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Books > History
Among the most memorable innovations of music and poetry in
thirteenth-century France was a genre that seemed to privilege
sound over sense. The polytextual motet is especially well-known to
scholars of the Middle Ages for its tendency to conceal complex
allegorical meaning in a texture that, in performance, made words
less, rather than more, audible. It is with such musical sound that
this book is concerned. What did it mean to create a musical effect
so potentially independent from the meaning of words? Is it
possible such supermusical effects themselves had significance? The
Sense of Sound offers a radical recontextualization of French song
in the heyday of the motet c.1260-1330, and makes the case for
listening to musical sound against a range of other potently
meaningful sonorities, often premised on non-verbal meaning. In
identifying new audible interlocutors to music, it opens our ears
to a broad spectrum of sounds often left out of historical inquiry,
from the hubbub of the medieval city; to the eloquent babble of
madmen; to the violent clamor of charivari; to the charismatic
chatter of prayer. Drawing on a rich array of artistic evidence
(music, manuscripts, poetry, and images) and contemporary cultural
theory, it locates musical production in this period within a
larger cultural environment concerned with representing sound and
its emotional, ethical, and social effects. In so doing, The Sense
of Sound offers an experiment in how we might place central the
most elusive aspect of music's history: sound's vibrating, living
effect.
This is a history not of an Enlightenment but rather the
Enlightenment-the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing,
freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern
Western law. Its principal protagonists, rather than members of a
cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, are non-literate, poor, and
enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of
Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic
world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of
history, and statecraft, it is conventionally believed to have
taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the
contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish
Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law.
The book is intensely empirical even as it is sly situated within
current theoretical debates about imperial geographies of history.
The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how
legal documents were made, fresh interpretations of the
intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the
period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from
six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the
colonies-far more often than peninsular Spaniards-sued superiors at
an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general
rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native
peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and
husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new
law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented
legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at
precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined
them in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the
Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of
the modern West.
"It is safer to be feared than loved." These words embody the
spirit of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli's classic work of
political philosophy. Machiavelli's advice for how a ruler should
acquire and ruthlessly exercise power over others continues to be
relevant to contemporary readers more than five centuries after it
was first published. This is one of Barnes & Noble's
'Collectible Editions' classics. Each volume features authoritative
texts by the world's greatest authors in an elegantly designed
bonded-leather binding, with distinctive gilt edging. Durable and
collectible, these volumes are an indispensable cornerstone of
every home library.
Tales of ghostly spirits envelop the northeast Tennessee landscape
like a familiar mountain fog. Join Pete Dykes, editor of
Kingsport's "Daily News," as he offers up a collection of spooky
local stories and legends from centuries past, including such
spine-chilling accounts as the foreboding ghost of Netherland Inn
Road, spectral disturbances at the Rotherwood Mansion, devilish
felines, ruthless poltergeists in Caney Creek Falls, the tortured
cries from fallen Rebel soldiers still heard today- and could
bigfoot really be buried in the woods of Big Stone Gap?
Visitors gazing out over the Highlands of coastal New Jersey might
never guess that these rolling hills have been a stage for mankind
s darkest deeds. In his thrilling new book, "Murder & Mayhem in
the Highlands," John King shines a spotlight on the region s
violent history of kidnapping, murder, smuggling and extortion.
From axe-wielding lunatics to killers who leave calling cards, King
presents each case with the care of a criminal investigator,
including details from coroners reports and witness testimonies.
In this sensational and gripping read, uncover the gritty
history of the Highlands, where a suspicious death usually meant
foul play and staying in a hotel might cost you your life.
The study of Roman sculpture has been an essential part of the
disciplines of Art History and Classics since the eighteenth
century. From formal concerns such as Kopienkritic (copy criticism)
to social readings of plebeian and patrician art and beyond,
scholars have returned to Roman sculpture to answer a variety of
questions about Roman art, society, and history. Indeed, the field
of Roman sculptural studies encompasses not only the full
chronological range of the Roman world but also its expansive
geography, and a variety of artistic media, formats, sizes, and
functions. Exciting new theories, methods, and approaches have
transformed the specialized literature on the subject in recent
decades. Rather than creating another chronological ARCH15OXH of
representative examples of various periods, genres, and settings,
The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture synthesizes current best
practices for studying this central medium of Roman art, situating
it within the larger fields of art history, classical archaeology,
and Roman studies. This volume fills the gap between introductory
textbooks-which hide the critical apparatus from the reader-and the
highly focused professional literature. The handbook conveniently
presents new technical, scientific, literary, and theoretical
approaches to the study of Roman sculpture in one reference volume
and complements textbooks and other publications that present
well-known works in the corpus. Chronologically, the volume
addresses material from the Early Republican period through Late
Antiquity. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture not only
contributes to the field of classical art and archaeology but also
provides a useful reference for classicists and historians of the
ancient world.
