Author: Richard Sowerby File Type: pdf In the modern world, angels can often seem to be no more than a symbol, but in the Middle Ages men and women thought differently. Some offered prayers intended to secure the angelic assistance for the living and the dead others erected stone monuments carved with images of winged figures and still others made angels the subject of poetic endeavour and theological scholarship. This wealth of material has never been fully explored, and was once dismissed as the detritus of a superstitious age. Angels in Medieval England offers a different perspective, by using angels as a prism through which to study the changing religious culture of an unfamiliar age. Focusing on one corner of medieval Europe which produced an abundance of material relating to angels, Richard Sowerby investigates the way that ancient beliefs about angels were preserved and adapted in England during the Anglo-Saxon period. Between the sixth century and the eleventh, the convictions of Anglo-Saxon men and women about the world of the spirits underwent a gradual transformation. This book is the first to explore that transformation, and to show the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons tried to reconcile their religious inheritance with their own perspectives about the world, human nature, and God. **
Author: Margaret Nydell
File Type: pdf
Never in modern history have more eyes been focused on the Middle East. As the Arab Spring unfolds across countries and continents, governments are being overturned in unprecedented abundance, with far-reaching ramifications for the rest of the globe. At no time has a solid understanding of Arab culture, history, and practices been more important.UNDERSTANDING ARABS, 5th Edition A Contemporary Guide to Arab Society is the completely revised and updated new edition of Dr. Margaret Nydells seminal work. For twenty years, UNDERSTANDING ARABS has earned a reputation as the resource on Arabic culture among top diplomats, scholars, and business people. Detailing the Middle Eastern events that have caused ripple effects throughout the world, this must-read expands upon key topics including The Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and more Anti-Americanism Arabs and Muslims in the West The similarities and differences between Arab countries Islamic FundamentalismThis all-encompassing guide breaks down the complex cultural boundaries between Arabs and Westerners, presenting richly detailed chapters that both the expert ethnographer and novice traveler will find accessible. UNDERSTANDING ARABS, 5th Edition A Contemporary Guide to Arab Society is the essential book for comprehending an immensely varied and often deeply misunderstood culture.
Author: Stephanie Pippin
File Type: pdf
In thrilling poems of metamorphosis and birth, death and dissolution, Stephanie Pippins debut collection returns us to a world unshorn of wildness. Delivering accident and hunger, love and grief, nature in these poems is beautiful and brutal, a hellish magnificence that both invites and denies the meanings we project onto it. Refusing the domesticated comfort of our usual myths, Pippin reminds us of our place as creatures among others in a world where what isnt dead is dying, and where the thrill of predatory flight commingles with the desperation of the prey. This mesmerizing and astonishingly assured collection offers a message as harrowing as it is essential. Faced with the hard master of necessityangel stinking of his own excitementand bare before what Mallarme called the horror of the forest, we are helpless, finally, to do anything to save what we love. Our sole task, these poems insist, is to look on while we can, and to love harder.
Author: Antonio Di Vittorio
File Type: pdf
Undoubtedly, the watershed moment in European economic history in the past 500 years was the industrial revolution. This unique book devotes equal time to the period leading up to the industrial age as to that which followed a comprehensive sweep which will ensure it becomes the definitive textbook of European economic history for years to come.Six international contributors have come together to assess the past half-millennium from an economic point of view, with John Davis of the University of Connecticut providing the pivotal chapter that looks at the industrial revolution itself.
Author: Sybil Gordon Kantor
File Type: pdf
Growing up with the twentieth century, Alfred Barr (1902-1981), founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, harnessed the cataclysm that was modernism. In this bookpart intellectual biography, part institutional historySybil Gordon Kantor tells the story of the rise of modern art in America and of the man responsible for its triumph. Following the trajectory of Barrs career from the 1920s through the 1940s, Kantor penetrates the myths, both positive and negative, that surround Barr and his achievements. Barr fervently believed in an aesthetic based on the intrinsic traits of a work of art and the materials and techniques involved in its creation. Kantor shows how this formalist approach was expressed in the organizational structure of the multidepartmental museum itself, whose collections, exhibitions, and publications all expressed Barrs vision. At the same time, she shows how Barrs ability to reconcile classical objectivity and mythic irrationality allowed him to perceive modernism as an open-ended phenomenon that expanded beyond purist abstract modernism to include surrealist, nationalist, realist, and expressionist art. Drawing on interviews with Barrs contemporaries as well as on Barrs extensive correspondence, Kantor also paints vivid portraits of, among others, Jere Abbott, Katherine Dreier, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Philip Johnson, Lincoln Kirstein, Agnes Mongan, J. B. Neumann, and Paul Sachs. **
Author: Shir Hever
File Type: pdf
Between 1994-2014, Israels security service was transformed, becoming one of the most extreme examples of privatised security in the world. This book is an investigation into this period and the conditions that created Occupation Inc. the institution of a private military-security-industrial complex.State sponsored violence is increasing as a result of this securitisation, but why is it necessary, and what are its implications? In this book, Shir Hever considers the impact of the ongoing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, the influence of U.S. military aid and the rise of neoliberalism in Israel, to make sense of this dramatic change in security policy.Through the lens of political economy, this book shows how the Israeli security elites turn violence into a commodity in order to preserve their status and wealth, providing a fresh new perspective on the Israeli occupation.
