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Books > Humanities > Archaeology
As modern-day muckraker Danny Schechter writes in his new
introduction, exclusive to this Cosimo Classics edition: "In this
era of financial crisis compounded, and even perhaps enabled, by a
dearth of investigative reporting, it is valuable to go back in
time to learn from the work of great journalists with the courage
to have taken on avaricious corporations and irresponsible business
practices."Perhaps no book demands our attention and respect as
much as the one now in your hands. The unabridged edition, long out
of print, of Ida Tarbell's study/expose of the history of the
Standard Oil Company is an American classic, a model of careful
research, detailed analysis, clear expository writing, and social
mission. It has been hailed as one of the top ten of journalism's
greatest hits."In this book, offering Volumes I&II, Tarbell
explores: the birth of the oil industry the rise of the Standard
Oil Company the "oil war" of 1872 the beginnings of the oil trust
the first interstate commerce bill battles over oil pipelines the
marketing of oil the political response to Standard's domination
breaking up the oil trust competition in the oil industry and
more.IDA MINERVA TARBELL (1857-1944) is remembered today as a
muckraking journalist, thanks to this 1904 blockbuster expose.
Originally published as a series of articles in McClure's magazine,
this groundbreaking work highlighted the dangers of business
monopolies and contributed to the eventual breakup of Standard
Oil.Investigative journalist DANNY SCHECHTER is editor of
Mediachannel.org and author of numerous books on the media,
including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the
Subprime Scandal (Cosimo). For more, see
www.newsdissector.com/plunder.
A captivating look at a bygone era through the lens of a single,
surprisingly momentous American year one century ago. 1908 was the
year Henry Ford launched the Model T, the Wright Brothers proved to
the world that they had mastered the art of flight, Teddy Roosevelt
decided to send American naval warships around the globe, the
Chicago Cubs won the World Series (a feat they have never yet
repeated), and six automobiles set out on an incredible 20,000 mile
race from New York City to Paris via the frozen Bering Strait.
A charming and knowledgeable guide, Rasenberger takes readers
back to a time of almost limitless optimism, even in the face of
enormous inequality, an era when the majority of Americans believed
that the future was bound to be better than the past, that the
world's worst problems would eventually be solved, and that nothing
at all was impossible. As Thomas Edison succinctly said that year,
"Anything, everything is possible."
Advocates of the established hypotheses on the origins of the
Synoptic gospels and their interrelationships (the Synoptic
Problem), and especially those defending or contesting the
existence of the "source" (Q), are increasingly being called upon
to justify their position with reference to ancient media
practices. Still others go so far as to claim that ancient media
realities force a radical rethinking of the whole project of
Synoptic source criticism, and they question whether traditional
documentary approaches remain valid at all. This debate has been
hampered to date by the patchy reception of research on ancient
media in Synoptic scholarship. Seeking to rectify this problem,
Alan Kirk here mounts a defense, grounded in the practices of
memory and manuscript transmission in the Roman world, of the Two
Document Hypothesis. He shows how ancient media/memory approaches
in fact offer new leverage on classic research problems in
scholarship on the Synoptic Gospels, and that they have the
potential to break the current impasse in the Synoptic Problem. The
results of his analysis open up new insights to the early reception
and scribal transmission of the Jesus tradition and cast new light
on some long-conflicted questions in Christian origins.
Economic archaeology and ancient economic history have boomed the
past decades. The former thanks to greatly enhanced techniques to
identify, collect, and interpret material remains as proxies for
economic interactions and performance; the latter by embracing the
frameworks of new institutional economics. Both disciplines,
however, still have great difficulty talking with each other. There
is no reliable method to convert ancient proxy-data into the
economic indicators used in economic history. In turn, the shared
cultural belief-systems underlying institutions and the symbolic
ways in which these are reproduced remain invisible in the material
record. This book explores ways to bring both disciplines closer
together by building a theoretical and methodological framework to
evaluate and integrate archaeological proxy-data in economic
history research. Rather than the linear interpretations offered by
neoclassical or neomalthusian models, we argue that complexity
economics, based on system theory, offers a promising way forward.
Walking served as an occasion for the display of power and status
in ancient Rome, where great men paraded with their entourages
through city streets and elite villa owners strolled with friends
in private colonnades and gardens. In this first book-length
treatment of the culture of walking in ancient Rome, Timothy
O'Sullivan explores the careful attention which Romans paid to the
way they moved through their society. He employs a wide range of
literary, artistic, and architectural evidence to reveal the
crucial role that walking played in the performance of social
status, the discourse of the body and the representation of space.
