14302 results for "History"

The understanding of nature: essays in the philosophy of biology

Grene, Marjorie
No student or colleague of Marjorie Grene will miss her incisive presence in these papers on the study and nature of living nature, and we believe the new reader will quickly join the stimulating discussion and critique which Professor Grene steadily provokes. For years she has worked with equally sure knowledge in the classical domain of philosophy and in modern epistemological inquiry, equally philosopher of science and metaphysician. Moreover, she has the deeply sensible notion that she should be a critically intelligent learner as much as an imaginatively original thinker, and as a result she has brought insightful expository readings of other philosophers and scientists to her own work. We were most fortunate that Marjorie Grene was willing to spend a full semester of a recent leave here in Boston, and we have on other occasions sought her participation in our colloquia and elsewhere. Now we have the pleasure of including among the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science this generous selection from Grene's philosophical inquiries into the understanding of the natural world, and of the men and women in it. Boston University Center for the R. S. COHEN Philosophy and History of Science M. W. W ARTOFSKY April 1974 PREFACE This collection spans - spottily - years from 1946 ('On Some Distinctions between Men and Brutes') to 1974 ('On the Nature of Natural Necessity').
Reidel Pub. Co 1974-07-01 374 pages

Too Strong for Fantasy

Marcia Davenport
I always meant to be a writer from my earliest recall, writes Marcia Davenport in her memoir, Too Strong For Fantasy, and like all such people I lived from infancy in the world of stories and books, most of them fantasy. When I began to outgrow fantasy, history seized me by the throat and has held on ever since. History is inseparable from place and politics and political men.
University of Pittsburgh Press 1992-09 504 pages

Quantum dialogue: the making of a revolution

Beller, Mara
"In Quantum Dialogue, Mara Beller shows that science is rooted not just in conversation but in disagreement, doubt, and uncertainty. She argues that it is precisely this culture of dialogue and controversy within the scientific community that fuels creativity." "Beller begins with the emergence of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Born's probabilistic interpretation, and Bohr's complementarity principle, demonstrating how theoretical concerns, experiment, logic, emotions, and ambitions all play a crucial role in the emergence of novelty. From there she proceeds to construct a radical new reading of the history of the quantum revolution, especially the development of the Copenhagen interpretation."--Jacket.
University of Chicago Press 1999 365 pages

Burn, Baby! Burn! The Autobiography of Magnificent Montague

Magnificent Montague,Nathaniel Montague,Bob Baker
With his dynamic on-air personality and his trademark cry of "Burn, baby! BURN!" when spinning the hottest new records, Magnificent Montague was the charismatic voice of soul music in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. In this memoir Montague recounts the events of his momentous radio career, which ran from the era of segregation to that of the civil rights movement; as he does so, he also tells the broader story of a life spent in the passionate pursuit of knowledge, historical and musical. Like many black disc jockeys of his day, Montague played a role in his community beyond simply spreading the music of James Brown, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and other prominent artists. Montague served as an unofficial spokesman for his black listeners, reflecting their beliefs and acting as a sounding board for their concerns. Montague was based in Los Angeles in 1965 when the Watts rioters seized on his incendiary slogan, turning the shout of musical appreciation into a rallying cry for racial violence. In Burn, Baby! BURN! Montague recalls these tumultuous times, including the personal struggle he faced over whether to remain true to his listeners or bend to political pressure and stop shouting his suddenly controversial slogan. Since the mid-1950s Montague had also expressed his passion for African American culture by becoming a zealous collector of artifacts of black history. He has built a monumental collection, taking time out from his collecting to become only the second African American to build his own radio station literally from the ground up. A compelling account of a rich and varied life, Burn, Baby! BURN! gives an insider's view of half a century of black history, told with on-the-air zest by the DJ/historian who was there to see it unfold.
University of Illinois Press 2003 192 pages

Jew and Gentile in the ancient world: attitudes and interactions from Alexander to Justinian