Author: Donald MacKenzie
File Type: pdf
In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modernbr economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobelbr Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply externalbr analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes. Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie saysbr that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts.br More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those marketsbr fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such asbr futures. By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstandingbr worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development ofbr theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities. MacKenzie examines thebr role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the worlds financial markets inbr recent years the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fundbr Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond thebr mainstream -- chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrots model of wild randomness. MacKenzies pioneeringbr work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how Americasbr financial markets have grown into their current form.ReviewAn Engine, Not a Camera provides an insightful appreciation of the ways in which financial models influence and shape the world they seek to understand. Anthony Hopwood Times Higher Education SupplementA brilliant, extremely lucid account of the connections between financial economics and the development of futures, options, and derivatives markets between the 1950s and 2001. Neil Fligstein American Journal of Sociology An Engine, Not a Camera is a compelling, detailed, and elegantly written exploration of the conditions in which finance economists help to make the world they seek to describe and predict. Donald MacKenzie has long been without equal as a sociologist of how late modern futures are brought into being and made authoritative. This is his best work yet. Steven Shapin , Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University Maggie Mort tells the fascinating and unusual story of the development of a high-tech submarine from the point of view of workers on the project.--Michel Callon, Ecole des Mines de ParisAbout the AuthorDonald MacKenzie is Professor of Sociology (Personal Chair) at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Inventing Accuracy (1990), Knowing Machines (1996), and Mechanizing Proof (2001), all published by the MIT Press. Portions of An Engine, not a Camera won the Viviana A. Zelizer Prize in economic sociology from the American Sociological Association.
Author: Roger B. Jeans
File Type: pdf
Colonel John Hart Caughey, a US Army war plans officer stationed in the Chinese Nationalist capital of Chungking, was an eyewitness to the battle for China in the final months of the war (194445) and beyond, when he rose to become head of the Theater Planning Section. In frequent letters to his wife as well as in several diaries, he chronicled the US militarys role in wartime China, especially his life as an American planner (when he was subject to military censorship). Previous accounts of the China Theater have largely neglected the role of the War Department planners stationed in Chungking, many of whom were Caugheys colleagues and friends. He also penned colorful descriptions of life in wartime China, which vividly remind the reader how far China has come in a mere seventy-odd years. In addition, his letters and diaries deepen our understanding of several of the American leaders in this Asian war, including China Theater commander Albert C. Wedemeyer Fourteenth Air Force chief Claire L. Chennault (former commander of the Flying Tigers) US ambassador to wartime China, Patrick J. Hurley famed Time-Life reporter Theodore White OSS director William (Wild Bill) Donovan Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of the Southeast Asia Command and Jonathan Wainwright, who was in command when the American forces in the Philippines surrendered in 1942, and who stayed for a few days at Caugheys Chungking residence on his way home after several years as a Japanese POW in Manchuria. In his writings, Caughey also revealed a more appealing side of Wedemeyer, whose extreme political opinions in the postwar era probably cost him the post of US Army chief of staff. By making Caughey a member of his planning staff, Wedemeyer made possible an extraordinary experience for the young colonel during the war. Caughey also rubbed shoulders with Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and traveled to the battlefields in Southeast China with the commander in chief of the Nationalist Army, He Yingqin, along with a number of other Chinese and American soldiers. Following the Japanese surrender, Caughey chronicled the resumption of the power struggle between the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists, largely postponed during the conflict. Shortly after the war, he had a brief encounter with the number two Communist leader, Zhou Enlai, whom he was to get to know much better during the Marshall Mission to China. **
Author: Kimberly G. Wieser
File Type: pdf
For thousands of years, American Indian cultures have recorded their truths in the narratives and metaphors of oral tradition. Stories, languages, and artifacts, such as glyphs and drawings, all carry Indigenous knowledge, directly contributing to American Indian rhetorical structures that have proven resistantand sometimes antitheticalto Western academic discourse. It is this tradition that Kimberly G. Wieser seeks to restore in Back to the Blanket, as she explores the rich possibilities that Native notions of relatedness offer for understanding American Indian knowledge, arguments, and perspectives.Back to the Blanket analyzes a wide array of American Indian rhetorical traditions, then applies them in close readings of writings, speeches, and other forms of communication by historical and present-day figures. Wieser turns this pathbreaking approach to modes of thinking found in the oratory of eighteenth-century Mohegan and Presbyterian cleric Samson Occom, visual communication in Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead, patterns of honesty and manipulation in the speeches of former president George W. Bush, and rhetorics and relationships in the communication of Indigenous leaders such as Ada-galkala, Tsiyugunsini, and Inoli. Exploring the multimodal rhetoricsoral, written, material, visual, embodied, kinestheticthat create meaning in historical discourse, Wieser argues for the rediscovery and practice of traditional Native modes of communicationa modern-day going back to the blanket, or returning to Native practices. Her work shows how these Indigenous insights might be applied in models of education for Native American students, in Native American communities more broadly, and in transcultural communication, negotiation, debate, and decision making.
Author: Carlo Rotella
File Type: pdf
An urban neighborhood remakes itself every dayand unmakes itself, too. Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But its also peoplethe people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood? In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicagos South Shore neighborhooda place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confrontingor avoidingeach other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happenedstories of deindustrialization and street life stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there. Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending. **