This volume introduces the early Christian ideas of history and history writing and shows their value for developing Christian communities of the patristic era. It examines the ways early Christians related and transmitted their history: apologetics, martyrdom accounts, sacred biography, and the genre of church history proper. The book shows that exploring the lives and writings of both men and women of the ancient church helps readers understand how Christian identity is rooted in the faithful work of preceding generations. It also offers a corrective to the individualistic and ahistorical tendencies within contemporary Christianity.
Edited by S. Jay Kleinberg, this volume investigates the role played by women in ancient, more recent and contemporary history and demonstrates that taking into account the activities of women radically alters the perspectives of historians.
"[An] engrossing survey of the history of childbirth." —Stephen Lowman, Washington Post Making and having babies—what it takes to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and deliver—have mystified women and men throughout human history. The insatiably curious Randi Hutter Epstein journeys through history, fads, and fables, and to the fringe of science. Here is an entertaining must-read—an enlightening celebration of human life.
This volume introduces the early Christian ideas of history and history writing and shows their value for developing Christian communities of the patristic era. It examines the ways early Christians related and transmitted their history: apologetics, martyrdom accounts, sacred biography, and the genre of church history proper. The book shows that exploring the lives and writings of both men and women of the ancient church helps readers understand how Christian identity is rooted in the faithful work of preceding generations. It also offers a corrective to the individualistic and ahistorical tendencies within contemporary Christianity.
Most of us think of the 1970s as an "in-between" decade, the uninspiring years that happened to fall between the excitement of the 1960s and the Reagan Revolution. A kitschy period summed up as the "Me Decade," it was the time of Watergate and the end of Vietnam, of malaise and gas lines, but of nothing revolutionary, nothing with long-lasting significance. In the first full history of the period, Bruce Schulman, a rising young cultural and political historian, sweeps away misconception after misconception about the 1970s. In a fast-paced, wide-ranging, and brilliant reexamination of the decade's politics, culture, and social and religious upheaval, he argues that the Seventies were one of the most important of the postwar twentieth-century decades. The Seventies witnessed a profound shift in the balance of power in American politics, economics, and culture, all driven by the vast growth of the Sunbelt. Country music, a southern silent majority, a boom in "enthusiastic" religion, and southern California New Age movements were just a few of the products of the new demographics. Others were even more profound: among them, public life as we knew it died a swift death. The Seventies offers a masterly reconstruction of high and low culture, of public events and private lives, of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Evel Knievel, est, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan. From The Godfather and Network to the Ramones and Jimmy Buffett; from Billie jean King and Bobby Riggs to Phyllis Schlafly and NOW; from Proposition 13 to the Energy Crisis; here are all the names, faces, and movements that once filled our airwaves, and now live again. The Seventies is powerfully argued, compulsively readable, and deeply provocative.
As the world reels from crisis to crisis, the most serious one seems to draw the least attention. And that is the crisis of the Western mind. The seeds of radical subjectivism sown at the time of a previous such crisis, chronicled in Paul Hazard’s Crisis of the European Mind, have now borne fruit, fruit of such stupendous magnitude that they threaten to drag us down into the depths of cultural despair. In The Rise and Fall of Natural Law, this descent into the maelstrom was chronicled from its origin to its inevitable conclusion – at least, in the world of intellect. Culture lags intellect, but it is never insulated from it. Ideas do have consequences. The intellectual counterpart to our cultural crisis already played itself out 200 years ago. The crisis of the European mind, by which intellectual culture shifted from Revelation to Reason, found its fitting conclusion in the work of the ultimate solipsist, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte’s focus on enthusiastic conviction and the primacy of the subjective makes him the prophet of the modern world. Indeed, his orientation has now triumphed for all to see. His story, and the stories of those leading up to him – the leading characters in “the Rise and Fall of Natural Law” – are crucial to understanding the genesis of the modern world. But that is not the end of the story, for history goes on. That spot, precisely where the first half of Stahl’s history of legal philosophy leaves off, is where the second half picks up. The Recovery of Historical Law narrates the attempts to overcome this radical subjectivism and establish a functioning social order in which the ideal matches up with the real, the theory is in harmony with the practice. After discussing the work of Locke, Montesquieu, Constant, and the Doctrinaires, all of whom functioned fully within the framework of autonomous natural law while attempting to mitigate it, Stahl reveals the hero of the story: Friedrich Schelling. It was Schelling who initiated the gargantuan task of reorienting philosophy away from subjectivism and back toward objective reality. Stahl characterizes this as a “Samsonesque act” whereby Schelling “lifted the temple of the previous philosophy off of its pillars and buried the whole army of enemies, himself included, under its ruins.” For one thing, this explains the cover illustration, “Samson Destroying the Philistine Temple.” For another, it intimates how Schelling, like Moses, stood at the entry to the Promised Land without entering in. Schelling’s philosophy is an exercise in pantheism, an orientation from which he struggled to free himself later in life. And in fact, Hegel, his great fellow laborer in so-called “speculative philosophy,” took that pantheism and turned it into a mighty system in its own right. A rabbit trail that carried many into another dead end, one with which we wrestle today: “conscious” or “woke” big government. But that is not the end of the story. Schelling’s first fruits were recovered by the Historical School of Jurisprudence, led by Friedrich Carl von Savigny. Here the work of Counter-Revolutionaries such as Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke was carried forward to bear fruit for jurisprudence. And this is the foundation for Stahl’s own system, as contained in Volume II: The Doctrine of Law and State on the Basis of the Christian World-View. It is on this basis that the laborious task to reconstruct Western civilization can begin. And not a moment too soon.
Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired. To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature. Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading—the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators—to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history—what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States—by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.
How do photojournalists get the pictures that bring us the action from the world's most dangerous places? How do picture editors decide which photos to scrap and which to feature on the front page? Find out in Get the Picture, a personal history of fifty years of photojournalism by one of the top journalists of the twentieth century. John G. Morris brought us many of the images that defined our era, from photos of the London air raids and the D-Day landing during World War II to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. He tells us the inside stories behind dozens of famous pictures like these, which are reproduced in this book, and provides intimate and revealing portraits of the men and women who shot them, including Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and W. Eugene Smith. A firm believer in the power of images to educate and persuade, Morris nevertheless warns of the tremendous threats posed to photojournalists today by increasingly chaotic wars and the growing commercialism in publishing, the siren song of money that leads editors to seek pictures that sell copies rather than those that can change the way we see the world.
An interdisciplinary consideration of Paul Gilroys contributions to cultural theory and understandings of modernity. In the more than twenty years since the publication of his book The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has become a leading Afro-European intellectual whose work in the cultural studies of race has influenced a number of fields and made the study of black Atlantic literatures and cultures an enduring part of the humanities. The essays in this collection examine the full trajectory of Gilroys work, looking beyond The Black Atlantic to consider also his work in the intervening years, focusing in particular on his investigations of contemporary black life in the United States, histories of human rights, and the politics of memory and empire in contemporary Britain. With an essay by Gilroy himself extending his longstanding examination of fascism, racial thinking, and European philosophical thought, in addition to an interview with Gilroy, this volume features Gilroys own words alongside other scholars alternative conceptualizations and critical rereadings of his works.
"In this anthology some of the most influential theorists, historians and artists that work within the field of real time + art, have been asked to describe and possibly even define it. The result is a kaleidoscopic play of ideas and art forms that together define a wide range of issues in art."--BOOK JACKET.