Examining the diverse religious texts and practices of the late
Hellenistic and Roman periods, this collection of essays
investigates the many meanings and functions of ritual sacrifice in
the ancient world. The essays survey sacrificial acts, ancient
theories, and literary as well as artistic depictions of sacrifice,
showing that any attempt to identify a single underlying
significance of sacrifice is futile. Sacrifice cannot be defined
merely as a primal expression of violence, despite the frequent
equation of sacrifice to religion and sacrifice to violence in many
modern scholarly works; nor is it sufficient to argue that all
sacrifice can be explained by guilt, by the need to prepare and
distribute animal flesh, or by the communal function of both the
sacrificial ritual and the meal.
As the authors of these essays demonstrate, sacrifice may be
invested with all of these meanings, or none of them. The killing
of the animal, for example, may take place offstage rather than in
sight, and the practical, day-to-day routine of plant and animal
offerings may have been invested with meaning, too. Yet sacrificial
acts, or discourses about these acts, did offer an important site
of contestation for many ancient writers, even when the religions
they were defending no longer participated in sacrifice.
Negotiations over the meaning of sacrifice remained central to the
competitive machinations of the literate elite, and their
sophisticated theological arguments did not so much undermine
sacrificial practice as continue to assume its essential
validity.
Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice offers new insight into the
connections and differences among the Greek and Roman, Jewish and
Christian religions.
Drawing on her work with the Cold Case Investigative Research
Institute at Bauder College and Ghost Hounds Paranormal Research
Society, elite psychic medium and cold case researcher Reese
Christian writes of the tragic past and the haunted present of
Greater Atlanta. From Peachtree Street in the heart of downtown to
the plantations and battlefields surrounding the city, join her in
discovering the twisted histories of some of Atlanta's most
infamous landmarks and forgotten moments.
Boudicca. Infamous warrior, queen of the British Iceni tribe and
mastermind of one of history's greatest revolts. Her defeat spelled
ruin for her people, yet still her name is enough to strike fear into
Roman hearts.
But what of the woman who grew up in her shadow?
The woman who has her mother's looks and cunning but a spirit all of
her own?
The woman whose desperate bid for survival will take her from Britain's
sacred marshlands to the glittering façades of Nero's Roman Empire…
Born to a legend. Forced to fight. Determined to succeed.
Meet Solina.
Boudicca's Daughter.
Writing the Rebellion presents a cultural history of loyalist
writing in early America. There has been a spate of related works
recently, but Philip Gould's narrative offers a completely
different view of the loyalist/patriot contentions than appears in
any of these accounts. By focusing on the literary projections of
the loyalist cause, Gould dissolves the old legend that loyalists
were more British than American, and patriots the embodiment of a
new sensibility drawn from their American situation and upbringing.
He shows that both sides claimed to be heritors of British civil
discourse, Old World learning, and the genius of English culture.
The first half of Writing Rebellion deals with the ways "political
disputation spilled into arguments about style, form, and
aesthetics, as though these subjects could secure (or ruin) the
very status of political authorship." Chapters in this section
illustrate how loyalists attack patriot rhetoric by invoking
British satires of an inflated Whig style by Alexander Pope and
Jonathan Swift. Another chapter turns to Loyalist critiques of
Congressional language and especially the Continental Association,
which was responsible for radical and increasingly violent measures
against the Loyalists. The second half of Gould's book looks at
satiric adaptations of the ancient ballad tradition to see what
happens when patriots and loyalists interpret and adapt the same
text (or texts) for distinctive yet related purposes. The last two
chapters look at the Loyalist response to Thomas Paine's Common
Sense and the ways the concept of the author became defined in
early America. Throughout the manuscript, Gould acknowledges the
purchase English literary culture continued to have in
revolutionary America, even among revolutionaries.
Why put Abraham Lincoln, the sometime corporate lawyer and American
President, in dialogue with Karl Marx, the intellectual
revolutionary? On the surface, they would appear to share few
interests. Yet, though Lincoln and Marx never met one another, both
had an abiding interest in the most important issue of the
nineteenth-century Atlantic world-the condition of labor in a
capitalist world, one that linked slave labor in the American south
to England's (and continental Europe's) dark satanic mills. Each
sought solutions-Lincoln through a polity that supported free men,
free soil, and free labor; Marx by organizing the working class to
resist capitalist exploitation. While both men espoused
emancipation for American slaves, here their agreements ended.
