Word: mediterraneans
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Internecine Warfare. The Mediterranean is like no other history. It opens not with Philip II (1527-1598) -whose royal entrance is delayed for several hundred pages-but high in the mountains that fringe the sea. It analyzes the shepherds' trails over the Pyrenees, it considers the early use of glacial ice to make ice cream, and it ponders the fate of the Jews, driven from city after city as the population exceeded the available food supply. Only after the fundamentals are established does Braudel turn to the traditional history of political events. Even then, the celebrated King Philip...
...inaugural conference of SUNY'S new Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations. It was the first major American recognition of French Historian Braudel-perhaps the most influential historian now at work and the author of the magnificent 1,375-page book, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip...
...young Fernand Braudel, then a fledgling schoolteacher in Algiers. "I am someone without ambition," Braudel remarked to TIME'S Ellie McGrath. "My father was a mathematician and wanted me to be a mathematician, so studying history was an adolescent revolt against my father." Looking out across the Mediterranean and wondering what to work on for his doctoral dissertation, Braudel decided on King Philip. But "little by little," recalls Braudel, "Philip II attracted me less and less, and the Mediterranean more and more." There was also the influence of Febvre, who had himself done work on Spain. "Philip...
...sustained himself by teaching other inmates (and occasionally playing pranks, like painting a pigeon's wings with the red. white and blue tricolor and then setting it loose, provoking a vain fusillade from German guards). He sustained himself too by a great feat of memory-writing The Mediterranean, filling up and mailing out one schoolboy copybook after another. "I had to believe that history, destiny, was written at a much more profound level," recalls Braudel of those years. "So it was that I consciously set forth in search of a historical language in order to present unchanging...
Striking Insights. Three great waves of events course through the pages of The Mediterranean: the longue duree of geographic and physical time; the shorter time span of cities and societies; the history of political events, "surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs." Striking insights emerge. Europe is not an entity; it is the physical sea that gives the region unity. Reversing the 19th century preoccupation with northern Europe, Braudel turns the globe upside down. Africa immediately looms large, overshadowing tiny Europe. The central struggle and axis in the Mediterranean is not north...