|
Showing 1 - 17 of
17 matches in All Departments
The summer of 1830 stirred revolutionary desires in young hearts
across Europe. More than a generation of war and political
instability had failed to dampen the fervor still felt from the
French Revolution. In England the Cambridge Apostles took up the
cause of the Spanish emigres so movingly visible in London where
they had sought refuge from the tyranny of Ferdinand VII and his
suppression of constitutional rights. The Spanish Expedition of the
Cambridge Apostles has always captured our imaginations. Its blend
of idealism and daring, of theory and practice, of thought and
energy, seems perfectly to fulfill the principles the Apostles
steadfastly espoused, a combination of faith and works. The
episodes comprised in most accounts of the expedition are symbolic
and filled with intrigue: secret meetings, assumed names, hidden
messages, contraband, narrow escapes from the authorities,
treachery, and finally a bloody execution on the beach at Malaga. A
host of newly-discovered documents now enable us to re-examine one
of the most intriguing events in British intellectual history.
David Nye's Narratives and Spaces examines how photography, the
railroad, electricity, space flight and the computer became
central, yet often contradictory, parts of the way Americans
construct and narrate their culture, whether as western settlers,
consumers or tourists. The book provides an interdisciplinary
perspective on topics at the centre of contemporary debate and
draws on a wide range of cultural media. This is a significant
contribution to American cultural history, and like David Nye's
previous award-winning books, is written to be accessible to a wide
audience. It is the first volume in a new UEP series, Representing
American Culture. This series exists to publish lively, accessible
and up-to-date studies of the culture of the United States. Whether
devoted to topics in popular, middlebrow or high culture, books in
the series explore the ways in which ideological assumptions may be
seen to be represented. The series is edited by Mick Gidley,
Professor of American Literature at the University of Leeds.
David Nye's Narratives and Spaces examines how photography, the
railroad, electricity, space flight and the computer became
central, yet often contradictory, parts of the way Americans
construct and narrate their culture, whether as western settlers,
consumers or tourists. The book provides an interdisciplinary
perspective on topics at the centre of contemporary debate and
draws on a wide range of cultural media. This is a significant
contribution to American cultural history, and like David Nye's
previous award-winning books, is written to be accessible to a wide
audience. It is the first volume in a new UEP series, Representing
American Culture. This series exists to publish lively, accessible
and up-to-date studies of the culture of the United States. Whether
devoted to topics in popular, middlebrow or high culture, books in
the series explore the ways in which ideological assumptions may be
seen to be represented. The series is edited by Mick Gidley,
Professor of American Literature at the University of Leeds.
For too long, European scholars have observed Americans in the
United States as though looking through a one-way window, where the
Europeans are seemingly invisible to those in discussion on the
other side of the glass. As well, for too long, it would appear
that Americans have scarcely realized that what was thought to be a
mirror could actually be a window. Beyond the Crisis in U.S.
American Studies is an invitation for developing dialogue across
the Atlantic. This volume celebrates the 40th anniversary of the
journal American Studies in Scandinavia, which began publication in
1967.
Visiting or moving to Denmark? Do you want a concise overview of
the country? Then this book is definitely for you! This completely
updated and considerably expanded edition of Introducing Denmark
and the Danes offers an excellent general introduction to Danish
culture, politics, and economics, as well as general and practical
advice for visitors. Introducing Denmark and the Danes has been
constantly in print for almost a generation, attesting to its
usefulness in helping outsiders to know a remarkable country and
find their way into its everyday life. Not a conventional guidebook
but an orientation to the culture, this little book can be read in
a short time, opening the door to one of Europe's most fascinating
nations.
Discusses in nontechnical language ten central questions about
technology that illuminate what technology is and why it matters.
Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable
from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years,
and their central purpose has not always been to provide
necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems
and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks.
Perhaps this is because we are intimate with devices and machines
from an early age-as children, we play with technological toys:
trucks, cars, stoves, telephones, model railroads, Playstations.
Through these machines we imagine ourselves into a creative
relationship with the world. As adults, we retain this
technological playfulness with gadgets and appliances-Blackberries,
cell phones, GPS navigation systems in our cars. We use technology
to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are
making. In Technology Matters, Nye tackles ten central questions
about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of
ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with
wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. He asks: Can
we define technology? Does technology shape us, or do we shape it?
Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often
fail to get it right?)? How do historians understand it? Are we
using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or
diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy
jobs or create new opportunities? Should "the market" choose our
technologies? Do advanced technologies make us more secure, or
escalate dangers? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental
horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice? These large questions may
have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them-to live
them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, "live along some distant
day into the answers."
