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Books > History > History of specific subjects > General
"The definitive book of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers" (Scott
Brown, "ESPN"): A unique literary sports book that--through
exquisite reportage, love, and honesty--tells the full story of the
best team to ever play the game.
The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s won an unprecedented and
unmatched four Super Bowls in six years. A dozen of those Steelers
players, coaches, and executives have been inducted into the Hall
of Fame, and three decades later their names echo in popular
memory: "Mean" Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Mike
Webster, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, and John Stallworth. In ways
exhilarating and heartbreaking, they define not only the
brotherhood of sports but those elements of the game that engage
tens of millions of Americans: its artistry and its brutality.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews, "Their Life's Work" is a richly
textured story of a team and a sport, what the game gave these men,
and what the game took. It gave fame, wealth, and, above all, a
brotherhood of players, twelve of whom died before turning sixty.
To a man, they said they'd do it again, all of it. They bared the
soul of the game to Gary Pomerantz, and he captured it wondrously.
"Here is a book as hard-hitting and powerful as the 'Steel Curtain'
dynasty that Pomerantz depicts so deftly. It's the NFL's version of
"The Boys of Summer," with equal parts triumph and melancholy.
Pomerantz's writing is strong, straightforward, funny, sentimental,
and blunt. It's as working class and gritty as the men he writes
about" ("The Tampa Tribune," Top 10 Sports Books of 2013).
Cathedrals of Learning: Great and Ancient Universities of Western
Europe provides a conspectus of the great Western European
universities, pithily tells their life stories, showcases their
architectural heritage, and describes the art, literary, and
natural history collections they have accumulated over the
centuries. This book profiles the ancient universities and their
distinctive organizational cultures, reveals their customs,
ceremonies, and traditions, their quirks and quiddities, recounts
their complicated histories, describes their architectural wonders
(libraries, museums, anatomy theaters, botanical gardens) and
treasures (rare manuscripts, antiquities, paintings, and objects
d'art of all kinds), and introduces their famous alumni,
distinguished scholars, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, and
famously eccentric personalities. It is a book for scholars,
researchers, and anyone interested in these ancient institutions
that remain centers of learning in the contemporary world.
In a remarkable decade of public investment in higher education,
some 200 new university campuses were established worldwide between
1961 and 1970. This volume offers a comparative and connective
global history of these institutions, illustrating how their
establishment, intellectual output and pedagogical experimentation
sheds light on the social and cultural topography of the long
1960s. With an impressive geographic coverage - using case studies
from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia - the book explores how
these universities have influenced academic disciplines and
pioneered new types of teaching, architectural design and student
experience. From educational reform in West Germany to the
establishment of new institutions with progressive,
interdisciplinary curricula in the Commonwealth, the illuminating
case studies of this volume demonstrate how these universities
shared in a common cause: the embodiment of 'utopian' ideals of
living, learning and governance. At a time when the role of higher
education is fiercely debated, Utopian Universities is a timely and
considered intervention that offers a wide-ranging, historical
dimension to contemporary predicaments.
Now available in paperback, the "fresh and fascinating" ("The Plain
Dealer," Cleveland), "splendid and brilliant" ("Philadelphia Daily
News") history of the early game by the Official Historian of Major
League Baseball.
Who really invented baseball? Forget Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown
and Alexander Cartwright. Meet Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus
Wheaton, and other fascinating figures buried beneath the
falsehoods that have accrued around baseball's origins. This is the
true story of how organized baseball started, how gambling shaped
the game from its earliest days, and how it became our national
pastime and our national mirror.
"Baseball in the Garden of Eden" draws on original research to tell
how the game evolved from other bat-and-ball games and gradually
supplanted them, how the New York game came to dominate other
variants, and how gambling and secret professionalism promoted and
plagued the game. From a religious society's plot to anoint Abner
Doubleday as baseball's progenitor to a set of scoundrels and
scandals far more pervasive than the Black Sox Fix of 1919, this
entertaining book is full of surprises. Even the most expert
baseball fan will learn something new with almost every page.
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