Acting Out

Acting Out

Author: John Rohrbach

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 0520306686

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Cabinet cards were America’s main format for photographic portraiture throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Standardized at 6½ x 4¼ inches, they were just large enough to reveal extensive detail, leading to the incorporation of elaborate poses, backdrops, and props. Inexpensive and sold by the dozen, they transformed getting one’s portrait made from a formal event taken up once or twice in a lifetime into a commonplace practice shared with friends. The cards reinforced middle-class Americans’ sense of family. They allowed people to show off their material achievements and comforts, and the best cards projected an informal immediacy that encouraged viewers to feel emotionally connected with those portrayed. The experience even led sitters to act out before the camera. By making photographs an easygoing fact of life, the cards forecast the snapshot and today’s ubiquitous photo sharing. Organized by senior curator John Rohrbach, Acting Out is the first ever in-depth examination of the cabinet card phenomena. Full-color plates include over 100 cards at full size, providing a highly entertaining collection of these early versions of the selfie and ultimately demonstrating how cabinet cards made photography modern. Published in association with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Tentative exhibition dates (postponed due to COVID-19): Amon Carter Museum of American Art: August 2020 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): 2021


Life After Life

Life After Life

Author: Kate Atkinson

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 0552779687

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WINNER OF THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in lifeâe(tm)s bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.


History of Economic Analysis

History of Economic Analysis

Author: Joseph A. Schumpeter

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2006-03-07

Total Pages: 1309

ISBN-13: 1134838719

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At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. Unprecedented in scope, the book was to provide a complete history of economic theory from Ancient Greece to the end of the second world war. A major contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics, History of Economic Analysis rapidly gained a reputation as a unique and classic work. As well being an economist, Schumpeter was a gifted mathematician, historian, philosopher and psychologist and this is reflected in the multi-disciplinary nature of his great endeavour. Topics addressed include the techniques of economic analysis, contemporaneous developments in other sciences and the sociology of economics. This inclusiveness extends to the periods and individuals who figure in the book. As well as dealing with all of the major economists from Adam Smith to Maynard Keynes, the book considers the economic writings of Plato and Aristotle, of the Medieval Scholastics and of the major European economists. Throughout, Schumpeter perceived economics as a human science and this is reflected in a volume which is lucid and insightful throughout.


Fonthill Recovered

Fonthill Recovered

Author: Caroline Dakers

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2018-05-16

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 1787350452

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Fonthill, in Wiltshire, is traditionally associated with the writer and collector William Beckford who built his Gothic fantasy house called Fonthill Abbey at the end of the eighteenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for overarching ambition and folly, a sublime ruin. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story of one man’s excesses. Beckford’s Abbey is only one of several important houses to be built on the estate since the early sixteenth century, all of them eventually consumed by fire or deliberately demolished, and all of them oddly forgotten by historians. Little now remains: a tower, a stable block, a kitchen range, some dressed stone, an indentation in a field. Fonthill Recovered draws on histories of art and architecture, politics and economics to explore the rich cultural history of this famous Wiltshire estate. The first half of the book traces the occupation of Fonthill from the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century. Some of the owners surpassed Beckford in terms of their wealth, their collections, their political power and even, in one case, their sexual misdemeanours. They include Charles I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the richest commoner in the nineteenth century. The second half of the book consists of essays on specific topics, filling out such crucial areas as the complex history of the designed landscape, the sources of the Beckfords’ wealth and their collections, and one essay that features the most recent appearance of the Abbey in a video game.