Third World and Ancient Cities
Since the 1980s extensive research has been done of the cities of the Ottoman Empire, where standardized record keeping and centralized archives have facilitated work on Aleppo, Damascus, Hama, Nablus and Jerusalem. Historians have explored the social bases of political factionalism, histories of elites and commoners, different family structures and gender roles, marginalized groups such as prostitutes and slaves, and relationships between Muslims and Christians and Jews. Increasingly work is underway on African cities, as well as South Asia.
In China the Maoist ideology privileged the uprising of the peasants as the central force in Chinese history, which led to a neglect of urban history until the 1980s. Academics were then allowed to assert that peasant rebellions were often reactionary rather than revolutionary, and that China's modernizers of the 1870s made significant advances, even if they were capitalists.
For over a century—since Heinrich Schliemann searched for and found ancient Troy—archaeologists and ancient historians have studies the cities of the ancient world.
Read more about this topic: Urban History
Famous quotes containing the words world, ancient and/or cities:
“The world is ... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not “inhabit” only “the inner man,” or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907–1961)
“He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.... He needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)