14302 results for "History"

Abuse of power: the new Nixon tapes

Kutler, Stanley I.
Using thousands of hours of previously concealed tapes, a stunning revelation into the infamous Nixon White House and how far the administration went to cover up the abuse of power. Richard Nixon said he wanted his administration to be "the best chronicled in history." But when Alexander Butterfield disclosed the existence of a voice-activated taping system to a Senate committee in July 1973, Nixon's White House and its recordings quickly became the most infamous in American history. But only sixty hours were actually made public in the 1970s. Thousands of hours remained secret and in Nixon's hands, and he fought fiercely to keep them that way right up to his death. Finally, thanks to a lawsuit brought by historian Stanley I. Kutler, the Nixon estate and the National Archives have brought over three thousand hours of tapes to light. The tapes reveal an extensive cover-up beyond what was previously understood. The recordings, ranging from campaign tactics to controversial discussions, redefine the meaning of power abuse within Nixon's administration and his ultimate demise. A spy planted in Ted Kennedy's Secret Service detail, Nixon's continual insistence on paying the burglars, and talks about a substantial campaign fund showcase the true depth of the cover-up efforts. Packed with revelations on almost every page, Abuse of Power offers a spellbinding portrait of raw power and a Shakespearean depiction of a king and his court. Never have the personalities of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Haig, Kissinger, Dean, and Mitchell been so vividly captured. And never has an American President offered such a revealing record of his darkest self.
Simon & Schuster 1998-09-22 675 pages

Maimonides A Biography

Solomon Zeitlin
Maimonides: A Biography is a comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most important figures in Jewish history, Moses Maimonides. Written by Solomon Zeitlin, a renowned scholar of Jewish studies, this book offers a detailed exploration of Maimonides' life, from his birth in Muslim Spain in 1135 to his death in Egypt in 1204.The book begins with an overview of the historical and cultural context in which Maimonides lived, including the rise of Islam, the Reconquista, and the flourishing of Jewish scholarship in Spain. It then delves into Maimonides' early life and education, his family background, and his intellectual development.Zeitlin examines Maimonides' major works, including his commentary on the Mishnah, the Guide for the Perplexed, and the Mishneh Torah, and explores the impact of these works on Jewish thought and practice. He also looks at Maimonides' role as a physician and his contributions to the field of medicine.Throughout the book, Zeitlin provides insights into Maimonides' personality, beliefs, and relationships with other scholars and leaders of his time. He also highlights the challenges that Maimonides faced as a Jew living in a Muslim-dominated society, including persecution and forced conversion.Maimonides: A Biography is a fascinating and engaging read for anyone interested in Jewish history, philosophy, and culture. It offers a nuanced and insightful portrait of one of the most influential figures in Jewish intellectual history.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
Literary Licensing, LLC 2011-08 258 pages

Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life

Shapin, Steven,Schaffer, Simon
"Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then." -- Amazon.com.
Princeton University Press 2017-11-14 391 pages

Hasidism incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the construction of modern Judaism

Magid, Shaul
Hasidism Incarnate contends that much of modern Judaism in the West developed in reaction to Christianity and in defense of Judaism as a unique tradition. Ironically enough, this occurred even as modern Judaism increasingly dovetailed with Christianity with regard to its ethos, aesthetics, and attitude toward ritual and faith. Shaul Magid argues that the Hasidic movement in Eastern Europe constitutes an alternative "modernity," one that opens a new window on Jewish theological history. Unlike Judaism in German lands, Hasidism did not develop under a "Christian gaze" and had no need to be apologetic of its positions. Unburdened by an apologetic agenda (at least toward Christianity), it offered a particular reading of medieval Jewish Kabbalah filtered through a focus on the charismatic leader that resulted in a religious worldview that has much in common with Christianity. It is not that Hasidic masters knew about Christianity; rather, the basic tenets of Christianity remained present, albeit often in veiled form, in much kabbalistic teaching that Hasidism took up in its portrayal of the charismatic figure of the zaddik, whom it often described in supernatural terms.
Stanford University Press 2015 271 pages

October Men Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and the Yankees' Miraculous Finish in 1978

Roger Kahn
On the morning of October 2, 1978, the World Champion NewYork Yankees found themselves tied for first place with the Boston Red Sox. That day these rousing ball clubs would meet at Fenway Park. Both had won ninety-nine games. Only one would win one hundred. The Yankees should have been reaching for their golf clubs-they had feuded until they were fourteen games out of first place. Then their fortunes turned, and they capped one of the most thrilling comebacks in baseball history by defeating the Red Sox that October afternoon in a game that many still remember as the greatest ever played. Transporting us into the midst of this unforgettable team, Roger Kahn weaves the first in-depth account of the legendary season of '78 and reaffirms his standing as our nation's master storyteller of baseball.
Harcourt 2004-03 382 pages

Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: the politics and poetics of an ethnographic event

Wolfe, Patrick
This work analyzes the politics of anthropological knowledge from critical perspective that alters existing understandings of colonialism. At the same time, it produces insights into the history of anthropology. Organized around an historical reconstruction of the great anthropological controversy over doctrines of virgin birth, the book argues that the allegation a great deal about European colonial discourse and little if anything about indigenous beliefs. By means of an Australian example, the book shows not only that the alleged ignorance was an artefact of the anthropological theory that produced it, but also that the anthropology was an artefact of the anthropological theory that produced it, but also that the anthropology concerened has been closely tied into both the historical dispossesion and the continuing oppresion of native peoples. The author explores the links between metropolitan anthropological theory and local colonial politics from the 19th century up to the present, settler colonialism, and the ideological and sexual regimes that characterize it.
Cassell 1999-01-01 246 pages

German Psychological Warfare (WW2 Classic, Reprint Edition)

Ladislas Farago
German Psychological Warfare is a critical survey and bibliography of German methods of military psychology and propaganda both in warfare and in molding a citizenry ripe for manipulation. The seeds for the rise of the Nazi Party and German aggression during World War II were sown at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Immediately recognizing the importance of national morale for what was to come, plans were drawn for the psychological guidance of the German people toward a life dedicated to the philosophy of Total War, where civilians and military alike support the Leader in creating a dominant Germany. This book, published in America during World War II, extensively surveyed German publications to determine the psychological underpinnings of Germany's aggression and tactics. It quickly becomes clear that the Nazi Party and German military officials, though not always in lockstep with each other, both relied heavily on psychological profiling, extensive testing, and a philosophical justification for their actions. This reprint should provide plenty of food for thought for readers of military history, world politics, and psychological warfare. For additional military and psychological warfare history titles, visit CoachwhipBooks.com.
Coachwhip Publications 2018-12-10 330 pages

The Female experience: an American documentary

Lerner, Gerda
While women's experience encompasses all that is human, while women have participated in history and the making of history through all time, until very recently they have been largely excluded from the writing of that history. Most of what we know of the past experience of women comes to us largely through the distorting lens of men's reflections and observations. In the now classic The Female Experience, Gerda Lerner describes history as seen by women, as colored by their values. What she creates is fascinating narrative of the lives and history of ordinary women, a book that provides a new framework for the study of their past experience. If women's history is now a healthy and ever-growing discipline, we have in a large part this award-winning author to thank. Avoiding the traditional chronological periods by which U.S. history is most often studied, Lerner groups her sources--many taken from manuscripts previously unknown, and others only available in research libraries--according to the lifecycle of women, their roles in a male-defined society, in the workplace, in politics, and finally in the contemporary world where feminism is creating an altogether new consciousness. From "runaway wives" in eighteenth-century America, through an anonymous account of a mother's death during childbirth, to appeals in our century for freedom of sexual preference, The Female Experience recounts history from the woman's point of view, and goes a long way toward reconstructing a female past and analyzing it with appropriate concepts. In the general introduction and chapter essays Lerner offers commentary that not only knits these disparate primary sources together, but also interprets them in an innovative way. Now brought up to date with a new preface, The Female Experience is a book that pulses with life, a stunning testament not only to the long-ignored role of women in society, but a pioneering effort to reinvent the way we look at history.
Oxford University Press 1992 509 pages

Time maps

Zerubavel, Eviatar
" Time Maps extends beyond all of the old clichés about linear, circular, and spiral patterns of historical process and provides us with models of the actual legends used to map history. It is a brilliant and elegant exercise in model building that provides new insights into some of the old questions about philosophy of history, historical narrative, and what is called straight history."-Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz Who were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Is a seventh cousin still a cousin? Why do some societies name their children after dead ancestors? As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in Time Maps , we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of our collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past in our minds and the mental strategies that help us string together unrelated events into coherent and meaningful narratives, as well as the social grammar of battles over conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, from Columbus to Lucy, and from ancient Egypt to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we tie discontinuous events together into stories; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most people think the Roman Empire ended in 476, even though it lasted another 977 years in Byzantium. Challenging such conventional wisdom, Time Maps will be must reading for anyone interested in how the history of our world takes shape.
University of Chicago Press 2003 180 pages

We are here: memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust

Cassedy, Ellen
Winner of the 2013 National Book Prize from Grub Street, the Towson Prize for Literature, and the 2013 Prakhin International Literary Foundation Award. Ellen Cassedy's longing to recover the Yiddish she'd lost with her mother's death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the "Jerusalem of the North." As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he'd left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nation--how do successor generations, moral beings--overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman's exploration of Lithuania's Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family's place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to "speak to a Jew" before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation--Cassedy finds that it's not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.
University of Nebraska Press 2012 273 pages

