I, The Rev. Carl Freeman Reynolds, am an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and have served in Outdoor Ministries with the Vermont and New York Conferences and in Churches in Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut. I am presently serving the Second Congregational Church of Stafford Springs at West Stafford, Connecticut. I received my BA in Fine Art Photography from Goddard College in Vermont in 1976 and my Masters of Divinity from Bangor Theological Seminary and was ordained in 1977. I am an artist in photography, wood turning and words. These words originated as sermons and prayers.
"Area studies"--and especially Middle Eastern studies--have been in a state of crisis since the spread of globalization. This volume focuses on one of the field's leading institutions, Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), which was founded 50 years ago to further research and teaching about a region that remains enigmatic to the U.S.
Ranging over 2,500 years,Cities in Civilizationis a tribute to the city as the birthplace of Western civilization. Drawing on the contributions of economists and geographers, of cultural, technological, and social historians, Sir Peter Hall examines twenty-one cities at their greatest moments. Hall describes the achievements of these golden ages and outlines the precise combinations of forces -- both universal and local -- that led to each city's belle epoque. Hall identifies four distinct expressions of civic innovation: artistic growth, technological progress, the marriage of culture and technology, and solutions to evolving problems. Descriptions of Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan London, and nineteenth-century Vienna bring to life those seedbeds of artistic and intellectual creativity. Explorations of Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, of Henry Ford's Detroit, and of Palo Alto at the dawn of the computer age highlight centers of technological advances. Tales of the creation of Los Angeles' movie industry and the birth of the blues and rock 'n' roll in Memphis depict the marriage of culture and technology. Finally, Hall celebrates cities that have been forced to solve problems created by their very size. With Imperial Rome came the apartment block and aqueduct; nineteenth-century London introduced policing, prisons, and sewers; twentieth-century New York developed the skyscraper; and Los Angeles became the first city without a center, a city ruled instead by the car. And in a fascinating conclusion, Hall speculates on urban creativity in the twenty-first century. This penetrating study reveals not only the lives of cities but also the lives of the people who built them and created the civilizations within them. A decade in the making,Cities in Civilizationis the definitive account of the culture of cities.
This collection examines recent theoretical and methodological debates, shifts in law and policy, and social and cultural changes around sexuality. It sets out new ways of conceptualizing and researching sexuality and explores persistently marginalised and re-traditionalised sexual practices, subjectivities and identities.
A scientist offers compelling visions and potential pitfalls of the future—in “a journey through time, space, and the human experience” (Dr. Tanya Harrison, coauthor of For All Humankind). Humanity has gained the ability not only to imagine the future, but to design and engineer it. At times entertaining, and at others profound, Future Rising provides an original perspective on our relationship with the future. As a species, we’ve become talented architects of our future—yet we often struggle to come to terms with what this means. As innovation and rapidly shifting norms and expectations drive our world at breakneck speed, we sometimes need to find a still, quiet place to pause and think. Future Rising creates such a place, where we can take advantage of our species’ knowledge of world history and the importance of science to piece together a positive future. To create a good future, we must rediscover the past. Our relationship with the future is inextricably intertwined with where we’ve come from, who we are, and what we aspire to. Future Rising starts at the beginning of all things with the Big Bang and traces a pathway along the emergence of intelligent life, through what makes humans uniquely capable of imagining and creating different futures. In a series of sixty short reflections, Andrew Maynard, a former physicist and nationally recognized expert in technology and society, will take you on a journey into: What “the future” actually is How it molds and guides our lives How we can use the history of the world to change our future “A thoughtful and thought-provoking response to the moment we’re in, chronicling how we got here, where we’re going, and what role we have in that journey.” —Ramona Pringle, Director of Creative Innovation Studio and Associate Professor, Ryerson University
"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Part of the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project, this book interrogates current and emerging contexts of academic books from the perspectives of thirteen expert voices from the connected communities of publishing, academia, libraries, and bookselling.
History as a field of learning is in a state of crisis. It has lost much of its influence in institutions of higher learning and its place in public esteem. Historians have, in large part, lost touch with the intelligent lay reader and with the undergraduate college student. History's value to society is being questioned. In this work, a distinguished historian views the profession to which he has been devoted for more than thirty years. Theodore S. Hamerow's learned observations will be welcomed by all historians and by those involved in the management of higher education, and should be required reading for all graduate students in history. Far from being a sentimental look at the past, Hamerow's work confronts the unpleasant reality of the present. History, he says flatly, is a discipline in retreat. The profession is in serious trouble and there are no signs that its problems will be resolved in the foreseeable future. After identifying the current crisis, Hamerow proceeds to trace the development of the profession over the last hundred years and to examine its characteristics in modern society. In this section of the book he shares some fascinating practical observations on the ways in which the profession operates. Hamerow explains why some historians rise to prominence while others do not. He also examines causes of the dissatisfactions that afflict many historians and their students. Hamerow also examines the way in which academic historians live their lives, as he expands on the daily realities that they face. He then explains how those realities have shaped scholarship and led to the "new history." The broad use of social science methods, he observes, has had the effect of isolating the new historians from traditional historians, indeed from one another. Couched in the arcane prose of machine-readable languages, says Hamerow, history has become inaccessible to the intelligent lay reader who had once read historical works with interest, understanding, and appreciation. In concluding his examination, Hamerow asks, "What is the use of history?" It has long been a favorite question asked by historians, but seldom one over which they agonized for very long. After considering various arguments for the usefulness of historical investigation, Hamerow offers his own justification. There are times, says Hamerow, when even the most spontaneous or instructive cultural pursuits need to be examined in the light of the purposes they serve and the goals they seek. Now might be a good time for all historians to take a long look at the direction their discipline has taken in the past century, at the functions it has come to perform, and at the serious dilemma it now faces. Hamerow is a steady and helpful guide to any such examination.
