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Surely no popular genre is as fascinated with origins as the superhero story, which almost invariably features an ordinary being suddenly and unexpectedly transformed into something extraordinary –...

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America famously burst into view when the debut issue of Captain America Comics appeared on newsstands during the final days of 1940 (despite the cover date of Ma...

“I hope that they may live to see the power of the King and the Lords thrown down, that yet may live to see property preserved.”— Colonel Petty at Putney, 28 October 1647 (Woodhouse, 61)The famous army debates held at Putney in 1647 provide us with some remarkable insights into the misgivings of the men who were soon to bring about the trial and execution of their king. Their very practical need to placate the then powerful “Leveller” faction within the army drew the “Grandees” into talks which clearly reveal the limits of their revolutionary aspirations. The principal objection of both Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton to the proposals of the Levellers is also the most telling: both men saw in the proposed Leveller constitution, The Agreement of the People, a threat to the current economic order, an order based upon the ownership of property by a relatively small number of men.

Between 1500 and 1700, London grew from a minor national capital to the largest city in Europe. The defining period of growth was the period from 1550 to 1650, the midpoint of which coincided with the end of Elizabeth I's reign and the height of Shakespeare's theatrical career. In Material London ca. 1600, Lena Cowen Orlin and a distinguished group of social, intellectual, urban, architectural, and agrarian historians, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and literary critics explore the ideas, structures, and practices that distinguished London before the Great Fire, basing their investigations on the material traces in artifacts, playtexts, documents, graphic arts, and archaeological remains.In order to evoke "material London, ca. 1600", each scholar examines a different aspect of one of the great world cities at a critical moment in Western history. Several chapters give broad panoramic and authoritative views: what architectural forms charaterized the built city around 1600; how London's citizens incorporated the new commercialism of their culture into their moral views. Other essays offer sharply focused studies: how Irish mantles were adopted as elite fashions in the hybrid culture of the court; how the city authorities clashed with the church hierarchy over the building of a small bookshop; how London figured in Ben Jonson's exploration of the role of the poet. Although all the authors situate the material world of early modern London -- its objects, products, literatures, built environment, and economics practices -- in its broader political and cultural contexts, provocative debates and exchanges remain both within and between the essays as to what constitutes "materialLondon, ca. 1600".