Internal Combustion How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives

Edwin Black
This enthralling book begins in the vast forests of Cyprus, whose wood fuelled the ancient Mediterranean, and extends through the Elizabethan era, in which the Hostmen guild of Newcastle exerted political influence by monopolizing the British coal supply. The central thread of this well-researched book, which draws upon a vast array of archival sources and an extensive list of secondary texts, picks up centuries later with the competition in the American automotive market between electric power and oil-fuelled internal combustion. The definitive blow in favour of oil comes with WWI, which prompted increased demand for gas-powered vehicles at the very moment Thomas Edison and Henry Ford aborted plans to develop an affordable electric car. The decades-long "General Motors conspiracy" solidifies the demise of electrically powered mass transit in American cities. Through it all, the author manages to keep this complex history compelling. By the time the author makes his final, impassioned plea for a bold new solution to the world's energy crisis, he has already made his case with devastating clarity.
Dialog Press 2008-04 408 pages

National insecurity: American leadership in an age of fear

Rothkopf, David J.
In the wake of 9/11, America and its people have experienced a sense of vulnerability unprecedented in the nation's recent history. Buffeted by challenges from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the financial crisis, from Washington dysfunction to the rise of China and the dawn of the era of cyber warfare, two very different presidents and their advisors have struggled to cope with a relentless array of new threats. You may think you know the story. But in National Insecurity, David Rothkopf offers an entirely new perspective into the hidden struggles, the surprising triumphs, and the shocking failures of those charged with leading the United States through one of the most difficult periods in its history. Thanks to his extraordinary access, Rothkopf provides fresh insights drawing on more than one hundred exclusive interviews with the key players who shaped this era. At its core, National Insecurity is the gripping story of a superpower in crisis, seeking to adapt to a rapidly changing world, sometimes showing inspiring resilience -- but often undone by the human flaws of those at the top, the mismanagement of its own system, the temptation to concentrate too much power within the hands of too few in the White House itself, and an unwillingness to draw the right lessons from the recent past. Nonetheless, within that story are unmistakable clues to a way forward that can help restore American leadership.
PublicAffairs 2016-04-26 512 pages

The shaping of the modern Middle East

Lewis, Bernard
With this major revision of his classic The Middle East and the West (1964), a leading Middle East historian of our time offers a definitive and now more-timely-than-ever history of Western-Middle Eastern relations from the late seventeenth century to the present day. Fully revised to cover the volatile developments of the last three decades, The Shaping of the Modern Middle East sheds light on the climax and sudden end of the cold war, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Arab-Israeli wars, the formation and activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the Persian Gulf War, and the Iranian revolution. Illuminating the region's geography, culture, history, language, and religion, Lewis explores the complex and often confusing issues of Arab nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism, and responses and reactions in the Middle East to centuries of Western influence, revealing the subtlety and sophistication of this dynamic civilization as no other scholar can.
Oxford University Press 1994 186 pages

Unfinished conquest: the Guatemalan tragedy

Perera, Victor
Spanning the years of civil war in Guatemala, Unfinished Conquest portrays an embattled country facing the third cycle of a conquest that began when the conquistadors arrived in the sixteenth century. As personal narrative weaves with reportage and oral testimony, we meet the victims, champions, and villains of a society torn apart by violence and injustice.
University of California Press 1993 382 pages

A Living Man Declared Dead, and Other Chapters I-XVIII

Taryn Simon,Homi Bhabha,Geoffrey Batchen
A significant and extensive book on a major new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon. Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I-XVIII was produced over a four-year period (2008-2011), during which Simon travelled the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen "chapters" that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. Her subjects feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. This volume accompanies the exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (May 2011), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (September 2011), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (May-September 2012).
Gagosian Gallery 2012 773 pages

Design school confidential: extraordinary class projects from international design schools

Heller, Steven
Every great design school in the world is defined, in part, by the work of its students at any given time. The various project challenges given to a class determine the success of a school’s pedagogy, but also the ingenuity of its faculty and students. This book features fifty real-world class assignments from top design programs at universities around the world, and examines the resulting student projects. From undergraduate to graduate work and basic class challenges to final thesis’s, students delivered a wide variety of graphic and multimedia design projects from print to motion to exhibition. The book has three functions: 1) To exhibit a wide range of challenging problems and successful solutions. 2) Provide practical models to be inspired by and learn from. 3) Examine how sophisticated design school projects are and what value they have in relation to real-world practice.
Rockport Publishers 2009-10-01 224 pages