Author: Melinda Hinkson
File Type: pdf
Imaging Identity presents potent reflections on the human condition through the prism of portraiture. Taking digital imaging technologies and the dynamic and precarious dimensions of contemporary identity as critical reference points, these essays consider why portraits continue to have such galvanising appeal and perform fundamental work across so many social settings. This multidisciplinary enquiry brings together artists, art historians, art theorists and anthropologists working with a variety of media. Authors look beyond conventional ideas of the portrait to the wider cultural contexts, governmental practices and intimate experiences that shape relationships between persons and pictures. Their shared purpose centres on a commitment to understanding the power of images to draw people into their worlds. Imaging Identity tracks a fundamental symbiosis to grapple with the workings of images is to understand something vital of what it is to be human. **
Author: Michael Gross
File Type: pdf
Is medical ethics in times of armed conflict identical to medical ethicsin times of peace, as the World Medical Association declares? In Bioethics and ArmedConflict, the first comprehensive study of medical ethics in conventional,unconventional, and low-intensity war, Michael Gross examines the dilemmas thatarise when bioethical principles clash with military necessity--when physicians tryto save lives during an endeavor dedicated to taking them--and describes both theconflicts and congruencies of military and medical ethics.Gross describes how theprinciples of contemporary just war, unlike those of medical ethics, often go beyondthe welfare of the individual to consider the collective interests of combatants andnoncombatants and the general interests of the state. Military necessity plays havocwith such patients rights as the right to life, the right to medical care, informedconsent, confidentiality, and the right to die. The principles of triage in battleconditions dictate not need-based treatment but the distribution of resources thatwill return the greatest number of soldiers to active duty. And unconventionalwarfare, including current wars on terrorism, challenges the traditional conceptof medical neutrality as physicians who have sworn to do no harm are called uponto lend their expertise to interrogational torture or to the development ofbiological or chemical weapons. Difficult dilemmas inevitably arise during armedconflict, and medicine, Gross concludes, is not above the fray. Medical ethics intime of war cannot be identical to medical ethics in peacetime.**
Author: Derek Johnston
File Type: pdf
Why do the English have ghost stories at Christmas? Why does US television have special Halloween episodes? Is this all down to Dickens, or is it a hangover of an ancient, pagan past? Why does it survive? Haunted Seasons explores these and related questions, examining the history and meaning of seasonal horror. It reaches back through archaeological evidence of ancient beliefs, through Shakespeare, and Victorian ghost stories, and the works of M.R.James, and onwards to radio and television. The broader genre of supernatural television is considered in relation to the irruptions of abnormality into the normal, along with the significance of time and the seasons in these narratives and their telling. Particular focus is placed on the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas strand and the Halloween episodes of The Simpsons to help us interpret the continued use of these seasonal horror stories and their place in society, from fireside to television.
Author: Alan MacQuarrie
File Type: epub
Of all the Celtic peoples once dominant across the whole of Europe north of the Alps, only the Scots established a kingdom that lasted. Wales, Brittany and Ireland, subject to the same sort of pressure from a powerful neighbour, retained linguistic distinctiveness but lost political nationhood. What made Scotlands history so different?**About the Author Alan Macquarrie teaches in the department of Scottish history at Strathclyde University. His previous publications include Scotland and the Crusades.
