Author: Ron Chernow File Type: epub Alexander Hamilton was an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean who overcame all the odds to become George Washingtons aide-de-camp and the first Treasury Secretary of the United States. Few figures in American history are more controversial than Alexander Hamilton. In this masterful work, Chernow shows how the political and economic power of America today is the result of Hamiltons willingness to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. He charts his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Monroe and Burr his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza and the notorious duel with Aaron Burr that led to his death in July 1804. This book was adapted into a hugely successful Broadway musical - nominated for a record 16 Tony awards and winner of 11 - opens at the Victoria Palace Theatre in November 2017.
Author: Michael W. Champion
File Type: pdf
Explaining the Cosmos analyzes the writings of three thinkers associated with Gaza Aeneas, Zacharias and Procopius. Together, they offer a case study for the appropriation, adaptation, and transformation of classical philosophy in late antiquity, and for cultural transitions more generally in Gaza. Aeneas claimed that the Academy and Lyceum had been transferred to Gaza. This book asks what the cultural and intellectual characteristics of the Gazan Academies were, and how members of the schools mixed with local cultures of Christians, philosophers, rhetoricians and monks from the local monasteries. Aeneas, Zacharias and Procopius each contributed to debates about the creation and eternity of the world, which ran from the Neoplatonist Proclus into the sixth-century disputes between Philoponus, Simplicius and Cosmas Indicopleustes. The Gazan contribution is significant in its own right, highlighting distinctive aspects of late-antique Christianity, and it throws the later philosophical debates into sharper relief. Focusing on the creation debates also allows for exploration of the local cultures that constituted Gazan society in the late-fifth and early-sixth centuries. Explaining the Cosmos further explores cultural dynamics in the Gazan schools and monasteries and the wider cultural history of the city. The Gazans adapt and transform aspects of Classical and Neoplatonic culture while rejecting Neoplatonic religious claims. The study also analyses the Gazans intellectual contributions in the context of Neoplatonism and early Christianity. The Gaza which emerges from this study is a set of cultures in transition, mutually constituting and transforming each other through a fugal pattern of exchange, adaptation, conflict and collaboration. *
Author: Paul Sheehan
File Type: pdf
In Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, Paul Sheehan attempts to redefine modernist narrative for the twenty-first century. For Sheehan modernism presents a major form of critique of the fundamental presumptions of humanism. By pairing key modernist writers with philosophical critics of the humanist tradition, he shows how modernists sought to discover humanisms inhuman potential. He examines the development of narrative during the modernist period and sets it against, among others, the nineteenth-century philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, Darwin and Nietzsche. Focusing on the major novels and poetics of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Beckett, Sheehan investigates these writers mistrust of humanist orthodoxy and their consequent transformations and disfigurations of narrative order. He reveals the crucial link between the modernist novels narrative concerns and its philosophical orientation in a book that will be of compelling interest to scholars of modernism and literary theory.
