With the vision of a historian and the voice of a novelist, prizewinning author John Demos explores the social, cultural, and psychological roots of the scourge that is witch-hunting, both in the remote past and today.
Before Captain Cook's three voyages, to Europeans the globe was uncertain and dangerous; after, it was comprehensible and ordered. Written as a conceptual field guide to the voyages, Longitude and Empire offers a significant rereading of both the expeditions and modern political philosophy. More than any other work, printed accounts of the voyages marked the shift from early modern to modern ways of looking at the world. The globe was no longer divided between Europeans and savages but populated instead by an almost overwhelming variety of national identities.
Since its original publication in 1972, no book has done as much as Jeremy Brecher's Strike! to bring American labor history to a wide audience. Strike! narrates the dramatic story of repeated, massive, and sometimes violent revolts by ordinary working people in America and tells this exciting hidden history from the point of view of the rank-and-file workers who lived it.
Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants -- by observing the rat. Rats live in the world precisely where humans do; they survive on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage. While dispensing gruesomely fascinating rat facts and strangely entertaining rat stories -- everyone has one, it turns out -- Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat. With a notebook and night-vision gear, he sits in the streamlike flow of garbage and searches for fabled rat kings, sets out to trap a rat, and eventually travels to the Midwest to learn about rats in Chicago, Milwaukee, and other cities of America. With tales of rat fights in the Gangs of New York era and stories of Harlem rent strike leaders who used rats to win basic rights for tenants, Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses -- its herd-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting yet always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing
In collecting the kind of reportage that all too rarely appears in this age of media triviality and corporate conglomeration, Muckraking documents an alternative journalistic tradition, one marked by depth of vision, passion for change, and bravery. From the Stamp Act to the abolition movement to the Vietnam war, from the fight against patent medicines to the elimination of labor spies, from the integration of baseball to the safety of government atomic workers, and from putting people in jail to getting them out, this book illustrates the great journalism that has made America a better country. With more than 125 entries that range across three centuries, Muckraking brings together the greatest moments of American journalism.
In The Glass Cage, best-selling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure.
The story of our most vital resource, and how it has shaped the history of every human society, spans five millennia, from ancient Mesopotamia to the parched Sun Belt, from ancient Rome, whose mighty aqueducts still supply modern cities, to China, where emperors marshaled armies of laborers in a centuries-long struggle to tame powerful rivers. Anthropologist Fagan sets out three ages of water: In the first, lasting thousands of years, water was scarce--so precious that it became sacred in almost every culture. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, human ingenuity had brought water to the most arid landscapes. This was the second age: water as commodity. Even bone-dry regions like the American Southwest glittered with swimming pools and golf courses. Today, we are entering a third age: as our population approaches nine billion and ancient aquifers run dry, we must learn once again to treat this essence of life with humility, even reverence.
From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He also provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information, including Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon.
The author "explains what the study of history entails, how it has been approached over the centuries, and why it should be undertaken by today's students."
The great myths of the world create meaning out of the fundamental events of human existence: birth, death, conflict, loss, reconciliation, the cycle of the seasons. They speak to us of life itself in voices still intelligible, yet compellingly strange and distant. World Mythology offers readers an authoritative and wide-ranging guide to these enduring mythological traditions, combining the pure narrative of the myths themselves with the background necessary for more complete understanding.
Dedicated to the preservation of our planet's architectural treasures, the World Monuments Watch was established in 1996 to aid in the rescue of endangered cultural sites. Breathtaking full-color photographs, many newly commissioned, portray the most important sites on the Watch's list between 1996 and 2000 - including such marvels as the Angkor Archaeological District in Cambodia, Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, ancient Pompeii, and many others around the globe. Spanning Baroque palace gardens in Vienna to an ancient city in the central Asian desert, the book includes brief discussions of each site. Published in association with the World Monuments Fund, the parent organization of the World Monuments Watch, this book will appeal to anyone interested in architecture, archaeology, and cultural history.
The global community, dependent as always on the cooperation of nation states, is gradually learning to address the serious threats to the cultural heritage of our disparate but shared civilizations. The legacy of conquest, colonialization, and commerce looms large in defining and explaining these threats. The essays contained in this challenging volume are based on papers presented at an international conference on cultural heritage issues that took place at Willamette University. The conference sought to generate fresh ideas about these cultural heritage issues; offer a good sense of their nuances and complexities; and reveal how culture, law, and ethics can interact, complement, diverge, and contradict one another.
Contains full text from more than 750 history reference books and encyclopedias, and cover-to-cover full text from nearly 60 history magazines. Also contains 58,000 historical documents; 43,000 biographies of historical figures; more than 12,000 historical photos and maps; and 87 hours of historical film and video.
Contains full text, citations, and indexing for over 500 English-language periodicals covering literature and language, history, philosophy, archaeology, classical studies, folklore, gender studies, performing arts, religion and theology.
This program combines lavish reconstructions of the ancient Greek Games with dramatic highlights from the modern Games to reveal the extraordinary contrasts and unexpected connections between the greatest sporting events of their age.
*Streaming video
Andrew Marr sets off on an epic journey through 70,000 years of human history. Using dramatic reconstructions, documentary filming around the world and cutting-edge computer graphics, he reveals the decisive moments that shaped the world we live in today—including unknown stories.
*Streaming video
This major documentary series looks at the first anthropologists to stop "armchair theorizing" and go out to live among the peoples who so interested them. Throughout the centuries travelers, adventurers, and explorers have been fascinated by other cultures. But most tribal societies were regarded as "primitive" and were thought of as inferior beings, presumed to be living evidence of the way we in the West once were. However, towards the end of the 19th century, the new science of anthropology began to change all that, bringing with it a greater understanding and respect for other cultures.
*Streaming videos
Mermaid Bonita Colson checking her hair in a mirror - Weeki Wachee, Florida
An extensive collection of guides or 'sourcebooks' containing links to information on topics ranging from Ancient history to Modern times. Includes timelines, historical documents, articles, and multimedia sources. Courtesy of Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies.
Features digital collections of historical documents from the State Archives and Library of Florida. Contains an extensive selection of photographs, video and audio recordings, as well government records.
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