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Books > History > History of specific subjects
Fashion History: A Global View proposes a new perspective on fashion history. Arguing that fashion has occurred in cultures beyond the West throughout history, this groundbreaking book explores the geographic places and historical spaces that have been largely neglected by contemporary fashion studies, bringing them together for the first time. Reversing the dominant narrative that privileges Western Europe in the history of dress, Welters and Lillethun adopt a cross-cultural approach to explore a vast array of cultures around the globe. They explore key issues affecting fashion systems, ranging from innovation, production and consumption to identity formation and the effects of colonization. Case studies include the cross-cultural trade of silk textiles in Central Asia, the indigenous dress of the Americas and of Hawai'i, the cosmetics of the Tang Dynasty in China, and stylistic innovation in sub-Saharan Africa. Examining the new lessons that can be deciphered from archaeological findings and theoretical advancements, the book shows that fashion history should be understood as a global phenomenon, originating well before and beyond the fourteenth century European court, which is continually, and erroneously, cited as fashion's birthplace. Providing a fresh framework for fashion history scholarship, Fashion History: A Global View will inspire inclusive dress narratives for students and scholars of fashion, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed
attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries,
the earliest period of intensive written production in Arabic. In
this groundbreaking first book, Zayde Antrim develops a "discourse
of place," a framework for approaching formal texts devoted to the
representation of territory across genres. The discourse of place
included such varied works as topographical histories, literary
anthologies, religious treatises, world geographies, poetry, travel
literature, and maps.
The Panama Canal is a world-famous site central to the global economy, but the social, cultural, and political history of the country along this waterway is little known outside its borders. In Musica Tipica, author Sean Bellaviti sheds light on a key element of Panamanian culture, namely the story of cumbia or, as Panamanians frequently call it, "musica tipica," a form of music that enjoys unparalleled popularity throughout Panama. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Bellaviti reconstructs a twentieth-century social history that illuminates the crucial role music has played in the formation of national identities in Latin America. Focusing, in particular, on the relationship between cumbia and the rise of populist Panamanian nationalism in the context of U.S. imperialism, Bellaviti argues that this hybrid musical form, which forges links between the urban and rural as well as the modern and traditional, has been essential to the development of a sense of nationhood among Panamanians. With their approaches to musical fusion and their carefully curated performance identities, cumbia musicians have straddled some of the most pronounced schisms in Panamanian society.
Though the distance between opera and popular music seems immense
today, a century ago opera was an integral part of American popular
music culture, and familiarity with opera was still a part of
American "cultural literacy." During the Ragtime era, hundreds of
humorous Tin Pan Alley songs centered on operatic subjects-either
directly quoting operas or alluding to operatic characters and
vocal stars of the time. These songs brilliantly captured the
moment when popular music in America transitioned away from its
European operatic heritage, and when the distinction between low-
and high-brow "popular" musical forms was free to develop, with all
its attendant cultural snobbery and rebellion.
Conventional wisdom holds that the US Army in Vietnam, thrust into
an unconventional war where occupying terrain was a meaningless
measure of success, depended on body counts as its sole measure of
military progress. In No Sure Victory, Army officer and historian
Gregory Daddis looks far deeper into the Army's techniques for
measuring military success and presents a much more complicated-and
disturbing-account of the American misadventure in Indochina.
"Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London at War" is a unique collection of surprising revelations, heroic deeds and other quirky pieces of trivia from the conflicts that have shaped London's fascinating past. From British wartime commanders and other characters who called London their home, through the privations of war and their social impact, to the devastation caused by the Blitz in World War II and London's subsequently resilience, an intriguing history is revealed. With stories of human endeavour in the face of adversity, the rich history of this great capital city at war is revealed.
From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving into an "empire of ruin."
On March 21, 1960, a line of 150 white policemen fired 1344 rounds
into a crowd of several thousand people assembled outside a police
station, protesting against the Apartheid regime's racist "pass"
laws. The gunfire left in its wake sixty-seven dead and one hundred
and eighty six wounded. Most of the people who were killed were
shot in the back, hit while running away.
Die skrywer Erika Murray-Theron wou weet waar die vroue in haar familie vandaan kom. Wat kry ’n mens van wie? Waar kom alles wat jý is vandaan? Hoe is die vroue in haar familie se lewe geraak deur trauma en groot wêreldgebeurtenisse waaroor hulle geen beheer gehad het nie? Theron se ouma Issie is op 3 Mei 1885 gebore; 133 jaar gelede. In hierdie verhaalbiografie gaan soek Theron in ou kookboeke, aantekeninge, foto’s, herinneringe, albums, briewe en geslagsregisters na haar ouma Issie se storie. ’n Lewe ontvou wat geraak is deur die verlies van ouers, die Anglo-Boereoorlog, die Rebellie van 1914 en daarna die energie wat dit verg om ’n groot huisgesin te behartig. ’n Skerfie glas wys hoe die verlede, selfs die verre verlede, spore op latere geslagte laat.