Feldman, Louis H.
Relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman period were marked by suspicion and hate, maintain most studies of that topic. But if such conjectures are true, asks Louis Feldman, how did Jews succeed in winning so many adherents, whether full-fledged proselytes or "sympathizers" who adopted one or more Jewish practices? Systematically evaluating attitudes toward Jews from the time of Alexander the Great to the fifth century A.D., Feldman finds that Judaism elicited strongly positive and not merely unfavorable responses from the non-Jewish population. Jews were a vigorous presence in the ancient world, and Judaism was strengthened substantially by the development of the Talmud. Although Jews in the Diaspora were deeply Hellenized, those who remained in Israel were able to resist the cultural inroads of Hellenism and even to initiate intellectual counterattacks. Feldman draws on a wide variety of material, from Philo, Josephus, and other Graeco-Jewish writers through the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Church Councils, Church Fathers, and imperial decrees to Talmudic and Midrashic writings and inscriptions and papyri. What emerges is a rich description of a long era to which conceptions of Jewish history as uninterrupted weakness and suffering do not apply.
Princetown University Press 1996 679 pages

The Edge of the Swamp A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South

Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
The flowering of literary imagination known as the American Renaissance had few roots in the South. While Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were creating a body of work that would endure, the only southern writer making a lasting contribution was Edgar Allan Poe. This failure on the part of antebellum southern writers has long been a subject of debate among students of southern history and literature. Now one of the region's most distinguished men of letters offers a cogently argued and gracefully written account of the circumstances that prevented early southern writers from creating transcendent works of art. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., brings forty years of critical integrity and imaginative involvement with the history and literature of the South to his informal inquiry into the foundations of the southern literary imagination. His exploration centers on the lives and works of three of the most important writers of the pre-Civil War South: Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod. In a close and highly original reading of Poe's poetry and fiction, Rubin shows just how profoundly growing up in Richmond, Virginia, influenced that writer. The sole author of the Old South whose work has endured did not use southern settings or concern himself with his region's history or politics. Poe was, according to Rubin, in active rebellion against the middle-class community of Richmond and its materialistic values. Simms, on the other hand, aspired to the plantation society ideal of his native Charleston, South Carolina. He was not the most devoted and energetic of southern writers and one of the country's best-known and most respected literary figures before the Civil War. Rubin finds an explanation for much of the lost promise of antebellum southern literature in Simms's career. Here was a talented man who got caught up in the politically obsessed plantation community of Charleston, becoming an apologist for the system and an ardent defender of slavery. Timrod, also a Charlestonian native, was a highly gifted poet whose work attained the stature of literature when the Civil War gave him a theme. He was known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy. Only when his region was locked in a desperate military struggle for the right to exist did he suddenly find his enduring voice. Anyone interested in southern life and literature will welcome his provocative and engaging new look at southern writing from one of the region's most perceptive critics.
LSU Press 1999-03-01 248 pages

The Curious Death of the Novel Essays in American Literature

Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
One of the country’s more perceptive younger critics, Louis Rubin is well known for his commentaries on the literature of the South. These essays—selected from his critical works over a period of more than a dozen years—reflect his wider concern with the whole spectrum of American literature. In the title essay Rubin treats “tired literary critics” and the often-heard pronouncement that the novel is dead. He argues that the response of novelists to our difficult and demanding times “will doubtless be what the response of writers to difficult and demanding times always has been: namely, difficult and demanding works of literature.” Another essay, “The Experience Difference: Southerners and Jews,” is a perceptive examination of the parallels in different factors and cultural experiences which brought Southern and Jewish writers to prominence. Rubin explores the potential pitfalls for Southern writers today in an essay called “Getting Out From Under William Faulkner.” Edgar Allan Poe’s position in American literary history and H.L. Mencken’s role as a literary critic and an “artist of destruction” who cleared the way and created an audience for the major American writers of the twenties are dealt with in other essays. The collection includes imaginative studies of Henry James, Mark Twain, Edmund Wilson, and Karl Shapiro. Several Southern writers, including Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, and James Branch Cabell, also come under Rubin’s scrutiny.
LSU Press 1999-03-01 312 pages

