Author: Richard Corliss File Type: pdf font face=Noto Sans [unknown], serifspan 12pxRichard Corliss (BFI 1984)spanfont

Author: Daniel K. Richter File Type: pdf America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nations pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparentthat far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present. Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoplesIndians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, Englishas they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico. By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richters epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history. **Review Once every quarter-century or so, a book of great sweep and synthetic sophistication bursts onto the scene to recast our understanding of early American history. This masterful study, with its startling comparisons of European patterns of conquest, colonization, chaos, and cultural convergence, is a must-read. (Gary Nash, author of The Liberty Bell) With breathtaking sweep and profound learning, Daniel K. Richter synthesizes the histories of Europe, North America, and the Atlantic world from the late Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century -- and he does it, in ways that no previous writer has managed, without carving his story into discontinuous regional narratives or succumbing to the teleology of the American Revolution. This book is nothing less than a masterpiece. (Fred Anderson, author of The War That Made America) By placing early American history fully in its Atlantic contexts and seeing all participants as historical agents, Before the Revolution allows us to understand the genuine parallels as well as the contrasts in the experience of Americans through their layered pasts. (Karen O. Kupperman, author of The Jamestown Project) An astute, thoroughly enjoyable mixture of political, economic and social history that culminates in a turbulent 18th-century North America whose people did not consider themselves on the verge of revolution but knew that things were not right. (Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 2011-03-15) [Richter] demonstrates that U.S. history did not begin with the American Revolution, convincingly arguing that the ideas that manifested themselves in the mid-18th century with the rebellious colonists had their origins in such varied locales as the Mississippian Southeast and Europe of the Middle Ages...Any history written by this preeminent historian is an essential read for everyone interested in the deeper history of the United States. (John Burch Library Journal 2011-04-01) So far it is one of my two or three favorite non-fiction titles of the year...Definitely recommended. (Tyler Cowen marginalrevolution.com 2011-04-07) An elegantly written attempt to see colonial America from the indigenous perspective...In Richters grand system, the continents history comprises successive waves of adventurers, one atop another. Although the American Revolution submerged these earlier strata, he argues that they nonetheless remained beneath the surface to mold the nations current contours. Walking atop the topmost strata, in other words, are thee and me, the terrain around us shaped by those who came first. The approach is bold, original and insightful...[A] masterly account...Before the Revolution is a book that by its very boldness invites intelligent argument. Every few decades, historians develop a new way of looking at the past. I am not talking about revisionism but unifying conceptual schemes, the sort of mental framework that Frederick Jackson Turner created in his argument for the importance of the frontier to our history or that Bernard Bailyn established in his studies of the American Revolutions ideological origins. Historians debated Turner for a long time and continue to debate Bailyn. I wouldnt be surprised if they were arguing with Richter a decade from today. (Charles C. Mann Wall Street Journal 2011-05-07) Ultimately, [Richters] history is a history of violence, of violence perpetrated by Europeans against Native Americans, by Native Americans against Europeans, and by both peoples against their own kith and kin. It is a dark and brutal story, although one in which the Native Americans are shown as for long holding their own, manipulating Europeans as trading partners and playing off one set of Europeans against another until the overwhelming British victory of 1763 no longer made this possible. There is precious little uplift here, and little sense of the more constructive characteristics of the brave new world that was rising amid the wreckage of the old. But, in patiently uncovering the layers beneath the rubble, Richter forcefully brings home to us that the American past belongs to many peoples, and that none should be forgotten. (J. H. Elliott New York Review of Books 2011-06-09) The core of the work is a vivid, well-paced, stimulatingly opinionated and provocatively selective history of colonial Anglo-America...[A] spirited and engaging history of British North America...Richters trenchant language excites enthusiasm. He evokes picturesque episodes engagingly--the agonies of Roanoke, the role of European goods in Powhatan power structures, the peripeties of indentured servants, the intolerance of Protestant fanatics, the poverty of seventeenth-century colonial home life, and the struggles of proprietors, rebels and crowns. (Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Times Literary Supplement 2011-09-23) The most important history books make us rethink things we think we know. In Before the Revolution Americas Ancient Pasts, Daniel Richter shows us a land built by successive waves of adventurers, immigrants and merchants, one atop the other. He insists on the primacy of human action in history--something not always popular in academia today. (Wall Street Journal 2011-12-17) [An] unusual and useful synthesis of North American history between 1000 and 1763. (D. R. Mandell Choice 2011-12-01) ** ** About the Author Daniel K. Richter is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. **

Author: Benjamin R. Barber File Type: epub Powerful and disturbing. No one who cares about the future of our public life can afford to ignore this book. Jackson Lears A powerful sequel to Benjamin R. Barbers best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a vivid portrait of an overproducing global economy that targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. To explain how and why this has come about, Barber brings together extensive empirical research with an original theoretical framework for understanding our contemporary predicament. He asserts that in place of the Protestant ethic once associated with capitalismencouraging self-restraint, preparing for the future, protecting and self-sacrificing for children and community, and other characteristics of adulthoodwe are constantly being seduced into an infantilist ethic of consumption.

Author: Laleh Khalili File Type: pdf Many decades have passed since the Palestinian national movement began its political and military struggle. In that time, poignant memorials at massacre sites, a palimpsest of posters of young heroes and martyrs, sorrowful reminiscences about lost loved ones, and wistful images of young men and women who fought as guerrillas, have all flourished in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine tells the story of how dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past, and how through their dynamic everyday narrations, their nation has been made even without the institutional memory-making of a state. Bringing ethnography to political science, Khalili invites us to see Palestinian nationalism in its proper international context and traces its affinities with Third Worldist movements of its time, while tapping a rich and oft-ignored seam of Palestinian voices, histories, and memories.