R. Charles Weller Book order

Focusing on the intersections of Mosaic and Islamic law, this groundbreaking comparative study explores their influence on American constitutional law and national identity. It provides a nuanced historical context, tracing the rise of debates in the 1990s and 2000s surrounding the Ten Commandments and Mosaic Law. The book also addresses the connections between these legal discussions and the resurgence of anti-Semitism, anti-Sharia protests, and related legislation in the U.S. and Western societies, offering a comprehensive analysis of contemporary legal and social dynamics.

The book explores the evolution of historical-cultural 'survivals' from late 19th-century theories, engaging with debates around monotheism and anti-Catholic sentiments. It traces these concepts back to their roots in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, as well as their secular adaptations during the German Enlightenment and Romanticism. The influence of the 'dual faith' tradition in Russian Orthodoxy on Tsarist and Soviet ethnography of Muslim Central Asia is highlighted, revealing its role in shaping imperial agendas and its ongoing impact on post-Soviet historiography.

This book makes a unique and timely contribution to world/global historical studies and related fields. It places essential world historical frameworks by top scholars in the field today in clear, direct relation to and conversation with one other, offering them opportunity to enrich, elucidate and, at times, challenge one another. It thereby aims to: (1) offer world historians opportunity to critically reflect upon and refine their essential interpretational frameworks, (2) facilitate more effective and nuanced teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom, (3) provide accessible world historical contexts for specialized areas of historical as well as other fields of research in the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and (4) promote comparative historiographical critique which (a) helps identify continuing research questions for the field of world history in particular, as well as (b) further global peace and dialogue in relation to varying views of our ever-increasingly interconnected, interdependent, multicultural, and globalized world and its shared though diverse and sometimes contested history.