The Birmingham Six and other cases: victims of circumstance

Blom-Cooper, Louis
When the Court of Appeal allowed the appeals of the Birmingham Six for the murder of 21 people in 1974, and set them free after 16yrs in prison, the judges said that nothing obliged or entitled them to say whether they thought that the 6 men were innocent. It is exclusively the jury's function to decide guilt or innocence. Judges in the appeal court are under a duty merely to say whether the conviction was wrongful or not. The presumption of innocence, which every accused is entitled to, abides until it has been overcome by evidence which convinces the jury of the guilt of the accused. Any conviction which is quashed on appeal does not revive the presumption. This book puts the record straight about the most famous criminal case in 'recent' British legal history, explaining to both legal and non-legal readers how many people misunderstand our criminal justice system, and how the supporters of those wrongfully convicted tend to persuade the British public that justice has indeed 'miscarried'. The author puts the case for an unbiased perspective on the trial of the Birmingham Six and other appeals, highlighting the true value of circumstantial evidence and pointing out how such evidence is so often preferable to the fallibility of eye-witness testimony. He also includes a European dimension. Finally, he questions whether the jury system itself can survive contemporary society. With Diary of Events, Appendix, Notes and Index.
Duckworth 1997-11-27 96 pages

On a grander scale: the outstanding life of Sir Christopher Wren

Jardine, Lisa
Trough the prism of the tumultuous life and brilliant intellect of Sir Christopher Wren, the multitalented architect of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, historian Lisa Jardine unfolds the vibrant, extraordinary emerging new world of late-seventeenth-century science and ideas. The man behind the bold, imposing beauty of Saint Paul's was as remarkable as the monuments he has left us. Wren was a versatile genius who could have pursued a number of brilliant careers with equal virtuosity. A mathematical prodigy, an accomplished astronomer, a skillful anatomist, and a founder of the Royal Society, he eventually made a career in what he described disparagingly in later life as "Rubbish " -- architecture, and the design and construction of public buildings. Wren was a major figure at a turning point in English history. He mapped moons and the trajectories of comets for kings; lived and worked under six monarchs; pursued astronomy and medicine during two civil wars; exercised his creativity through the English Commonwealth, the Great Fire, the Restoration. His royal employment out lasted abdication, Dutch invasion, and the eventual extinction of the Stuart dynasty. Beyond the public achievements, Jardine explores Wren's personal motivations and passions. He was a sincere, intensely moral man with a remarkable capacity for friendship. His career was shaped by lasting associations forged during a turbulent boyhood and a lifelong loyalty to the memory of his father's master and benefactor, the "martyred king," Charles I. Everything Wren undertook, he envisaged on a grander scale -- bigger, better, more enduring than anything that had gone before.
HarperCollins 2002 600 pages

Existentia Africana: understanding Africana existential thought

Gordon, Lewis R.
The intellectual history of the last quarter of this century has been marked by the growing influence of Africana thought--an area of philosophy that focuses on issues raised by the struggle over ideas in African cultures and their hybrid forms in Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. "Existentia Africana" is an engaging and highly readable introduction to the field of Africana philosophy and will help to define this rapidly growing field. Lewis R. Gordon clearly explains Africana existential thought to a general audience, covering a wide range of both classic and contemporary thinkers--from Douglass and DuBois to Fanon, Davis and Zack.
Routledge 2000 228 pages

Existence in Black: an anthology of Black existential philosophy

Lewis Ricardo Gordon
This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time.
Routledge 1997 328 pages

Tekstura: Russian essays on visual culture

Alla Efimova,Lev Manovich
Fascinated by the myth of the Russian avant-garde and scornful of official art, the West has been selective in its engagement with Russian visual culture. Yet how do contemporary Russian scholars and critics themselves approach the history of visual culture in the former Soviet Union? Taking its title from a Russian word that can refer to the 'texture" of life, painting, or writing, this anthology assembles thirteen key essays in art history and cultural theory by Russian-language writers. The essays erase boundaries between high and low, official and dissident, avant-garde and socialist realism, art and everyday life. Everything visual is deemed worthy of analysis, whether painting or propaganda banners, architecture or candy wrappers, mass celebrations or urban refuse. Most of the essays appear here in English for the first time. The editors have selected works of the past twenty years by philosophers, literary critics, film scholars, and art historians. Also included are influential earlier essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, V. N. Voloshinov, and Sergei Eisenstein. Compiled for general readers and specialists alike, Tekstura is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Russian and Soviet cultural history or in new theoretical approaches to the visual.
University of Chicago Press 1994 231 pages

