The Greatest Invention

The Greatest Invention

Author: Silvia Ferrara

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0374601631

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In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.


Origins, Invention, Revision

Origins, Invention, Revision

Author: James S. Ackerman

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300218718

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An illuminating collection of essays from the preeminent scholar of architectural history and theory One of the most distinguished scholars in the fields of architectural history and theory today, James Sloss Ackerman is best known for his work on Italian masters such as Palladio and Michelangelo. In this collection of essays, Ackerman offers insight into his formation and development as a scholar, as well as reflections on a range of topics. Concise, lucid, and original, this book presents deep syntheses alongside innovative approaches and a broadening geographical and chronological reach. Ackerman's enduring fascination with architecture was one unforeseen consequence of his military service in World War II, and the collection includes a revealing account of his part in the liberation of Milan as a soldier in the Fifth American Regiment. These essays represent a unique, personal journey--from the Italian Renaissance to the classical architecture of India and the work of Frank Gehry at the new museum of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.


The Invention of Humanity

The Invention of Humanity

Author: Siep Stuurman

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-02-20

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 0674977513

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For much of history, strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. Siep Stuurman traces evolving ideas of human equality and difference across continents and civilizations from ancient times to the present. Despite humans’ deeply ingrained bias against strangers, migration and cultural blending have shaped human experience from the earliest times. As travelers crossed frontiers and came into contact with unfamiliar peoples and customs, frontier experiences generated not only hostility but also empathy and understanding. Empires sought to civilize their “barbarians,” but in all historical eras critics of empire were able to imagine how the subjected peoples made short shrift of imperial arrogance. Drawing on the views of a global mix of thinkers—Homer, Confucius, Herodotus, the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, the Haitian writer Antenor Firmin, the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal, and more—The Invention of Humanity surveys the great civilizational frontiers of history, from the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies in ancient Eurasia and Africa, to Europeans’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the New World, to the Enlightenment invention of universal “modern equality.” Against a backdrop of two millennia of thinking about common humanity and equality, Stuurman concludes with a discussion of present-day debates about human rights and the “clash of civilizations.”


Mothers and Daughters of Invention

Mothers and Daughters of Invention

Author: Autumn Stanley

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 792

ISBN-13: 9780813521978

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Stanley traces women's inventions in five vital areas of technology worldwide--agriculture, medicine, reproduction, machines, and computers.


The Invention of Tradition

The Invention of Tradition

Author: Eric Hobsbawm

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992-07-31

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780521437738

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This book explores examples of this process of invention and addresses the complex interaction of past and present in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism.


The Invention of Yesterday

The Invention of Yesterday

Author: Tamim Ansary

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 1610397975

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From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.


How Invention Begins

How Invention Begins

Author: John H. Lienhard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0195341201

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In How Invention Begins, Lienhard reconciles the ends of invention with the individual leaps upon which they are built, illuminating the vast web of individual inspirations that lie behind whole technologies. He traces, for instance, the way in which thousands of people applied their combined genius to airplanes, trains, and automobiles, revealing how a collective desire, an upwelling of fascination, a spirit of the times--a Zeitgeist--laid its hold upon inventors. The thing they all sought to create was speed itself. Can we speak of speed as an invention? To do so, he concludes, is certainly no greater a stretch than to call the car an "invention."


The Invention of Scotland

The Invention of Scotland

Author: Hugh Trevor-Roper

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-07-16

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0300176538

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This book argues that while Anglo-Saxon culture has given rise to virtually no myths at all, myth has played a central role in the historical development of Scottish identity. Hugh Trevor-Roper explores three myths across 400 years of Scottish history: the political myth of the "ancient constitution" of Scotland; the literary myth, including Walter Scott as well as Ossian and ancient poetry; and the sartorial myth of tartan and the kilt, invented--ironically, by Englishmen--in quite modern times. Trevor-Roper reveals myth as an often deliberate cultural construction used to enshrine a people's identity. While his treatment of Scottish myth is highly critical, indeed debunking, he shows how the ritualization and domestication of Scotland's myths as local color diverted the Scottish intelligentsia from the path that led German intellectuals to a dangerous myth of racial supremacy. This compelling manuscript was left unpublished on Trevor-Roper's death in 2003 and is now made available for the first time. Written with characteristic elegance, lucidity, and wit, and containing defiant and challenging opinions, it will absorb and provoke Scottish readers while intriguing many others. "I believe that the whole history of Scotland has been coloured by myth; and that myth, in Scotland, is never driven out by reality, or by reason, but lingers on until another myth has been discovered, or elaborated, to replace it."-Hugh Trevor-Roper


The Sources of Invention

The Sources of Invention

Author: John Jewkes

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1969-06-18

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1349000159

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A study of the causes and consequences of industrial innovation through the inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.