Ambivalent Nation: How Britain Imagined the American Civil War
Author: Hugh Dubrulle File Type: pdf In Ambivalent Nation , Hugh Dubrulle explores how Britons envisioned the American Civil War and how these conceptions influenced their discussions about race, politics, society, military affairs, and nationalism. Contributing new research that expands upon previous scholarship focused on establishing British public opinion toward the war, Dubrulle offers a methodical dissection of the ideological forces that shaped that opinion, many of which arose from the complex Anglo-American postcolonial relationship.Britains lingering feeling of ownership over its former colony contributed heavily to its discussions of the American Civil War. Because Britain continued to have a substantial material interest in the United States, its writers maintained a position of superiority and authority in respect to American affairs. British commentators tended to see the United States as divided by two distinct civilizations, even before the onset of war a Yankee bourgeois democracy and a southern oligarchy supported by slavery. They invariably articulated mixed feelings toward both sections, and shortly before the Civil War, the expression of these feelings was magnified by the sudden emergence of inexpensive newspapers, periodicals, and books. The conflicted nature of British attitudes toward the United States during the antebellum years anticipates the ambivalence with which the British reacted to the American crisis in 1861. Britons used prewar stereotypes of northerners and southerners to help explain the course and significance of the conflict. Seen in this fashion, the war seemed particularly relevant to a number of questions that occupied British conversations during this period the characteristics and capacities of people of African descent, the proper role of democracy in society and politics, the future of armed conflict, and the composition of a durable nation. These questions helped shape Britains stance toward the war and, in turn, the war informed British attitudes on these subjects.Dubrulle draws from numerous primary sources to explore the rhetoric and beliefs of British public figures during these years, including government papers, manuscripts from press archives, private correspondence, and samplings from a variety of dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies. The first book to examine closely the forces that shaped British public opinion about the Civil War, Ambivalent Nation contextualizes and expands our understanding of British attitudes during this tumultuous period.
Author: Sahar Amer
File Type: pdf
Winner of the 2009 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for comparative literary studies Given Christianitys valuation of celibacy and its persistent association of sexuality with the Fall and of women with sin, Western medieval attitudes toward the erotic could not help but be vexed. In contrast, eroticism is explicitly celebrated in a large number of theological, scientific, and literary texts of the medieval Arab Islamicate tradition, where sexuality was positioned at the very heart of religious piety. In Crossing Borders, Sahar Amer turns to the rich body of Arabic sexological writings to focus, in particular, on their open attitude toward erotic love between women. By juxtaposing these Arabic texts with French works, she reveals a medieval French literary discourse on same-sex desire and sexual practices that has gone all but unnoticed. The Arabic tradition on eroticism breaks through into French literary writings on gender and sexuality in often surprising ways, she argues, and she demonstrates how strategies of gender representation deployed in Arabic texts came to be models to imitate, contest, subvert, and at times censor in the West. Amers analysis reveals Western literary representations of gender in the Middle Ages as cross-cultural, hybrid discourses as she reexamines borderscultural, linguistic, historical, geographicnot as elements of separation and division but as fluid spaces of cultural exchange, adaptation, and collaboration. Crossing these borders, she salvages key Arabic and French writings on alternative sexual practices from oblivion to give voice to a group that has long been silenced. **
Author: Ed Diener
File Type: pdf
This book draws together the latest work from scholars around the world using subjective well-being data to understand and compare well-being across countries and cultures. Starting from many different vantage points, the authors reached a consensus that many measures of subjective well-being, ranging from life evaluations through emotional states, based on memories and current evaluations, merit broader collection and analysis. Using data from the Gallup World Poll, the World Values Survey, and other internationally comparable surveys, the authors document wide divergences among countries in all measures of subjective well-being, The international differences are greater for life evaluations than for emotions. Despite the well-documented differences in the ways in which subjective evaluations change through time and across cultures, the bulk of the very large international differences in life evaluations are due to differences in life circumstances rather than differences in the way these differences are evaluated.