Bad shoes and the women who love them

Tanenbaum, Leora
Bad Shoes & the Women Who Love Them is a lighthearted wake-up call to women to make informed decisions when buying and wearing fashionable shoes. Arming the reader with essential facts, citing medical literature as well as leading podiatric surgeons and orthopedists, Tanenbaum covers the history of high heels, Chinese foot binding, the controversy over cosmetic surgery of the foot, and what Freud had to say about women's shoes and sex. Illustrated by artist Vanessa Davis throughout, Bad Shoes & the Women Who Love Them also includes hilarious anecdotes from women who love shoes. And yes—it is possible to make smart footwear decisions without sacrificing style! Tanenbaum shows you how.
Seven Stories Press 2010-06-01 179 pages

Jewish legal theories: writings on state, religion, and morality

Leora Batnitzky,Yonatan Brafman
"Contemporary arguments about Jewish law uniquely reflect both the story of Jewish modernity and a crucial premise of modern conceptions of law generally: the claim of autonomy for the intellectual subject and practical sphere of the law. [This book] collects representative modern Jewish writings on law and provides short commentaries and annotations on these writings that situate them within Jewish thought and history, as well as within modern legal theory. The topics addressed by these documents include Jewish legal theory from the modern nation-state to its adumbration in the forms of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism in the German-Jewish context; the development of Jewish legal philosophy in Eastern Europe beginning in the eighteenth century; ultra-Orthodox views of Jewish law premised on the rejection of the modern nation-state; the role of Jewish law in Israel; and contemporary feminist legal theory."--
Brandeis University Press 2018-01-02 260 pages

Our roots are deep with passion: creative nonfiction collects new essays by Italian American writers

Gutkind, Lee,Herman, Joanna Clapps
In the twenty-one nonfiction narratives collected in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion, established and emerging writers with family ties to Italy reflect on the ways that their lives have been accented with uniquely Italian-American flavors. Several of the essays breathe new life into the time-honored theme of familyLouise DeSalvo honors her grandfather, nick-named "the drunk" because he spent his life of hard work drinking wine instead of water, and James Vescovi portrays the close of the stormy relationship between his father and grandmother. Other stories tackle the mystical side of Italian-American life, like Laura Valeri's account of a summer vacation se;ance in Sardinia that goes eerily awry. And elsewhere, Stephanie Susnjara charts the history of garlic in society and her kitchen, and Gina Barreca offers an unabashed confession of congenital jealousy. --Publisher description.
Other Press 2006-10-17 286 pages

Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: entangled lives in Morocco

Rosen, Lawrence
In this work by seasoned scholar Lawrence Rosen, we follow the fascinating intellectual developments of four ordinary Moroccans over the span of 40 years. Walking and talking with Haj Hamed Britel, Yaghnik Driss, Hussein Qadir, and Shimon Benizri - in a country that, in a little over a century, has gone from an underdeveloped colonial outpost to a modern Arab country in the throes of economic growth and religious fervour - Rosen details a fascinating plurality of viewpoints on culture, history, and the ways both can be dramatically transformed. Through the intellectual lives of these four men, this book explores a number of interpretative and theoretical issues that have made Arab culture distinct, especially in relationship to the West: how nothing is ever hard and fast, how everything is relational and always a product of negotiation.
The University of Chicago Press 2015 363 pages

HebrewPunk

Lavie Tidhar
THE CLASSIC COLLECTION OF JEWISH FANTASY! "Marks a milestone in the literature of the fantastic." - Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy In HebrewPunk , World Fantasy Award winning author Lavie Tidhar had reinvented pulp fantasy fiction in Jewish terms, creating a hidden world where fantasy, horror and history intertwine. Featuring the Rabbi, the Rat and the Tzaddik, their stories take us on a journey from an expedition to an alternate world in Kenya in 1904 to the drug-soaked streets of 1920s London and to Transylvania in the Second World War. "Imagine Hard-Boiled Kabbalah... If you like your otherworld fun noir, have I got a book for you!" - Kage Baker, author of In the Garden of Iden "Wondrous, adventurous, and thought-provoking." - Ellen Datlow, co-editor of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror "Tidhar writes a sort of intensified supernatural action-surrealism that fair rattles along and is full of surprises--not only plot twists and thrills but a level of conceptual surprise, a reinvigoration of some of the more tired conventions of the fantasy-horror genre... not to be missed." - Adam Roberts, author of The Thing Itself
Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Incorporated 2023-04-18 188 pages