What do people do all day? What did women and men do to make a living in early modern Europe, and what did their work mean? As this book shows, the meanings depended both on the worker and on the context. With an innovative analytic method that is yoked to a specially-built database of source materials, this book revises many received opinions about the history of gender and work in Europe. The applied verb-oriented method finds the 'work verbs' that appear incidentally in a wide variety of early modern sources and then analyzes the context in which they appear. By tying information technologies and computer-assisted analysis to the analytic powers - both quantitative and qualitative - of professional historians, the method gets much closer to a participatory observation of the micro-patterns of early modern life than was once believed possible. It directly addresses a number of broad problems often debated by historians of gender and early modern Europe. First, it discusses the problem of assessing more accurately the incidence, character and division of work. Second, it analyzes the configurations of work and human difference. Third, it deals with the extent to which work practices created notions of difference - gender difference but also other forms of difference - and, conversely, to what extent work practices contributed to notions of sameness and gender convergence. Finally, it studies the impact of processes of change. Drawing on sources from Sweden, the authors show the importance of multiple employment, the openness of early modern households, the significance of marriage and marital status, the gendered nature of specific tasks, and the ways in which state formation and commercialization were entangled in people's everyday lives.
Americans often look back on Paris between the world wars as a
charming escape from the enduring inequalities and reactionary
politics of the United States. In this bold and original study,
Brooke Blower shows that nothing could be further from the truth.
She reveals the breadth of American activities in the capital, the
lessons visitors drew from their stay, and the passionate responses
they elicited from others. For many sojourners-not just for the
most famous expatriate artists and writers- Paris served as an
important crossroads, a place where Americans reimagined their
position in the world and grappled with what it meant to be
American in the new century, even as they came up against
conflicting interpretations of American power by others.
At the start of the Civil War, Knoxville, Tennessee, with a
population of just over 4,000, was considered a prosperous
metropolis little reliant on slavery. Although the surrounding
countryside was predominantly Unionist in sympathy, Knoxville
itself was split down the middle, with Union and Confederate
supporters even holding simultaneous political rallies at opposite
ends of the town's main street. Following Tennessee's secession,
Knoxville soon became famous (or infamous) as a stronghold of
stalwart Unionism, thanks to the efforts of a small cadre who
persisted in openly denouncing the Confederacy. Throughout the
course of the Civil War, Knoxville endured military occupation for
all but three days, hosting Confederate troops during the first
half of the conflict and Union forces throughout the remainder,
with the transition punctuated by an extended siege and bloody
battle during which nearly forty thousand soldiers fought over the
town.
During the nineteenth century, nearly one hundred symphonies were written by over fifty composers living in the United States. With few exceptions, this repertoire is virtually forgotten today. In Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise, author Douglas W. Shadle explores the stunning stylistic diversity of this substantial repertoire and uncovers why it failed to enter the musical mainstream. Throughout the century, Americans longed for a distinct national musical identity. As the most prestigious of all instrumental genres, the symphony proved to be a potent vehicle in this project as composers found inspiration for their works in a dazzling array of subjects, including Niagara Falls, Hiawatha, and Western pioneers. With a wealth of musical sources at his disposal, including never-before-examined manuscripts, Shadle reveals how each component of the symphonic enterprise-from its composition, to its performance, to its immediate and continued reception by listeners and critics-contributed to competing visions of American identity. Employing an innovative transnational historical framework, Shadle's narrative covers three continents and shows how the music of major European figures such as Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, and Dvorak exerted significant influence over dialogues about the future of American musical culture. Shadle demonstrates that the perceived authority of these figures allowed snobby conductors, capricious critics, and even orchestral musicians themselves to thwart the efforts of American symphonists despite widespread public support of their music. Consequently, these works never entered the performing canons of American orchestras. An engagingly written account of a largely unknown repertoire, Orchestrating the Nation shows how artistic and ideological debates from the nineteenth century continue to shape the culture of American orchestral music today.