Lincoln thought that the free labor society of the American North
provided great opportunities for free men missing from the American
South, a kind of "farm ladder" that gave every man the ability to
become a landowner. Marx thought such "free land" a chimera and
(with information from German-American correspondents), was certain
that the American future lay in the proletarianized cities. Abraham
Lincoln and Karl Marx in Dialogue intersperses short selections
from the two writers from their voluminous works, opening with an
introduction that puts the ideas of the two men in the broad
context of nineteenth-century thought and politics. The volume
excerpts Lincoln's and Marx's views on slavery (they both opposed
it for different reasons), the Civil War (Marx claimed the war
concerned slavery and should have as its goal abolition; Lincoln
insisted that his goal was just the defeat of the Confederacy), and
the opportunities American free men had to gain land and economic
independence. Through this volume, readers will gain a firmer
understanding of nineteenth-century labor relations throughout the
Atlantic world: slavery and free labor; the interconnections
between slave-made cotton and the exploitation of English
proletarians; and the global impact of the American Civil War.
The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical offers new and
cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling issues and
topics in the growing, interdisciplinary field of musical-theater
and film-musical studies. Taking the form of a "keywords" book, it
introduces readers to the concepts and terms that define the
history of the musical as a genre and that offer ways to reflect on
the specific creative choices that shape musicals and their
performance on stage and screen. The handbook offers a
cross-section of essays written by leading experts in the field,
organized within broad conceptual groups, which together capture
the breadth, direction, and tone of musicals studies today.
Each essay traces the genealogy of the term or issue it addresses,
including related issues and controversies, positions and
problematizes those issues within larger bodies of scholarship, and
provides specific examples drawn from shows and films. Essays both
re-examine traditional topics and introduce underexplored areas.
Reflecting the concerns of scholars and students alike, the authors
emphasize critical and accessible perspectives, and supplement
theory with concrete examples that may be accessed through links to
the handbook's website.
Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and
reception, the book's contributors bring a wide range of practical
and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of one
of America's most lively, enduring artistic traditions. The Oxford
Handbook of The AmericanMusical will engage all readers interested
in the form, from students to scholars to fans and aficionados, as
it analyses the complex relationships among the creators,
performers, and audiences who sustain the genre.
The Western Slope towns of Gunnison and Crested Butte are defined
by their placement in the Colorado Rockies. Both are located in
alpine valleys surrounded by 14,000-foot-high peaks with sparkling
mountain-fed streams, and both dominate the Gunnison country, a
unique wilderness covering over 4,000 square miles. Beginning over
400 years ago, Native Americans, fur traders, explorers, miners,
railroaders, and cattlemen all made a place for themselves in the
area. Today Gunnison, Crested Butte, and the Gunnison country
remain isolated and tranquil. Recreation, tourism, and cattle
ranching now reign supreme as Gunnison and Crested Butte attempt to
preserve their distinctly Western heritage.
Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in
the Spanish Civil War.
In 1794, two years before Tennessee became a state, the legislature
of the Southwest Territory chartered Blount College in Knoxville as
one of the first three colleges established west of the Appalachian
Mountains. In 1807, the school changed its name to East Tennessee
College. The school relocated to a 40-acre tract, known today as
the Hill, in 1828 and was renamed East Tennessee University in
1840. The Civil War literally shut down the university. Students
and faculty were recruited to serve on battlefields, and troops
used campus facilities as hospitals and barracks. In 1869, East
Tennessee University became the states land-grant institution under
the auspices of the 1862 Morrill Act. In 1879, the state
legislature changed the name of the institution to the University
of Tennessee. By the early 20th century, the university admitted
women, hosted teacher institutes, and constructed new buildings.
Since that time, the University of Tennessee has established
campuses and programs across the state. Today, in addition to a
rich sports tradition, the University of Tennessee provides
Tennesseans with unparalleled opportunities.
This book offers a unique perspective for understanding how and why
the Second World War in Europe ended as it did-and why Germany, in
attacking the Soviet Union, came far closer to winning the war than
is often perceived. Why Germany Nearly Won: A New History of the
Second World War in Europe challenges this conventional wisdom in
highlighting how the re-establishment of the traditional German art
of war-updated to accommodate new weapons systems-paved the way for
Germany to forge a considerable military edge over its much larger
potential rivals by playing to its qualitative strengths as a
continental power. Ironically, these methodologies also created and
exacerbated internal contradictions that undermined the same war
machine and left it vulnerable to enemies with the capacity to
adapt and build on potent military traditions of their own. The
book begins by examining topics such as the methods by which the
German economy and military prepared for war, the German military
establishment's formidable strengths, and its weaknesses. The book
then takes an entirely new perspective on explaining the Second
World War in Europe. It demonstrates how Germany, through its
invasion of the Soviet Union, came within a whisker of cementing a
European-based empire that would have allowed the Third Reich to
challenge the Anglo-American alliance for global hegemony-an
outcome that by commonly cited measures of military potential
Germany never should have had even a remote chance of
accomplishing. The book's last section explores the final year of
the war and addresses how Germany was able to hang on against the
world's most powerful nations working in concert to engineer its
defeat. Detailed maps show the position and movement of opposing
forces during the key battles discussed in the book More than 30
charts, figures, and appendices, including detailed orders of
battle, economic figures, and equipment comparisons
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