“Saab 105" is a definitive and comprehensive book that delves into the world of the Saab 105 aircraft, providing readers with a wealth of information and captivating visuals. Written in English, this book stands out as the ultimate resource for enthusiasts, historians, and aviation aficionados seeking an in-depth understanding of the iconic Saab 105.One of the book's standout features is its extensive collection of photographs, showcasing the aircraft in various operational settings. Many of these captivating images have never been seen before, offering readers a rare glimpse into the rich history of the Saab 105. From action shots to candid moments, the photographs provide a vivid visual narrative, bringing the aircraft's story to life.The book also includes detailed walkaround photographs of preserved Saab 105 aircraft. These close-up shots offer enthusiasts a unique opportunity to explore the intricate details and features of the aircraft, further enhancing their understanding and appreciation.Also the book incorporates illustrations sourced from contemporary manualsFurthermore, "Saab 105" features original colour artwork. These vibrant illustrations capture the Saab 105 in all its glory, showcasing its sleek lines, distinctive features, and livery variations. The artwork serves as both a visual treat and a reference, allowing readers to visualize the aircraft in different contexts.For model enthusiasts and collectors, the book includes scale plans in 1/72 scale.

The “Battlin’ Bastards” of B Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, fought daily against a numerically superior and well-trained enemy during their tours in Vietnam, 1968–71. Before the war, these men were brothers, sons, sweethearts, husbands, and fathers. Some were athletes, some musicians. Some were just out of high school, some in established careers. There is no monolithic “Battlin’ Bastard,” but when they joined the 101st Airborne Division—one of the most highly decorated divisions in the United States Army—in Vietnam, they united, fighting for each other, and fighting to return safely home.It was difficult to put their experiences behind them. As Bravo veteran, Terry Taylor, recalled, “I learned at the age of 18 that you don’t have to die to go to hell. Vietnam was hell on earth”. And yet despite the obstacles, many of these men built successful lives post-war. Decades after returning from the “Nam”, when the men were ready to cautiously revisit their experiences, the Bastards started stateside reunions.From these reunions came the wish to share their stories with the world, to honor, to educate, and to inspire. The result is this book, written from interviews and diligent archival research, in which the surviving “Battlin’ Bastards” tell their stories of combat in their own words, and honor those who “sacrificed for their country and their unit.”

By October 1943, the German 17th Army had been forced to retreat from the Kuban bridgehead across the Kerch Strait to Crimea. During the following months, the Red Army pushed back the German forces in the southern Ukraine. In November 1943, they eventually cut off the land-based connection of 17th Army through the Perekop Isthmus. Hitler prohibited a sea evacuation of 17th Army because he thought the Red Army could use the Crimean Peninsula to launch air attacks against Romanian oil refineries.In November 1943, the Russian launched a massive amphibious assault at two locations on the eastern coast of the Crimea, but its units were unable to prevent an Axis counterattack that collapsed the southern bridgehead. The Red Army held the bridgehead at Yenikale, from which they launched further offensive operations, culminating in a huge offensive in April 1944.Although the 17th Army bitterly contested every bit of ground, it was unable to stop the advance. Soviet forces reached Kerch on April 11, forcing the 17th Army to retreat towards Sevastopol. The remaining Axis forces in the Crimea were concentrating around the city by the end of the third week of April.The Germans intended to hold Sevastopol as a fortress, as the Russians had done between 1941 and 1942. However, the fortifications of the city had not been restored and the city fell on 9 May.From mid-April, Romanian and German ships undertook a huge and complex evacuation operation. The last phase of the evacuation, following the fall of Sevastopol, saw 37,000 troops transported under constant attacks from Soviet aircraft and shore artillery. Overall around 57,000 men were lost during the evacuation.Fully illustrated with rare and unpublished photos, this is a detailed account of the dogged attempt to retake the Crimea in 1943–44.