Early work in conflict resolution and peace research focused on why wars broke out, why they persisted, and why peace agreements failed to endure. Later research has focused on what actions and circumstances have actually averted destructive escalations, stopped the perpetuation of destructive conduct, produced a relatively good conflict transformation, or resulted in an enduring and relatively equitable relationship among former adversaries. This later research, which began in the 1950s, recognizes that conflict is inevitable and is often waged in the name of rectifying injustice. Additionally, it argues that damages can be minimized and gains maximized for various stakeholders in waging and settling conflicts. This theory, which is known as the constructive conflict approach, looks at how conflicts can be waged and resolved so they are broadly beneficial rather than mutually destructive. In this book, Louis Kriesberg, one of the major figures in the school of constructive conflict, looks at every major foreign conflict episode in which the United States has been involved since the onset of the Cold War to analyze when American involvement in foreign conflicts has been relatively effective and beneficial and when it has not. In doing so he analyzes whether the US took constructive approaches to conflict and whether the approach yielded better consequences than more traditional coercive approaches. Realizing Peace helps readers interested in engaging or learning about foreign policy to better understand what has happened in past American involvement in foreign conflicts, to think freshly about better alternatives, and to act in support of more constructive strategies in the future.
As the Atlantic Ocean was transformed from a terrifying barrier into a highway uniting four continents, the lives of people all around the ocean were transformed. After 1492 merchants and political leaders around the Atlantic refocused their attention from trade highways in their interiors to the coasts. Those who emigrated, willingly or unwillingly, had their lives changed completely, but many others became involved in new trades and industries that necessitated consolidation of populations. American gold and silver contributed to the emergence of nation-states. New foods enriched diets all over the world. American foods such as fish, cassava, maize, tomatoes, beans, and cacao fed burgeoning populations. Sugar grown around the Atlantic transformed tastes everywhere. Tobacco was the first great consumer craze. Furs provided the raw material for fashionable broad hats. Chains of commodity exchange linked the Atlantic to the Pacific; they also linked Americans to the Mediterranean and the goods of the Middle East. Creation of Atlantic economies required organization of labor and trade on a scale previously unknown. Generations of Europeans who signed up for servitude for a number of years in order to pay their passage over were gradually supplanted by enslaved Africans, millions of whom were imported into slavery. Wars, fueled by the need for ever more slaves, spread throughout West and Central Africa. The African end of the slave trade produced powerful rulers and great confederations in Africa. Consolidation of displaced tribal groups and remnants of populations depleted by epidemic disease led to the emergence of the Six Nations of the Iroquois League in northern North America, and the Creeks, Cherokees, and others in the south. Those who made a choice to travel across the Atlantic did so for economic advancement, but many also were influenced by religious concerns. Conflict between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Europe, and the power of political leaders to force conformity, caused many to feel that their right to worship was under threat. They were willing to accept servitude to make emigration possible, in order to protect their religious lives. Attempting to create and control vast networks of settlement and trade enhanced the rise of nation-states in Europe and contributed to the growth of national identities. The wars of independence in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries changed the nature of relationships, but did not end them. Abolitionism serves as a vivid example of the collision of religious, philosophical, and economic realities and the ways in which the Atlantic context posed new possibilities and new answers.
Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is against these dominant 'archives' that this book launches the partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture. It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book covers rich (counter-)archival material - from partisan poems, graphic works and photography, to monuments and films - and ends by describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical "history of the oppressed" as an alternative journey to the partisan past that retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.
The Company-State rethinks the nature of the early English East India Company as a form of polity and corporate sovereign well before its supposed transformation into a state and empire in the mid-eighteenth century. Taking seriously the politics and political thought of the early Company on their own terms, it explores the Company's political and legal constitution as an overseas corporation and the political institutions and behaviors that followed from it, from tax collection and public health to warmaking and colonial plantation. Tracing the ideological foundations of those institutions and behaviors, this book reveals how Company leadership wrestled not simply with the bottom line but with typically early modern problems of governance, such as: the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the relationship between law, economy, and sound civil and colonial society; and the nature of jurisdiction and sovereignty over people, commerce, religion, territory, and the sea. The Company-State thus reframes some of the most fundamental narratives in the history of the British Empire, questioning traditional distinctions between public and private bodies, "commercial" and "imperial" eras in British India, a colonial Atlantic and a "trading world" of Asia, European and Asian political cultures, and the English and their European rivals in the East Indies. At its core, The Company-State offers a view of early modern Europe and Asia, and especially the colonial world that connected them, as resting in composite, diffuse, hybrid, and overlapping notions of sovereignty that only later gave way to more modern singular, centralized, and territorially- and nationally-bounded definitions of political community. Given growing questions about the fate of the nation-state and of national borders in an age of "globalization," this study offers a perspective on the vitality of non-state and corporate political power perhaps as relevant today as it was in the seventeenth century.
India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world. For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it. |
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