Author: Elisabeth Salter File Type: pdf This book is about the ways that ordinary people in town and country creatively define themselves, their families and their social networks. It explores, for the period c. 1450-1560, inheritance strategies, personal possessions and their meanings, attitudes to commemoration after death, the daily fashioning of identity and the interactions between imagination and daily life. The book is also about how the surviving textual evidence may be used to reconstruct these perceptions and experiences and the implications of such reconstruction for cultural history in the current crises of interpretation. Above all, this book emphasizes the cultural significance of the creative imagination.

Author: Felix Budelmann File Type: pdf Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as textual events. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within in them, but as well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh. **

Author: Colin Wilson File Type: pdf Explores the remote depths of history & attempts to understand how ancient peoples thought, felt & communicated with the universe.

Author: Arthur Goldwag File Type: epub From Birthers who claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States to counter-jihadists who believe that the Constitution is in imminent danger of being replaced with Sharia law, conspiratorial beliefs have become an increasingly common feature of our public discourse. In this deeply researched, fascinating exploration of the ideas and rhetoric that have animated extreme, mostly right-wing movements throughout American history, Arthur Goldwag reveals the disturbing pattern of fear-mongering and demagoguery that runs through the American grain.br br The New Hate takes readers on a surprising, often shocking, sometimes bizarrely amusing tour through the swamps of nativism, racism, and paranoid speculations about money that have long thrived on the American fringe. Goldwag shows us the parallels between the hysteria about the Illuminati that wracked the new American Republic in the 1790s and the McCarthyism that roiled the 1950s, and he discusses the similarities between the antiNew Deal forces of the 1930s and the Tea Party movement today. He traces Henry Fords anti-Semitism and the John Birch Societys Insiders back to the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he relates white supremacist nightmares about racial pollution to nineteenth-century fears of papal plots. br br The most salient feature of what I have come to call the New Hate, Goldwag writes, is its sameness across time and space. The most depressing thing about the demagogues who tirelessly exploit itin pamphlets and books and partisan newspapers two centuries ago, on Web sites, electronic social networks, and twenty-four-hour cable news todayis how much alike they all turn out to be.From BooklistTurns out, the new hate is pretty much the same as the old hate, according to Goldwag. No doubt drawing from research compiled for his Isms & Ologies (2007) and Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (2009), the author identifies the historical American precedents of primarily right-wing demagogueryamong them, anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford, and McCarthyismwhose echoes can be heard today over the airwaves and in print. Its hardly enjoyable reading, churning up as it does the long-standing animosities that run deep in American politics and continue to distract the country from addressing real issues in addition, the text, as well researched as it is, could have used a lot more coherence. Still, identifying demagoguery, on the Right or the Left, might help readers work through it in the coming years. Would November 2012 be too soon? --Alan Moores ReviewAn informative and lively history of organized hate groups and their role in U.S. politics . . . A witty narrator, Goldwag combines his research with contemporary analysis to explain what conspiracy theories all have in common and to show how the new hate is the same as the old, though its now hiding in plain sight . . . Exhaustively well researched and passionately written . . . Whether hes analyzing the origins of Glenn Becks ideology or demystifying the Illuminati, Goldwag excels at showing how the obsessions of the past connect with those of the present. br Publishers Weeklybr br A well-reported study of disaffected groups who hate other groups whose members look or think differently than the haters . . . Goldwag terms the phenomenon the paranoid style of hatred, and shows how that style has been linked to conspiracy theories for hundreds of years. The author examines with special depth hatreds against Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, African-Americans and the extremely wealthy. With the election of President Obama, the haters coalesced against what they saw as an obvious enemy. Goldwag is able to effectively use the hatreds toward Obama to illustrate the irrationality of the haters . . . A provocative, intellectually rigorous book written clearly and with an admirable lack of hatred.br Kirkus (starred review)br br Wide-ranging narrative . . . A useful primer on the nations long-standing penchant for conspiratorial thinking, its never-ending quest for scapegoats . . . [Goldwags] thoroughness in exploring this subject is impressive . . . If theres any comfort in this dispiriting account, its that the conspiracy-minded have (largely) been confined to the margins of American political and cultural life. Thats small consolation, though, when balanced against the unavoidable conclusion that the haters will always be with us or, as Goldwag puts it, the realization that the New Hate is the same as the Old Hateonly now its hiding in plain sight. br *Shelf Awareness br One wishes that Goldwag were exaggerating, but if you spend a little time reading the vile comments sections on right-wing websites you will see that Goldwag has performed a valuable service in tracing the history of the new hate to the old.br Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler and How the End Begins The Road to a Nuclear World War III*br Goldwag provides a lucid and detailed account of the irrational and bigoted right-wing populists and their conspiracy theories of power in the United States. These conspiracists are like intellectual vampires sucking the blood out of the body politic and leaving behind a weakened democracy in a fading twilight for civil society. Goldwag illuminates the conspiracists to reverse their trajectory of increasing influence, which is a periodic problem for our nation.br Chip Berlet, co-author Right-Wing Populism in Americabr Arthur Goldwag confronts conspiracist fantasies and paranoia with reason and humanitynot to mention the briskness and drama of great historical storytelling. His dissection of how the political fringe has edged into mainstream culture deserves the attention and admiration of everyone who is concerned about the coarsening of our politics.br Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nationbr br This exhumation of the deep and gnarled roots of the American conspiratorial tradition could not be more timely. Combining a sweeping historical eye and sharp contemporary analysis, Arthur Goldwag explains not just why American politics in the Age of Obama is infected by a virulent strain of right-wing conspiracismbut why it has always been thus. From the Bavarian Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt, to the Tea Party Idiocracy of Michelle Malkin, The New Hate covers everything you need to know about the paranoid style in American politics.br Alex Zaitchik, author of Common Nonsense Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorancebr br The New Hate is a timely examination of the deep roots of the conspiracy theories that have animated the American radical right for more than a century. This important book gives readers the background they need to understand the astounding extremist rhetoric that now passes for mainstream political debate.br Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center