossator’s ink, and the meaning of enigmatic words and phrases within the vernacular gloss. Approaching the material from a series of new perspectives, the contributors shed new light on numerous aspects of this magnificent manuscript, its milieux, and its significance.

In 1585, the British painter and explorer John White created images of Carolina Algonquian Indians. These images were collected and engraved in 1590 by the Flemish publisher and printmaker Theodor de Bry and were reproduced widely, establishing the visual prototype of North American Indians for European and Euro-American readers. In this innovative analysis, Michael Gaudio explains how popular engravings of Native American Indians defined the nature of Western civilization by producing an image of its “savage other.” Going beyond the notion of the “savage” as an intellectual and ideological construct, Gaudio examines how the tools, materials, and techniques of copperplate engraving shaped Western responses to indigenous peoples. Engraving the Savage demonstrates that the early visual critics of the engravings attempted-without complete success-to open a comfortable space between their own “civil” image-making practices and the “savage” practices of Native Americans-such as tattooing, bodily ornamentation, picture-writing, and idol worship. The real significance of these ethnographic engravings, he contends, lies in the traces they leave of a struggle to create meaning from the image of the American Indian. The visual culture of engraving and what it shows, Gaudio reasons, is critical to grasping how America was first understood in the European imagination. His interpretations of de Bry’s engravings describe a deeply ambivalent pictorial space in between civil and savage-a space in which these two organizing concepts of Western culture are revealed in their making. Michael Gaudio is assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota.