History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)

Book Description

Recorded history is a finely-woven magic fabric of intricate lies about events predating the sixteenth century. There is not a single piece of evidence that can be reliably and independently traced back earlier than the eleventh century. This book details events that are substantiated by hard facts and logic, and validated by new astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient sources.

Customer Reviews:

Calculations are only as good as your numbers.......2007-08-03

Yes, we can all agree that mainstream history is nearly 100% BS due to politics, economics, ego, problems with dating techniques, and various conspiracies. Agreed. But, I've been researching the distinct possibility that human history (in terms of civilizations) are much more ancient than we've been told, so coming across this book was very interesting to me. I wondered how Fomenko could be wrong (if at all) because he is very persuasive in his presentations. Then it dawned on me. If at previous times in prehistory, due to the various catastrophies that are well documented (comets, asteroids, planetary disruptions, plasma discharge, pole reversals, etc) the Earth was in a different position in relation to the sun, different tilt on its axis, different orbit, different rotation (in terms of velocity and DIRECTION), and the continents were in different positions, then would this not cause the ancients to see the sky (constellations) differently? In other words, is Fomenko making erronious assumptions about the physics of the Earth in pre-history, which then corrupt his data with regards to dating the relevant astrology? The last event to seriously disrupt our planet occured roughly 3500 years ago, according to other good researchers, so is it possible Fomenko has been confused by this? The vastly different physics of our planet in the not so distant past may explain this confusion, which is not to say the "mainstream" version of history is correct; on the contrary. I am not an expert in these fields, but wanted to see if this idea could spark discussion.

Pants on fire?.......2007-07-19

Will people ever read before spamming? Yes, Jesuits could not rewrite world history alone, they had help. Anyway, Dr Prof Acad A.Fomenko does not point to jesuits as the driving force of world wide history manipulation in published volumes 1,2,3;, actually he barely mentions the poor devils. Check it with 'Search inside' feature, please. China is rarely mentioned either, in fact, Dr Fomenko is completely eurocentric. Right, his theory contradicts all mainstream schools of history, because in their actual state they are all built on blatantly erroneus chronology. You don't need a mysterious cabal (conspiracy) to falsify history, the falsification is its modus operandi. It is inherent to history(ians) to falsify (distort) events, as it is inherent to humans to boast as it is inherent to power (authority) to legimize itself by referrring to glorious past made to its own order. Dr Prof Fomenko and team have identified scores of instances of such manipulation in Russian, European, etc.. history, and delivered valid statistical proof thereof. His own 'reconstruction' is completely another story. Forget c14 as a valid method of dating. W.Libby has initially discovered a brilliant method of INDEPENDENT dating. Too bad, c14 method has become a joke after a forced marrige with dendrochronology with consensual chronological scale inbuilt. Radiocarbon method can't stand blind tests, but is so very productive as a rubberstamp.

Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed. .......2007-04-09

There is no doubt that history as most know it is a sham, & institution's version of History both University & Church is fradulent & inaccurate. Everything was established with an agenda, The real "Dark Ages" are now when we have access to incredible amounts of information past authorities & more important 'common folk' didn't have but our institutions & educators are slow to evolve because of what has ignorantly & arrogantly been taught for too long. This is on many subjects not just Chronology.

For anyone to question "Why would a Mathematician have anything credible to say of History?" The answer is from Dr. Fomenko's preface in the book: "It would be worthwhile to remind the reader that in the XVI-XVII century Chronology was considered to be a subdivision of Mathematics." These volumes could possibly be some of the most important works to date & should be read by everyone with an interest in History, especially professors & educators who have a duty to the public. I have read both books & must say that 'Chronology 1' has some very eye opening & revolutionary information. Even if these volumes are part true the implications are profound & opens the doors to further investigations & questions which must be done. I speak several different lanquages & must say the logic Dr. Fomenko uses with "inflection" of words & words being read from left to right in one region & right to left in another then written backwards, the removal of vowels & get down to basics of words, or different cities & locations having the same name etc. is correct. Vowel usage has always been optional & varied, actually complicating linquistics & study. The first thing one has to understand is that words never had a fixed spelling in history like we do now, the spelling of words was mutable & regional, as well as names & titles of people were vast, varied & changed, NOTHING WAS FIXED or understood linear. Matters of Life & Death as well as financial profiteering yesterday & today were & are made with ignorant, illogical & conspiratorial views of history & reality, it's time people get closer to the Truth & society collectively grow up.

Very Interesting.......2007-03-07

It is a good proposal and I believe it will mature into something even better in the future. I think it deserves to be read.

History as Science Fiction.......2007-01-10

Anatoly Fomenko has written a very intriguing book, full of pictures, charts, and computer 'proof' of his thesis: backwards of AD900 we don't really know what happened or when. Between AD900 and AD1600 there is more certainty, but there is still a lot of fuzzy ground, and things don't get reliable until we get past the 1600's where the printing press made it very difficult for the perpetrators of this timeline manipulation to change anything that had been committed to print. The Dark Ages did not happen. Books were burned for a reason. One organization has doubled the actual length of its existence by expanding the real chronology. Read why.

I had always wondered why Christ died about AD33 and yet men waited until the 11th century to form the Knights Templar, the Cathars, etc and go after the Holy Land by force. Why the 1000 year gap? Turns out there wasn't more than a 10-12 year gap and he proves it using astronomy. This also implies that the planet is not as old as we have been told, and current Christian and other creationist scientists are already championing that idea without being aware of Fomenko's book. The two groups, creationist scientists and the Russian mathematical analysts corroborate each other. Fascinating.

Of course, all this flies in the face of what we have been told traditionally is the 'proper' chronology of western civilization, and most readers will experience 'cognitive dissonance' in reading this book. It means that our history going backwards from AD1600 becomes progressively more incorrect and unreliable until it cannot be trusted at all... in the space of 700-800 years.

Naturally, the curious, open-minded reader will want to know WHO did this, WHY, and did any of the events we think of as really ancient ever happen?
Dr. Fomenko is a respected scientist/mathematician at Moscow State University who has already answered these questions to the satisfaction of his initially skeptical colleagues. Most of them are now believers, a few still refuse to believe (the usual diehards), and of course the western press has ignored Fomenko's work -- for obvious reasons when you read the book. The ones who perpetrated this chronology ruse have a lot to answer for. They are still with us. That's why this book is a well-kept secret.

I gave the book a 4-star rating because I was unable to check out some of his claims; those I checked were as he said. But if even 1/3 of his claims are true, this punches a big hole in what we think is our history, the meaning of western civilization, our educational process (for repeating the ruse as gospel), and the trustworthiness of the organization that perpetrated this ruse, well-intentioned or not.

This book relates to current research into a Young Earth paradigm, to John Keel's discoveries about our planet, and Fr Malachi Martin's insights (in his now out-of-print books). We are indeed sheep who are manipulated and kept ignorant -- for a reason. While knowing what these men have to say may be the "booby prize" (as in: 'what can you do with this knowledge?'), it will provide interesting reading. Didn't someone say: "...and the Truth will set you free."?? For you to judge if this book contains the truth.

Autonomy and Ethnicity: Negotiating Competing Claims in Multi-Ethnic States (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)

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Interesting case studies, but somewhat disconnected

Autonomy and Ethnicity: Negotiating Competing Claims in Multi-Ethnic States (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)

Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Contemporary Nationalism: Civic, Ethnocultural and Multicultural Politics
Comparing Political Regimes: A Thematic Introduction to Comparative Politics
Managing and Settling Ethnic Conflicts: Perspectives on Successes and Failures in Europe, Africa, and Asia
Keeping the Peace: Lasting Solutions to Ethnic Conflicts
Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights

ASIN: 0521786428

Book Description

Responses to ethnic conflicts in recent decades have ranged from oppression and ethnic cleansing to accommodations of ethnic claims through affirmative policies, special forms of representation, power sharing, and the integration of minorities. One of the most sought after, and resisted, devices for conflict management is autonomy. This book uses select countries including China, Canada, South Africa, former Yugoslavia and Australia to explore the dialectics of ethnicity and territory as mediated by a variety of forms of autonomy.

Customer Reviews:

Interesting case studies, but somewhat disconnected.......2007-08-17

I'm currently using this as a textbook for an undergraduate political science class. I chose it because there are few books on this topic, i.e. the merit of using autonomy as a means to manage multi-ethnic states, and because the table of contents looked promising.

The book consists of an introduction by the editor and a number of case studies from all over the world that are divided into three categories: operating autonomies (Canada, India, China, South Africa, Spain), failed autonomies (the only case study is former Yugoslavia), and seeking autonomies (Ethiopia/Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Bougainville, Australia). Unfortunately, there is no conclusion to tie any of the case studies together.

Even though the case studies themselves are very interesting, I don't think this book works as a whole, because there is literally nothing that ties the findings together. The introduction does a fairly good job of providing some background information, primarily on the various theories on the origins and definitions of "ethnicity," on the state of international law concerning self-determination and group rights, as well as some very general (and mostly self-evident) lessons learned from past experiences with autonomy. What the book lacks is a systematic comparison of the different cases and a conclusion as to whether or not granting autonomy to certain ethnic groups actually works, and if so, in what form this should happen. The cases are well researched individually (albeit more descriptive than analytical), but appear to be quite disconnected from each other. There is nothing that tells the reader what makes the so-called "operating autonomies" successful and how those "seeking autonomy" might learn from that.

In addition, this books is not the easiest you'll ever read. The chapters are quite "dense" (to use my students' assessment) and full of academic terms that might be confusing for those not familiar with the field of political science. I would recommend this volume to advanced graduate students and/or scholars interested in the subject, as well as to readers who are looking for an in-depths analysis of one of the cases discussed in the volume. It is definitely not a good "introduction to..."

Anika Leithner

Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice

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Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice

Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Similar Items:

Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China after Mao
China's Long March toward Rule of Law
The Legal System of the People's Republic of China in a Nutshell (Nutshell Series)
Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China
Understanding China's Legal System

ASIN: 0804750483
Release Date: 2005-02-04

Book Description

This interdisciplinary book of essays addresses critical issues arising from the emergence of legal institutions in contemporary China. One section of the book focuses on the legal process: how law is mobilized by ordinary people to redress injustice, the role of legal culture, the extent to which citizens can sue state officials, and how disputes involving workers and veterans are settled. A second set of papers explores specific legal institutions, such as the security apparatus, “labor reeducation” camps, and rules that punish infringement of intellectual property rights. Almost all the contributors are social scientists who have recently engaged in field research in China. The introduction by the editors and the individual chapters attempt, for the first time, to bring to bear on the study of Chinese law the law-and-society scholarship that has enriched Western legal studies in recent years.

Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Law, Society, and Culture in China)

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The best study of local government in late imperial China

Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Law, Society, and Culture in China)
Bradly Reed
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0804737584
Release Date: 2000-03-07

Book Description

For commoners in the Qing dynasty, the most salient agents of the imperial state were not the emperor’s appointed officials but rather the clerks and runners of the county yamen, the lowest level of functionaries in the Qing state’s administrative hierarchy. Yet until now we have known very little about these critically important persons beyond the caricatured portrayals of corruption and venality left by Qing high officials and elites.

Drawing from the rich archival records of Ba county, Sichuan, the author challenges the simplicity of these portrayals by taking us inside the county yamen to provide the first detailed look at local administrative practice from the perspective of those who actually carried it out. Who were the county clerks and runners? How were they recruited, organized, disciplined, and rewarded? What was the economic basis for a career in the yamen? How did clerks and runners view themselves as well as legitimize their role in Qing government? And what impact did their interests and practices have on symbolically laden elements of imperial government such as the magistrate’s court?

In addressing these questions, the author traverses the disjuncture between statutory regulations and the realities of daily administrative practice, uncovering a realm of informal, semiautonomous, yet highly structured and even rationalized procedures. Although frequently in violation of formal law, this extra-statutory system nevertheless remained an irreducible component of local government under the Qing. Recognizing the centrality of such informal practice to yamen administration forces us to rethink not only traditional assumptions concerning local corruption in the Qing, but also the ways in which we conceptualize the boundaries between state and society in late imperial China.

Customer Reviews:

The best study of local government in late imperial China.......2003-12-21

This book is by far the most important study of local government in late imperial China that has yet been published. Its only possible rival might be T'ung-tsu Ch'u's 1962 classic, "Local Government in China Under the Ch'ing," which Reed's book has largely superseded.