Author: Noriko Takeda
File Type: pdf
In its international and cross-cultural evolution, the modernist movement brought the most notable achievements in the poetry genre. Through their fragmented mode by semantic scrambling, the modernist poems seek to embody an indestructible unity of language and art. In order to elucidate the significance of that essential form in capitalistic times, A Flowering Word applies C. S. Peirces semiotic theory to the principal works of three contemporary writers Stephane Mallarmes late sonnets, T. S. Eliots Four Quartets, and the Japanese prefeminist poet, Yosano Akikos Tangled Hair.**
Author: Byron E. Shafer
File Type: pdf
Social scientists and campaign strategists approach voting behavior from opposite poles. Reconciling these rival camps through a merger of precise statistics and hard-won election experience, The American Political Landscape presents a full-scale analysis of U.S. electoral politics over the past quarter-century. Byron Shafer and Richard Spady explain how factors not usually considered hard data, such as latent attitudes and personal preferences, interact to produce an indisputably solid result the final tally of votes.Pundits and pollsters usually boil down U.S. elections to a stark choice between Democrat and Republican. Shafer and Spady explore the significance of a third possibility not voting at all. Voters can and do form coalitions based on specific issues, so that simple party identification does not determine voter turnout or ballot choices. Deploying a new method that quantifiably maps the distribution of political attitudes in the voting population, the authors describe an American electoral landscape in flux during the period from 1984 to 2008. The old order, organized by economic values, ceded ground to a new one in which cultural and economic values enjoy equal prominence.This realignment yielded election outcomes that contradicted the prevailing wisdom about the importance of ideological centrism. Moderates have fared badly in recent contests as Republican and Democratic blocs have drifted further apart. Shafer and Spady find that persisting links between social backgrounds and political values tend to empty the ideological center while increasing the clout of the ideologically committed.**
Author: Arleen Pabon
File Type: pdf
As San Juan nears the 500th anniversary of its founding, Arleen Pabon-Charneco explores the urban and architectural developments that have taken place over the last five centuries, transforming the site from a small Caribbean enclave to a sprawling modern capital. As the oldest European settlement in the United States and second oldest in the Western Hemisphere, San Juan is an example of the experimentation that took place in the American borderland from 1519 to 1898, when Spanish sovereignty ended. The author also investigates post-1898 examples to explore how architectural ideas were exported from the mainland United States. Pabon-Charneco covers the varied architectural periods and styles, aesthetic theories and conservation practices of the region and explains how the development of the architectural and urban artifacts reflect the political, cultural, social and religious aspects that metamorphosed a small military garrison into a urban center of international significance.
Author: Catherine Pickstock
File Type: pdf
The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of the literary has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rivalclaims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communicationlooking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading.Repetition and Identity offers a theory of the existing thing as such. A thing only has identity and consistency when it has already been repeated, but repetition summons difference and the shadow invocation of a connecting sign. In contrast to the perspectives of Post-structuralism, Catherine Pickstock proposes that signs are part of reality, and that they truthfully express the real. She also proposes that non-identical repetition involves analogy, rather than the Post-structuralistcombination of univocity and equivocity, or of rationalism with scepticism. This proposal, which is happy for reality to make sense, involves, however, a subjective decision which is to be poetically performed. A wager is laid upon the possibility of a consistency which sustains the subject, in continuitywith the elusive consistency of nature. This wager is played out in terms of a performative argument concerning the existential stances open to human beings. It is concluded that the individual sustains this quest within the context of an inter-subjective search for an historical consistency of culture. But can ethical consistency, and the harmonisation of this with an aesthetic surplus of an elsewhere, invoked by the sign, be achieved without a religious gesture? And can this gesture avoid atragic tension between ethical commitment and religious renunciation? Pickstock suggests a Kierkegaardian re-reading of the Patristic categories of recapitulation and reconstitution can reconcile this tension. The quest for the identity and consistency of the thing leads us from the subjectthrough fiction and history and to sacred history, to shape an ontology which is also a literary theory and a literary artefaction.**
Author: Pamela White
File Type: pdf
The Middle Ages, though marked by plague in Europe, was a time of increased investigation of the world. People from civilizations around the globe--from the Chinese in Asia to a curious Venetian named Marco Polo--sought to understand the world at large and discover its secrets. Exploration in the World of the Middle Ages, 500-1500, Revised Edition is an account of travels, expeditions, discoveries, and cross-cultural contacts in the span of 1,000 years throughout the world. This era encompassed periods of sophisticated civilization, learning, and outstanding achievement in many cultures around the world.