Author: Yuri Slezkine
File Type: pdf
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoys War and Peace, Grossmans Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkines gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalins purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their childrens loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the buildings residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared. **
Author: Greg Conti
File Type: epub
What Does Google Know about You? And Who Are They Telling? When you use Googles free services, you pay, big timewith personal information about yourself. Google is making a fortune on what it knows about youand you may be shocked by just how much Google does know. Googling Security is the first book to reveal how Googles vast information stockpiles could be used against you or your businessand what you can do to protect yourself. Unlike other books on Google hacking, this book covers information you disclose when using all of Googles top applications, not just what savvy users can retrieve via Googles search results. West Point computer science professor Greg Conti reveals the privacy implications of Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk, Google Groups, Google Alerts, Googles new mobile applications, and more. Drawing on his own advanced security research, Conti shows how Googles databases can be used by others with bad intent, even if Google succeeds in its pledge of dont be evil. ul l Uncover the trail of informational bread crumbs you leave when you use Google search l l How Gmail could be used to track your personal network of friends, family, and acquaintances l l How Googles map and location tools could disclose the locations of your home, employer, family and friends, travel plans, and intentions l l How the information stockpiles of Google and other online companies may be spilled, lost, taken, shared, or subpoenaed and later used for identity theft or even blackmail l l How the Google AdSense and DoubleClick advertising services could track you around the Web l l How to systematically reduce the personal information you expose or give away l ul This book is a wake-up call and a how-to self-defense manual an indispensable resource for everyone, from private citizens to security professionals, who relies on Google. Preface xiii Acknowledgments xix About the Author xxi Chapter 1 Googling 1 Chapter 2 Information Flows and Leakage 31 Chapter 3 Footprints, Fingerprints, and Connections 59 Chapter 4 Search 97 Chapter 5 Communications 139 Chapter 6 Mapping, Directions, and Imagery 177 Chapter 7 Advertising and Embedded Content 205 Chapter 8 Googlebot 239 Chapter 9 Countermeasures 259 Chapter 10 Conclusions and a Look to the Future 299 Index 317 **
Author: Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin
File Type: pdf
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays presents six short works from Bakhtins Esthetics of Creative Discourse, published in Moscow in 1979. This is the last of Bakhtins extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman) were written in Bakhtins later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.**
Author: Pliny the Elder
File Type: pdf
Pliny the Elder, tireless researcher and writer, is author of the encyclopedicNatural History, in 37 books, an unrivaled compendium of Roman knowledge.The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1 table of contents of the others and of authorities 2 mathematical and metrological survey of the universe 3-6 geography and ethnography of the known world 7 anthropology and the physiology of man 8-11 zoology 12-19 botany, agriculture, and horticulture 20-27 plant products as used in medicine 28-32 medical zoology 33-37 minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.font face=DejaVu Sans, serifspan 14pxhttpwww.archive.orgdetailsnaturalhistory06plinuoft,spanfont
Author: Markus Hilgert
File Type: epub
The present volume comprises 6 highly original studies on material text cultures in different nontypographic societies stretching from the 3rd millennium cuneiform textual record of Ancient Mesopotamia to 20th century Qur anic boards of northern and central African provenience. The volume provides a multidisciplinary approach to material text cultures complementary to the interdisciplinary, strongly theory-grounded research scheme of the CRC 933. **
Author: Johnny Adair
File Type: epub
Johnny Adair was born in the Shankhill Road area of Belfast, Northern Ireland. The youngest of seven children he was raised a Protestant. As a teenager Johnny and his gang would roam the streets looking for Catholics for no other reason then religion and he bears many scars and war wounds from endless street battles. A young Loyalist, Johnny earned his reputation as a paramilitary leader long before he fully understood the politics but quickly came to realise the purpose of the paramilitary antics - freedom and peace in Northern Ireland - and this belief fuelled his passion for the campaign, making him unstoppably ruthless in his quest. The authorities hold him responsible for 41 murders and he became known as the most feared and infamous terrorist of them all. Now he breaks his silence to tell his true spine-chilling story. In 1995 Johnny was sentenced to 16 years for Directing Terrorism but in 1999 he was the 293rd prisoner to be released from the Maze Prison under the Good Friday Agreement. In total there have been ten attempts on his life and he has a hole in the back of his head the size of a 50p piece where he was shot whilst at a UB40 concert, plus a hole in the side of one leg from another attack. But his story is not one about money or grudges - he was simply fighting for what he truly believes in -peace in Northern Ireland, a lifelong struggle in which he became known as the hardest man in the UK.
Author: David Graff
File Type: pdf
Shortly after 300 AD, barbarian invaders from Inner Asia toppled Chinas Western Jin dynasty, leaving the country divided and at war for several centuries. Despite this, the empire gradually formed a unified imperial order. Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 explores the military strategies, institutions and wars that reconstructed the Chinese empire that has survived into modern times.Drawing on classical Chinese sources and the best modern scholarship from China and Japan, David A. Graff connects military affairs with political and social developments to show how Chinas history was shaped by war.ReviewThis is an important addition to the rapidly growing literature in English on Chinese warfare. - The Journal of Asian StudiesA superlative history of medieval China ... the best historical account in English available. - War in HistoryAbout the AuthorDavid A. Graff is Associate Professor of History at Kansas State University. He received his PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 1995.