Author: Karl Marx File Type: pdf

Author: David Toews File Type: pdf Digital technology has vastly broadened and complexied social life, levelling opportunities for communication and producing a new awareness of the importance of diversity of social relations, as well as of life on the planet. This book explores the ways in which social media, by encouraging human curiosity and sociability in relation to these developments, has highlighted for users their own nature as social beings who have discovered new ways to get along with each other, as well as new challenges. The complexity of networks on social media has created new kinds of conicts, and new ways to mediate older kinds of conicts, that have resulted in a demand for new forms of political participation, thus reinvigorating political activity, without extending the practice of politics as usual. However, with concerns for the planet in the back- ground, a tendency for elites and ordinary people alike to want to see a political solution to every problem in social life has become an unsustainable and troubling trend. This book argues that enthusiasms for social media can be tempered in a helpful manner through an engagement with studies of social media in relation to understandings of the history of modern social life provided by sources in classical and contemporary sociology and political theory. Social media makes possible new sociable opportunities and multiple publics, but at the same time represents important continuities with modern social life of earlier times, such as the respect in which it works to limit political action within the boundaries of a generalized public, thus constraining demagoguery and challenging the arrogance of elites who seek to impose certain forms of political life. Engaging with the work of Deleuze, Tarde, Simmel, Lazzarato, Latour, Harman, Heidegger, Arendt, Archer, Wellman, Bergson and others, Social Life and Political Life in the Era of Digital Media advances a new understanding of modernity oered by social media, re-establishing the autonomy of social life over and against political life and re-articulating the relationship between the social and political. As such, it will appeal to scholars of social and political theory and cultural and media studies. **Review A central achievement of this book is to insist that, instead of rushing to analyze the surface effects of digital media, it is crucial first to contemplate the relationship between social life and political life. Toews masterfully scrutinizes this relationship by reinvigorating classical sociological thinkers such as Bergson, Simmel, and Tarde, and bringing them into dialogue with present-day theory and concerns. The result is a significant contribution to social theory. hr Christian Borch, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Employing an original relationalist interpretation of such thinkers as G. Deleuze and G. Tarde, David Toews discusses the effects of new social media on relations in a world characterized by social inequalities and new political phenomena like Trumps presidency. Anybody interested by the metamorphoses of this world and social theories should read this text written by a skilled sociologist. hr Francois Depelteau, Laurentian University, Canada. Digital media have transformed social and political life. Everyone is aware of this, but few have tried to understand this transformation in such a profound way as David Toews in this book. Avoiding the common practices of facile praise or condemnation, Toews mobilizes resources from the sociological tradition to provide a nuanced analysis of our new time. hr Peter Wagner, Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and University of Barcelona, Spain. About the Author David Toews received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warwick. An award-winning teacher and major grant recipient from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) in the area of Sociology, he has been a faculty member in several universities and has published articles in such journals as Theory, Culture and Society and the European Journal of Social Theory.

Author: Harry E. Wedeck File Type: epub Dictionary of Magic by Harry E. Wedeck offers a broad understanding of the field of witchcraft, the occult, and its many manifestations, from early Babylonian times to the present day. It includes knowledge of words in this area from many continents and practices. It also discusses and analyzes occult practices and notable wizards and demographers. **

Author: David W. Blight File Type: pdf No historical event has left as deep an imprint on Americas collective memory as the Civil War. In the wars aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. bDavid Blightb explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and Americas national reunion.In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial. Blights sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today. **From Publishers Weekly Almost all the dominant views of the Civil War and its aftermath, including Reconstruction and reunion, prevalent in this country until the coming of the civil rights movement, were the direct result of an extensive Southern propaganda war, argues Blight (Amherst College professor of history and black studies), remnants of which are still flourishing in various racist subcultures. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted a century ago, shortly after the war, the North was tacitly willing to accept the Souths representation of the conflict in exchange for an opening of new economic frontiers. Blight sets out to prove this thesis, surveying a mass of information (the end notes run to almost 100 pages) clearly and synthetically, detailing the mechanics of mythmaking how the rebels were recast as not actually rebelling, how the South had been unjustly invaded, and how, most fabulously of all, the South had fought to end slavery which had been imposed upon it by the North. His argument that this memory war was conducted on a conscious level is supported by the Reconstruction-era evidence of protest, by blacks and whites alike, that he unearths. Yet these voices failed to dissuade the vast majority of Americans both North and South who internalized some version of the story. This book effectively traces both the growth and development of what became, by the turn of the 20th century and the debut of The Birth of a Nation, the dominant racist representation of the Civil War. A major work of American history, this volumes documentation of the active and exceedingly articulate voices of protest against this inaccurate and unjust imagining of history is just one of its accomplishments. (Feb. 19) Forecast This book will be the standard for how public perceptions of the Civil War were formed and propagated in a manner directly analogous to todays doublespeak and spin control. It will be a regular on course syllabi, and will be glowingly reviewed, but the wealth and diversity of sources may keep some general readers away. . From Booklist The year 1913 saw two separate ceremonies commemorating great events 50 years previously elderly Union and Confederate veterans shook hands at the Gettysburg battlefield, and W.E.B DuBois staged an elaborate National Emancipation Exposition. Together they struck discordant chords of memory about the Civil War, which Blight examines in this incisive discussion of how the conflict was popularly remembered in the half-century following Appomattox. He closely examines the types of memorializations of the war, such as the creation and observance of Memorial Day, the erection of statues to Robert E. Lee and Robert Gould Shaw, soldiers reunions, soldiers memoirs, popular literature, and anniversary orations by such figures as Frederick Douglass. Within these modes of expression Blight recounts the strong tide in the post-war years for reunion on Southern terms, politically by the overthrow of the Republican Reconstruction governments in the South, and ideologically in Lost Cause writings justifying secession and slavery. Freed blacks suffered the consequence of the ascendance of a sentimental view of the war and amnesia about its central issue. -Gilbert Taylor