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Puritans in Babylon - The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880-1930 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,350
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Puritans in Babylon - The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880-1930 (Hardcover)
Series: Princeton Legacy Library
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R3,370
Discovery Miles: 33 700
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From the 1880s through the 1920s a motley collection of American
scholars, soldiers of fortune, institutional bureaucrats, and
financiers created the academic fields that give us our knowledge
of the ancient Near East. Bruce Kuklick's new book begins with the
story of the initial adventure of these determined investigators--a
twelve-year dig near the Biblical Babylon, at Nippur, conducted at
intervals from 1888 through 1900 and bankrolled by the Babylonian
Exploration Fund. To unearth tens of thousands of cunneiform
tablets, the leaders of this venture faced harsh living conditions
in the desert and an academic war of each against all that was
quickly begun at the site itself. As their knowledge increased,
they risked their personal religious beliefs in the search for
historical truth. Kuklick discusses their tribulations to
illuminate two other contemporary developments: first, the
maturation of the American university, particularly in contrast to
its German counterpart; and second, the influence of
religious-secular conflict on the ways in which Western scholarship
appropriated or appreciated other cultures. The Nippur expedition
spawned unseemly (and entertaining) fights among the University of
Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, and Chicago for
leadership in the study of ancient Near East--not to mention
disagreements with their own developing museums and an
international scandal called the Hilprecht controversy. More
significant than these quarrels was the concern for the meaning of
history displayed in this period of Near Eastern scholarship. The
field was linked to Biblical criticism and Judeo-Christian
interests, and many of the orientalists originally possessed strong
religious commitments--which some put aside as they struggled for
objectivity. As recent critics have shown, "orientalism" was an
example of the West's ability to appropriate the "other" for its
own purposes. However, Kuklick's study demonstrates that the
censure of orientalism hinges on modes of argumentation that
scholars of the ancienet Near East helped to legitimate, and at no
small cost to themselves. Bruce Kuklick is Killbrew Professor of
History at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are To
Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976
(Princeton), Churchmen and Philosophers: Jonathan Edwards to John
Dewey, and The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge
Massachusetts, 1860-1930. Originally published in 1996. The
Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology
to again make available previously out-of-print books from the
distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These
editions preserve the original texts of these important books while
presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The
goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access
to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books
published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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