Daniel Lord Smail

When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilisation, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the...

The courtroom drama that denied the legitimacy of slavery in late medieval Europe. In 1387, a young Muslim woman from North Africa was captured on a galley in the Bay of Naples and brought to Marseille as a slave. For more than ten years, she was held in bondage to a shipwright and privateer named Peire Huguet. Daniel Lord Smail...