The Vikings in the Hebrides provides an introduction to the Viking colonization and Norse occupation of the Outer Hebrides. Our knowledge of this period in the Hebrides has until recently been minimal as the historic evidence was negligible and the archaeology limited. However, two recent excavations at Bornais and Cille Pheadair have transformed our understanding of the period in the region. These two excavations will provide much of the information that is set out in this book but there is also a comprehensive review of other important discoveries such as the Lewis Chessmen, the burial at Cnip, Lewis and the silver hoards from Stornoway Castle and Dibidale in Lewis.The excavations at Bornais have transformed our understanding of the Norse settlement of the North Atlantic. It is possible to chart the evolution of domestic houses from the Viking longhouse to the post-medieval croft, to analyze the distribution of finds on the house floors and to critically assess gender relationships over this long period.The excavations have also produced large quantities of finds that demonstrate the links between the Western Isles and the wider world. These include important assemblages of bone combs and comb making debris, which enable a discussion of craft production and the fluctuating relationship of the Hebrides, the Irish Sea zone and Scandinavia. The presence of exotic green porphyry from Greece, amber, Ringerike art, pottery from the Bristol Channel, coins from Scandinavia, England and the Low Countries all provide opportunities to contextualise the settlements and the region in the wider medieval world.This book places the Outer Hebrides at the center of the Viking World and provides a unique contribution to our understanding of the islands’ importance at the critical period when Scotland was emerging as a major medieval kingdom.

Monumental spaces were fundamental in the construction of power, political order and community identities in the ancient and pre-modern world. It was for this reason that authorities invested heavily in the construction of ideal landscapes of power that embodied the basic representation about what a harmonious society and an ordered world under the inspired guidance of the ruler(s) was. Such landscapes conveyed thus powerful cultural values and ideals about the social order that had produced them, not to speak about the authorities’ ability –who designed and built them – to lead their societies. However, far from being fixed over time, those spaces underwent changes to accommodate new values, to express a new balance of power resulting in transformations, rebuilding, integration of selected aspects of the past or, simply, utter destruction of landscapes no longer functional.In some societies, ceremonies were open, addressed to the whole society―at least as witnesses―in which their rulers performed the construction of social order and received divine support. The Maya cities, for example, with their loose urban density and open spaces dominated by autonomous neighbourhoods, epitomize the ideological need to gather society as spectators. Plazas became thus essential to negotiate consent and social consensus. In other cases the absence of open spaces – including cult ones – in which the community may gather and participate in collective performances points to oligarchical and somewhat secluded configurations of power, as in pharaonic Egypt, while, in the Classical world, agoras, forums and open spaces were intended to facilitate collective political deliberation.Urban layouts may bear traces of rival uses of space, for instance between “official” ceremonial areas, reserved to pageantry displays, and areas that were more organic, difficult to control but which favoured the concentration of crafts and guilds, alternative circulation of news and construction of counterpowers, like bazaars. The archaeological focus put on ceremonial spaces and prestige buildings may thus conceal the political importance of those other spaces and the counter-power issued there, with the lack specifically-designed buildings significant in itself.The aim of this book is to explore the relation between built environments, collective identities and political agency and the potential conflicts arising from competing or alternative social uses of the space, be it public, ritual, civic or a mix of all of them. A selection of historical case-studies from different regions of the world may help rethink current concepts and views about the traces that communal political agency left in the organization of settlements and in planning monumental areas. Such cases may also cast some light over the limits of rulers’ authority and the existence of collective institutions―formal or informal―rarely evoked in official sources. In the end, this book explores the importance of comparative research to address collective decision-making and communal identities in the pre-modern world.

