demographics

AE156 Books

Urban Life and Form in Ancient Egypt

Although there is a rich source of archaeological evidence for towns and cities in ancient Egypt, research into urbanism has, according to Nadine Moeller, often avoided mention of it, because many of the settlements could be regarded as anomalous, not…

Birthing Romans

REVIEW BY PAULINE RIPAT Roman legends stressed the importance of babies in the foundation of Rome and its destiny to dominate. The unlikely birth of the twins Romulus and Remus from a Vestal Virgin, and their even more improbable survival…

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This week: Ancient immigration

While the subject of immigration remains perennially high up the modern political agenda, there is a tendency still in Britain to view the movement of people to these shores as a relatively recent phenomenon – as if it only began in the post-war period, with the arrival of the 'Windrush generation' and other migrants from countries that once were part of the British Empire. But multiculturalism has been a fact of life for much longer than that, of course.

Above The Plunkett Foundation promotes the idea of locating community businesses in places of worship to provide local services, create jobs, and generate revenue through rent.

Church Communities and Heritage

Churches are significant repositories of community history; they contain rare and precious objects; they are, in a very real sense, museums at the heart of every community. They are also places of reflection and spiritual sustenance...

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This week: Hawaii and Polynesia

It is a matter of debate as to whether Captain James Cook was really the first European adventurer to set eyes on the Hawaiian archipelago. According to some historians, the 1778 arrival of the British seafarer's ship, HMS Resolution, in the waters of the North Pacific island chain may have been preceded by a visit from the Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos in 1542 – more than 200 years earlier. What is more clear-cut is the effect Cook's arrival would have on the islands' original inhabitants, who had themselves crossed the Pacific to reach these shores many centuries before. With colonisation rapidly taking hold, large numbers of immigrants from Europe and America introduced new diseases to which the locals had no resistance. This lead to a calamitous fall in the native Hawaiian population, from approximately 300,000 in the 1770s to fewer than 40,000 in the 1890s, barely a century later.