HISTORY Course Guide - Indianapolis

The discovery of the Indies, wrote Francisco López de Gómara in 1552, was "the greatest event since the creation of the world, excepting the Incarnation and Death of Him who created it." Five centuries have not diminished either the overwhelming importance or the strangeness of the early encounter between Europeans and American peoples. This collection of essays, encompassing history, literary criticism, art history, and anthropology, offers a fresh and innovative approach to the momentous encounter.

A baseline study of the growth of preindustrial cities worldwide. This work employs a subset of preindustrial cities on many continents to answer questions archaeologists grapple with concerning the populating and growth of cities before industrialization. It further explores how scholars differently conceive and execute their research on the population of cities. The subject cities are in Greece, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Italy, Egypt, Africa, United States, Denmark, and China. This broad sample provides a useful framework for answers to such questions as "Why did people agglomerate into cities?" and "What population size and what age of endurance constitute a city?"

Against the widely held view occult spiritualities are marginal to Western culture, Spirituality and the Occult argues that the esoteric tradition has played a major role in European intellectual and cultural history. Among the disciplines in which B.J. Gibbons identifies the influence and continued presence of esoteric mystical movements are: medicine; science; philosophy; Freudian and Jungian psychology; radical political movements; and imaginative literature.