By examining how Roman authors depict walking, this book sheds new
light on the Romans themselves not only how they perceived
themselves and their experience of the world, but also how they
drew distinctions between work and play, mind and body, and
republic and empire."
Scholars have long debated the nature of Maya political
organisation during the Classic period (AD 250-950). Complex
questions regarding political centralisation, economic change, and
the role of politics and economics in the rise and collapse of the
civilisation have been examined and reexamined from a variety of
perspectives. Antonia Foias and Kitty Emery have assembled a broad
collection of essays all focused on a single polity, that of Motul
de San Jose. By presenting a coherent interdisciplinary body of
archaeological and environmental data, the volume offers an
intensely deep, focused investigation of the various models of the
ancient Maya political and economic systems. Research conducted
over six seasons of fieldwork reveals a more centralised political
system than expected and uncovers the workings of the ancient
economic structure. The contributors offer new details concerning
how involved royals and non-royal elites were in the politics of
nearby states, as well as an extensive tribute system
The development of key methodologies for the study of battlefields
in the USA in the 1980s inspired a generation of British and
European archaeologists to turn their attention to sites in their
own countries. The end of the Cold War and key anniversaries of the
World Wars inspired others, especially in the UK, to examine the
material legacy of those conflicts before they disappeared. By 2000
the study of war was again firmly on the archaeological agenda. The
overall purpose of the book is to encourage proponents and
practitioners of Conflict Archaeology to consider what it is for
and how to develop it in the future.The central argument is that,
at present, Conflict Archaeology is effectively divided into closed
communities who do not interact to any large extent. These separate
communities are divided by period and by nationality, so that a
truly international Conflict Archaeology has yet to emerge. These
divisions prevent the exchange of information and ideas across
boundaries and thereby limit the scope of the field. This book
discusses these issues in detail, clearly outlining how they affect
the development of Conflict Archaeology as a coherent branch of
archaeology.
Peter Karavites presents a revisionist overview of Homeric
scholarship, whose purpose is to bridge the gap between the
"positivist" and "negativist" theories dominant in the greater part
of the twentieth century. His investigation derives new insights
from Homer's text and solves the age old question of the
relationship between Homer and the Mycenaean age.
Cuban Cultural Heritage explores the role that cultural heritage
and museums played in the construction of a national identity in
postcolonial Cuba. Starting with independence from Spain in 1898
and moving through Cuban-American rapprochement in 2014, Pablo
Alonso Gonzalez illustrates how political and ideological shifts
have influenced ideas about heritage and how, in turn, heritage has
been used by different social actors to reiterate their status,
spread new ideologies, and consolidate political regimes. Unveiling
the connections between heritage, power, and ideology, Alonso
Gonzalez delves into the intricacies of Cuban history, covering key
issues such as Cuba's cultural and political relationships with
Spain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and so-called Third
World countries; the complexities of Cuba's status as a
postcolonial state; and the potential future paths of the
Revolution in the years to come. This volume offers a detailed look
at the function and place of cultural heritage under socialist
states.
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Hallelujah Hats
- Volume 1
(Hardcover)
Bruce Nelson; Photographs by Heather J Kirk; Designed by Heather J Kirk
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The Islands of the Sun and the Moon in Bolivia's Lake Titicaca
were two of the most sacred locations in the Inca empire. A
pan-Andean belief held that they marked the origin place of the Sun
and the Moon, and pilgrims from across the Inca realm made ritual
journeys to the sacred shrines there. In this book, Brian Bauer and
Charles Stanish explore the extent to which this use of the islands
as a pilgrimage center during Inca times was founded on and
developed from earlier religious traditions of the Lake Titicaca
region.
Drawing on a systematic archaeological survey and test
excavations in the islands, as well as data from historical texts
and ethnography, the authors document a succession of complex
polities in the islands from 2000 BC to the time of European
contact in the 1530s AD. They uncover significant evidence of
pre-Inca ritual use of the islands, which raises the compelling
possibility that the religious significance of the islands is of
great antiquity. The authors also use these data to address broader
anthropological questions on the role of pilgrimage centers in the
development of pre-modern states.
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