Author: Stephen English
File Type: epub
During his spectacular career of conquest Alexander the Great attacked many cities and fortresses, never failing to take them. Such operations occupied more of his time than his famous pitched battles and were at least as vital in securing his vast empire. Sieges provided some of the sternest tests for the Macedonian army, and it is perhaps telling that Alexander received most of his many wounds in the shadow of enemy walls. Yet this is the first full-length study concentrating purely on his many dramatic sieges and his mastery of siege craft. Dr. Stephen English describes each of Alexanders sieges, analyzing the strategy, tactics, and technical aspects, such as the innovative and astoundingly ambitious siege engines used. From the shocking destruction of Thebes, through the epic siege of Tyre, which Alexander found an island and left permanently joined to the mainland, to his final (and nearly fatal) combat at the town of the Malli, where he was first to storm the enemy battlements, we see how Alexanders sieges helped make him great. Dr. Stephen English gained a BA in Ancient History and an MA in Classics from Durham University while simultaneously studying for a BSc through the Open University. He went on to gain an MSc from Sunderland University while already working towards his PhD at Durham, under the supervision of renowned classicist PJ Rhodes. His research at Durham focused on the military career of Alexander the Great and forms the basis of this book, as it did of his first, The Army of Alexander the Great. He has also written on the subject for the magazine Ancient Warfare. Dr. English lives in Durham with his partner, Elizabeth, also a writer.
Author: Aleš Erjavec
File Type: pdf
The Berlin Wall was coming down, the Soviet Union was dissolving, Communist China was well on its way down the capitalist path the world was witnessing political and social transformations without precedent. Artists, seeing it all firsthand, responded with a revolution of their own. What form this revolution tookhow artists in the 1980s marked their societies traumatic transition from decaying socialism to an insecure futureemerges in this remarkable volume. With in-depth perspectives on art and artists in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and Mitteleuropa, China, and Cubaall from scholars and art critics who were players in the tumultuous cultural landscapes they describethis stunningly illustrated collection captures a singular period in the history of world art, and a critical moment in the cultural and political transition from the last century to our own. Authors Ales Erjavec, Gao Minglu, Boris Groys, Peter Gyorgy, Gerardo Mosquera, and Misko Suvakovic observe distinct national differences in artistic responses to the social and political challenges of the time. But their essays also reveal a clear pattern in the ways in which artists registered the exhaustion of the socialist vision and absorbed the influence of art movements such as constructivism, pop art, and conceptual art, as well as the provocations of western pop culture. Indebted to but not derived from capitalist postmodernism, the result was a unique version of postsocialist postmodernism, an artisticpolitical innovation clearly identified and illustrated for the first time in these pages.**ReviewA fascinating document in the understanding of one of the decisive cultural moments in the postmodern world. The books diversity of approaches illuminates both postmodern art and politics from a distinctive angle. Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition is likely to become a significant primary source for future cultural historians. From the Inside FlapThis crucial study presents an epic narrative of how postmodernism gave the artists of Eastern and Central Europe the expressive means to work their way out from the ruins of state socialism into the global art world in which their compatriots in the West are themselves struggling to find their identity. The authors bring to consciousness the art history of the present from important and unsuspected perspectives. This is not just a book for specialists-it is for everyone who lives the life of art in unprecedented times.Arthur C. Danto, author of After the End of Art Contemporary Art and the Pale of History A fascinating document in the understanding of one of the decisive cultural moments in the postmodern world. The books diversity of approaches illuminates both postmodern art and politics from a distinctive angle. Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition is likely to become a significant primary source for future cultural historians.Paul Crowther, author of The Transhistorical Image Philosophizing Art and Its History This fine volume deals with the postmodernist approaches that helped artists and intellectuals cope with political reality after socialism and provided the means to face the cultural vacuum without regressing to premodern attitudes. The book suggests that dissenting voices have a better chance to be heard in smaller countries like Hungary, Cuba, Slovenia, and other republics of the former Yugoslavia. It should indeed make us pay more attention to what has happened and is happening in these countries as well as in larger countries like Russia and China.Wolfgang Welsch, author of Undoing Aesthetics This collection genuinely crackles with vitality. Tracking postmodernism far away from the canonical centers of the modern, it presents an exhilarating patchwork of mythic repetitions, sociopolitical reflections, and sheer creative exuberance.Stephen Bann, University of Bristol