A unique feature of Reed's book is that it makes use of the only county government archive of any size that survives from the Qing dynasty, the Ba County archive. This singular body of material became available to scholars only shortly before Reed began his doctoral research, and he was quick to seize the opportunity to provide an insider's view of how local administration actually worked in the late empire. Previous scholarship had depended on the writings of senior officials appointed by the imperial center, and was severely limited by the top-down, condescending perspective of such sources; it tended to pass along unwittingly the prejudices of Qing elites as empirical fact.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of the book is to rescue us from diehard stereotypes of clerks and runners in the local government offices ("yamen") of late imperial China. For centuries, these locally-recruited personnel were vilified as inherently evil and corrupt; such rhetoric was a standard part of official and elite discourse for several dynasties, and earlier generations of scholars tended to accept it at face value. Yet no one until Reed had bothered to ask why a system that employed such personnel, and depended on them for most of the vital and sensitive tasks of government, could function so well for so long. For example, clerks and runners were constantly blamed for supposedly provoking litigation in order to extort personal profits - and yet, as Reed proves, the entire local court system was financed by fees collected from litigants. The increase of litigation was hardly the result of extortion by clerks and runners. Reed shows that this discourse of vituperation was vital to the ideology of empire; it enabled degree-holding Mandarins of elite pedigree to cloak themselves in the symbols of Confucian legitimacy while distancing themselves from the dirty work of government (tax collection, arrests, etc.) that was performed by the clerks and runners under their supervision. Such rhetoric was one of the ways that late imperial regimes tried to obscure the coercive bureaucratic machinery that underpinned their supposedly virtuous rule.

Another important contribution of Reed's book is his discovery of the "customary law" of the local yamen, which was used to resolve disputes among the clerks and runners themselves. The local magistrate would adjudicate internal disputes on the basis of longstanding internal rules and norms, which the clerks and runners themselves would report to him. (Magistrates were outsiders who served relatively brief terms before being rotated elsewhere; the clerks and runners were long-serving locals.) This process was invisible from the outside, and it runs completely counter to the top-down view of law and government in late imperial China that constituted our received wisdom; in fact, it clearly violated the nominal rules dictated by the imperial center for running local affairs. But, as Reed shows, if such nominal rules had been enforced, the imperial system would have collapsed immediately. Like the official rhetoric about clerks and runners, these nominal rules published in the imperial capital had long been taken at face value, as a description of how local government really functioned. But increasingly it appears that the imperial system worked in precisely the manner that Reed describes, through flexible negotiation between lofty ideological norms and practical local needs, with the latter frequently proving decisive.

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Pacific Affairs, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2006. The length of the article is 964 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice.(Book review)
Author: Pitman B. Potter
Publication: Pacific Affairs (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 79 Issue: 3 Page: 520(3)

Article Type: Book review

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Law, the State, and Society in China (Chinese Law : Social, Political, Historical, and Economic Perspectives)

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Law, the State, and Society in China (Chinese Law : Social, Political, Historical, and Economic Perspectives)
Tahirih V. Lee
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

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Book Description

Crime and "Due Process"
Alford, William P. "Of Arsenic and Old Laws: Looking Anew at Criminal Justic in Late Imperial China" California Law Review 72 (1984)
* Li, Victor, Hao. "Law Without Lawyers" in Law Without Lawyers (Boulder: West Publishing, 1980)
* Ocko, Jonathan K. "Ill Take It All the Way to Beijing: Capital Appeals in the Qing (Chinese Qing Dynasty 1644-1911)" Journal of Asian Studies 47 (1988)
* Tao, Lung-Sheng. "Politics and Law Enforcement in China: 1949-1970" American Journal Of Comparative Law 22 (1974)
* Woo, Margaret Y.K. "The Right to a Criminal Appeal in the People's Republic of China" Yale Journal of International Law 14 (1989)
Law and Families
Hom, Sharon "Female Infanticide in China: the Human Rights Spector and Thoughts Towards another Vision" Columbia Human Rights Law Review 23 (1992)
* Ng, Vivien W. "Ideology and Sexuality: Rape Laws in Qing China" Journal of Asian Studies 47(1987)
* Palmer, Michael "Adoption Law in the People's Republic of China" Yearbook on Socialist Legal Systems (1986)
* Riles, Annelist "Spheres of Exchange and Spheres of Law: Identity and Power in Chinese Marriage Agreements" International Journal of the Sociology of Law 19 (1991)
Human Rights
Cohen, Jerome Alan. "Due Process?" In Ross Terrill, ed., The China Difference (Harper & Row, 1979)
* Li, Victor "Human Rights in a Chinese Context" In Ross Terrill, ed. The China Difference(Harper & Row, 1979)
* Potter, Pitman "The Administrative Litigation Law of the PRC: Judicial Review and Bureaucratic Reform" in Pitman Potter ed., Domestic Law Reforms in Post-Mao China (Boulder: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1993)

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