Author: Sue Ferguson Gussow
File Type: pdf
Where does architectural design begin? In an age obsessed with all things digital, its tempting to envision a computerscreen in a paperless studio. While the practical value of computer-aided drafting and photorealistic modeling areindisputable, but you wont find the soul of architecture in the machine. Look instead at an architects drawing hand. Ideas flow onto the paper through the uniquely human creative collaboration between mind and eye. Architects Draw, the inaugural volume of our new Architectural Briefs series, highlights this most fundamental level of speculative designfreehand drawing.Architects Draw offers a practical and invaluable way to help students and would-be sketchers translate what they see onto the page, not as an imitation of reality, but as a comprehensive union of voids and solids, light and shadows, lines and shapes. For nearly forty years, revered Cooper Union professor and artist Sue Gussow has taught aspiring architects of varying abilities how to fully observe and perceive the spaces that make up our physical environment. Gussow skillfully applies architectural language to twenty-one drawing exercises that tackle a variety of formsfrom peas in a pod to monkeys, skeletons, dinosaur bones, and the art of Giacometti and Mondrian. She shows, for example, how cut fruit and paper bags reveal that the physical world is made up of planes, dimensions, and enclosed space. Architects Draw features examples from postgraduate architectural practice that explicitly connect drawing to the world of architecture. This unique course provides a solid foundation for anyone interested in using drawing as a visual language to describe architecture. **
Author: Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger
File Type: pdf
A new interpretation of the Holy Roman Empire that reveals why it was not a failed state as many historians believe The Holy Roman Empire emerged in the Middle Ages as a loosely integrated union of German states and city-states under the supreme rule of an emperor. Around 1500, it took on a more formal structure with the establishment of powerful institutions--such as the Reichstag and Imperial Chamber Court--that would endure more or less intact until the empires dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger provides a concise history of the Holy Roman Empire, presenting an entirely new interpretation of the empires political culture and remarkably durable institutions. Rather than comparing the empire to modern states or associations like the European Union, Stollberg-Rilinger shows how it was a political body unlike any other--it had no standing army, no clear boundaries, no general taxation or bureaucracy. She describes a heterogeneous association based on tradition and shared purpose, bound together by personal loyalty and reciprocity, and constantly reenacted by solemn rituals. In a narrative spanning three turbulent centuries, she takes readers from the reform era at the dawn of the sixteenth century to the crisis of the Reformation, from the consolidation of the Peace of Augsburg to the destructive fury of the Thirty Years War, from the conflict between Austria and Prussia to the empires downfall in the age of the French Revolution. Authoritative and accessible, The Holy Roman Empire is an incomparable introduction to this momentous period in the history of Europe.
Author: Stephen R. Porter
File Type: pdf
Stephen Porters Benevolent Empire examines political-refugee aid initiatives and related humanitarian endeavors led by American people and institutions from World War I through the Cold War, opening an important window onto the short American century. Chronicling both international relief efforts and domestic resettlement programs aimed at dispossessed people from Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, Porter asks how, why, and with what effects American actors took responsibility for millions of victims of war, persecution, and political upheaval during these decades. Diverse forces within the American state and civil society directed these endeavors through public-private governing arrangements, a dynamic yielding both benefits and liabilities. Motivated by a variety of geopolitical, ethical, and cultural reasons, these advocates for humanitarian action typically shared a desire to portray the United States, to the American people and international audiences, as an exceptional, benevolent world power whose objects of concern might potentially include any vulnerable people across the globe. And though reality almost always fell short of that idealized vision, Porter argues that this omnivorous philanthropic energy helped propel and steer the ascendance of the United States to its position of elite global power. The messaging and administration of refugee aid initiatives informed key dimensions of American and international history during this period, including U.S. foreign relations, international humanitarianism and human rights, global migration and citizenship, and American political development and social relations at home. Benevolent Empire is thus simultaneously a history of the United States and the world beyond. **
Author: Paul Stephenson
File Type: pdf
Review...Stephenson has incorporated into his work recent sigillographical publications as well as reports on archaeological finds...usefully discussed and analyzed with the help of tables, graphs, and maps of find spots. The book is well written and discussion is concise, and is recommended for all collections. Choice...can be lauded both as a successful synthesis of a number of practical, and some theoretical, problems related to Balkan dimensions of the High Middle Ages, and as a thorough new reading of the available written sources, supplemented with overviews of archaeological discoveries made in Southeast Europe during the last decades. Comitatus Book DescriptionThis is a narrative political history of the northern Balkans in the period 900-1204. It treats the Balkans as the frontier of the Byzantine empire, and considers imperial relations with the peoples living in the Balkans, including the Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and Albanians. It also considers responses to invasions from beyond the frontier by steppe nomads, from beyond the Danube, and by western powers through Hungary and across the Adriatic sea. The first four crusades, 1095-1204, are considered in some detail, and extensive use is made of archaeology.