Custer's Bugler is an examination into the life of John Martin (born Giovanni Martino). Abandoned as a baby, he marched with Garibaldi before coming to America. Within three years, Martino (now Martin) would find a permanent place in American history by carrying Custer's final dispatch from the Little Big Horn. He continued in active military service for another 30 years before passing away in 1922. John Martin lived a historical odyssey, from his earliest days in rural southern Italy to life on the Plains as a Cavalry trooper before his final act in the rapidly modernizing world of New York City. Custer's Bugler: The Life of John Martin (Giovanni Martino) details his extraordinary story.
The richly varied lives of the Martin brothers reflected the many upheavals of Britain in the age of Industrial Revolution. Low-born and largely unschooled, they were part of a new generation of artists, scientists and inventors who witnessed the creation of the modern world. William, the eldest, was a cussedly eccentric inventor who couldn't look at a piece of machinery without thinking about how to improve it; Richard, a courageous soldier, fought in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo; Jonathan, a hellfire preacher tormented by madness and touched with a visionary genius reminiscent of William Blake, almost burned down York Minster in 1829; while John, the youngest Martin, single-handedly invented, mastered and exhausted an entire genre of painting, the apocalyptic sublime, while playing host to the foremost writers, scientists and thinkers of his day. In The Prometheans Max Adams interweaves the fascinating story of these maverick siblings with a magisterial and multi-faceted account of the industrial, political and artistic ferment of early 19th-century Britain. His narrative centres on a generation of inventors, artists and radical intellectuals (including the chemist Humphry Davy, the engineer George Stephenson, the social reformer Robert Owen and the poet Shelley) who were seeking to liberate humanity from the tyranny of material discomfort and political oppression. For Adams, the shared inspiration that binds this generation together is the cult of Prometheus, the titan of ancient Greek mythology who stole fire from Zeus to give to mortal man, and who became a potent symbol of political and personal liberation from the mid-18th century onwards. Whether writing about Davy's invention of the miner's safety lamp, the scandalous private life of the Prince Regent, the death of Shelley or J.M.W. Turner's use of colour, Adams's narrative is pacy, characterful, and rich in anecdote, quotation and memorable character sketch. Like John Martin himself, he has created a sprawling and brightly coloured canvas on an epic scale.
The Explanation of Social Action is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences. It makes the strong argument that the traditional understanding involves asking questions that have no clear foundation and provoke an unnecessary tension between lay and expert vocabularies. Drawing on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, John Levi Martin exposes the root of the problem as an attempt to counterpose two radically different types of answers to the question of why someone did a certain thing: first person and third person responses. The tendency is epitomized by attempts to explain human action in "causal" terms. This "causality" has little to do with reality and instead involves the creation and validation of abstract statements that almost no social scientist would defend literally. This substitution of analysts' imaginations over actors' realities results from an intellectual history wherein social scientists began to distrust the self-understanding of actors in favor of fundamentally anti-democratic epistemologies. These were rooted most defensibly in a general understanding of an epistemic hiatus in social knowledge and least defensibly in the importation of practices of truth production from the hierarchical setting of institutions for the insane. Martin, instead of assuming that there is something fundamentally arbitrary about the cognitive schemes of actors, focuses on the nature of judgment. This implies the need for a social aesthetics, an understanding of the process whereby actors intuit intersubjectively valid qualities of complex social objects. In this thought-provoking and ambitious book, John Levi Martin argues that the most promising way forward to such a science of social aesthetics will involve a rigorous field theory.
Brimming with old-fashioned charm, this book of puzzles from 1922 features antique rebuses, riddles, puns, and other imaginative challenges. Each puzzle is complemented by whimsical illustrations. Solutions.
An award-winning historian’s revisionary account of the early modern world, showing how apocalyptic ideas stimulated political, religious, and intellectual transformations “A masterful synthesis of the prognostications of faith, knowledge, and politics on a global stage. Martin’s book illuminates one of the enduring themes that shaped the medieval and early modern world.”—Paula E. Findlen, Stanford University In this revelatory immersion into the apocalyptic, messianic, and millenarian ideas and movements that created the modern world, John Jeffries Martin performs a kind of empathic time travel, entering into the psyche, spirituality, and temporalities of a cast of historical actors in profound moments of discovery. He argues that religious faith—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—did not oppose but rather fostered the making of a modern scientific spirit, buoyed along by a providential view of history and nature, and a deep conviction in the coming End of the World. Through thoughtful attention to the primary sources, Martin re‑reads the Renaissance, excavating a religious foundation at the core of even the most radical empirical thinking. Familiar icons like Ibn Khaldūn, Columbus, Isaac Luria, and Francis Bacon emerge startlingly fresh and newly gleaned, agents of a history formerly untold and of a modern world made in the image of its imminent end.
An internationally renowned painter in his time (1789-1854), John Martin created paintings of apocalyptic destruction and biblical disaster. He is credited with influencing a remarkable range of people, including the Brontes and the Pre-Raphaelites.
This is a nonchronological introduction to Baroque, one of the great periods of European art. John Martin's descriptions of the essential characteristics of the Baroque help one to gain an understanding of the style. His illustrations are informative and he has clearly looked with a fresh eye at the works of art themselves. In addition to the more than 200 illustrations, the volume contains an appendix of translated documents.
Personal memoir of author, John Martin of growing up in M?n? Camp, the westernmost sugar plantation camp on Kauai, and in Hawaii. John Martin includes stories of his family and shares memories of his life, playing and working with plantation camp kids of different ethnicities. Hunting for pigs and goats, freshwater and salt water fishing, swimming in the ocean and other fresh water ponds and ditches were only some of the exciting things they did. Working on the plantation during summer breaks was also an important part of the lifestyle of a plantation camp kid. In 1987 the camp was closed, and the two remaining families moved to Kekaha. Rows of vacant houses, which once were the homes of families with dreams were leveled. Nothing remains of the small but proud community.
