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:
“We don’t know any more about pictures than a kangaroo does about metaphysics.... To us, the great uncultivated, it is the last thing in the world to call a picture. Brown said it looked like an old fire- board.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
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—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)