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Intersections Series

A Medieval Life: William de Felton and Edlingham Castle, 1260–1324 is a biographical fusion of history, geography and archaeology with a focus on landscape and castles studies, set in the reigns of Edward I and II in the context of early attempts to create by force a single nation on the British island. A central theme in the book is how medieval biography can be written about someone relatively ordinary and not famous without straying into generalisation. The existing general market readership for medieval history focuses on ‘kings, queens and battles’, and this book attempts a different perspective. The book’s origin lies in an archaeological excavation between 1978 and 1982 at Edlingham Castle, near Alnwick, Northumberland. Edlingham Castle was first built in the years around 1300 by William de Felton. It was abandoned in the 1660s after less than four centuries of habitation, to be uncovered by excavation just over three centuries later. This is not a conventional excavation report, nor an architectural survey, but an attempt to excavate a buried and concealed life, that of the castle’s first builder. In the process it creates a context to understand this unusual building. It offers a biographical approach to history framed by archaeological and landscape perspectives: biographies of one man and of groups of people he knew, but also biographies of place and landscape.William de Felton has been fairly anonymous to historians; his precise birth and death dates are unrecorded, his parentage has always been uncertain, his place of origin unclear. He was relatively wealthy and privileged, perhaps in the upper five or ten percent of contemporary society, but he does not represent the high aristocracy or even the medieval ‘great and the good’, which is the most common subject of medieval biography and history. Although not famous either then or since, William’s story can nevertheless illuminate the lives and landscapes of those around him because his life is unexpectedly welldocumented; his career as a middleranking servant in and close to the royal households, combined with the bureaucratic habits of Edward I and Edward II, has bequeathed a corpus of about two hundred contextualised medieval documents that mention him.These contemporary documents could individually be considered banal. Taken together with the documentary evidence for William’s family, friends and colleagues, and located into a known geographic as well as historic context, they enable a reconstruction of his life, and offer windows onto several aspects of life in medieval Britain. They show us William as husband and father, and as a landowner, as an usher of the king’s bedchamber, as a soldier during Edward I’s continual wars, and as a builder, notably for the king in Gascony, but also in his own right at Edlingham. We see him as an administrator or governor of occupied territories, and later as a local official in Northumberland. The contemporary documents about William also illustrate the mechanisms of longdistance travel in the thirteenth century: contrary to the idea that medieval people travelled little, they show us William moving with the king’s armies and household from his native Shropshire, widely around England, into Wales, France, Gascony and Flanders, and Scotland during the first wars of Scottish independence. William’s biography and Edlingham Castle opens windows onto life in the Middle Ages, revealing a world not as dissimilar to our own as we might like to think.

For many years now, the main thrust of European prehistory has followed a fundamentally terrestrial plot line. This terrestrial paradigm has undervalued the story of Europe as a peninsula between the Baltic, Mediterranean and Atlantic, and likewise downplayed that of many navigable rivers that reach deeply inland and the large lakes important for travel and subsistence. In vast areas of Europe the survival of incoming groups depended on coping and interacting with a seascape as much as a landscape. From the late Mesolithic onwards, in regions such as Scandinavia, the British Isles and the Mediterranean, most occupation was coastal; seas or rivers provided the most important infrastructure for transport, exchange and communication. Know-how about seascapes, boatbuilding, navigation and maritime networks had a profound impact on social organisation, ritual monuments and iconography, and the spread of materials and ideas, enabled by the adaptation of languages to these new environments. Given these facts the time is long overdue to critique the dominant terrestrial paradigm of European prehistory. This book is the first in the multi-author series Maritime Encounters, outputs of the major six-year (2022–2028) international research initiative funded by Sweden’s central bank. Our programme is based on a maritime perspective, a counterpoint to prevailing land-based vantages on Europe’s prehistory. In the Maritime Encounters project a highly international cross-disciplinary team has embarked on a diverse range of research goals to provide a more detailed and nuanced story of how prehistoric societies realised major and minor sea crossings, organised long-distance exchange, and adapted to ways of life by the sea in prehistory.

The Bayeux Tapestry is one of the most important works of art in the world. Even without visiting the tapestry itself in the museum dedicated to it, we are all familiar with at least one illustration drawn from one of the 58 scenes that compose it. Visitors to the tapestry are often surprised by its length, its vivacity and its colours. It inspires passion in everybody who sees it - nobody can remain insensitive to a 950 year old story told in pictures accompanied by a Latin text.