How conflicting ideas of nature threaten to fracture America's
identity. Amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties: American
invest much of their national identity in sites of natural beauty.
And yet American lands today are torn by conflicts over science,
religion, identity, and politics. Creationists believe that the
Biblical flood carved American landscapes less than 10,000 years
ago; environmentalists protest pipelines; Western states argue that
the federal government's land policies throttle free enterprise;
Native Americans demand protection for sacred sites. In this book,
David Nye looks at Americans' irreconcilably conflicting ideas
about nature.
By viewing the corporation as a communicator, Image Worlds links
the histories of labor, business, consumption, engineering, and
photography, providing a new perspective on one of the largest and
most representative corporations. General Electric was one of the
first modern industrial corporations to use photographs and other
media resources to create images of itself; and the GE archives,
comprising well over a million images, form one of the largest
privately held collections in the world. To produce this
venturesome book, David Nye has used these vast archives to develop
a new approach to corporate ideology through corporate
iconography.Image Worlds embraces symbols, intentional signs, and
photographs on the one hand and the history of institutional and
technological development on the other. It views photography as a
developing technology with a history of its own, and presents the
corporation as a communicator as well as a producer and
employer.Illustrated with nearly 60 photographs from the archives,
the book identifies five "image markets" that GE sought to organize
and address. Company engineers, workers, and managers received
publications designed to appeal to their presumed interests. Some
of these grew into public journals with a scientific-educational
mission; others were restricted in circulation even within the
company. At the same time, illustrated mass-media advertising was
created to reach potential consumers of GE products. Advertising
that presented an image of GE as a place where "progress was the
most important product." While GE was promoting this enlightened
image, the company was also using its resources to reach the voting
public, hoping to gain their support for private electrification in
the national debate over municipal power.David E. Nye is Associate
Professor of American History at Odense University in Denmark.
How Americans adapted European royal illuminations for patriotic
celebrations, spectacular expositions, and intensely bright
commercial lighting to create the world's most dazzling and
glamorous cities. Illuminated fetes and civic celebrations began in
Renaissance Italy and spread through the courts of Europe. Their
fireworks, torches, lamps, and special effects glorified the
monarch, marked the birth of a prince, or celebrated military
victory. Nineteenth-century Americans rejected such monarchial pomp
and adapted spectacular lighting to their democratic, commercial
culture. In American Illuminations, David Nye explains how they
experimented with gas and electric light to create illuminated
cityscapes far brighter and more dynamic than those of Europe, and
how these illuminations became symbols of modernity and the
conquest of nature. Americans used gaslight and electricity in
parades, expositions, advertising, elections, and political
spectacles. In the 1880s, cities erected powerful arc lights on
towers to create artificial moonlight. By the 1890s they adopted
more intensive, commercial lighting that defined distinct zones of
light and glamorized the city's White Ways, skyscrapers, bridges,
department stores, theaters, and dance halls. Poor and blighted
areas disappeared into the shadows. American illuminations also
became integral parts of national political campaigns, presidential
inaugurations, and victory celebrations after the Spanish-American
War and World War I.
Because of its rapid growth, ubiquitous popular culture, and global
power, almost everyone knows something about the United States. But
oftentimes these many facts float about rather freely. For those
who need a chronology and orientation mixed with scholarly insight,
this is the book. The American Century is for research, for trivia,
and for setting events in the right order. This book is a timeline
that organizes the U.S. political, social, literary, and cultural
events of each year in the 20th century - plus the beginning of the
21st century. The book also includes short essays suggesting how
these many events fit into larger patterns.
An exploration of the dialogue that emerged after 1776 between
different visions of what it meant to use new technologies to
transform the land. After 1776, the former American colonies began
to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community.
Technologies had an important role in the resulting national
narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence.
Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and
the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories
that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he
rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as
a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation. While
mainstream Americans constructed technological foundation stories
to explain their place in the New World, however, marginalized
groups told other stories of destruction and loss. Native Americans
protested the loss of their forests, fishermen resisted the
construction of dams, and early environmentalists feared the
exhaustionof resources. A water mill could be viewed as the kernel
of a new community or as a new way to exploit labor. If passengers
comprehended railways as part of a larger narrative about American
expansion and progress, many farmers attacked railroad land grants.
To explore these contradictions, Nye devotes alternating chapters
to narratives of second creation and to narratives of those who
rejected it.Nye draws on popular literature, speeches,
advertisements, paintings, and many other media to create a history
of American foundation stories. He shows how these stories were
revised periodically, as social and economic conditions changed,
without ever erasing the earlier stories entirely. The image of the
isolated frontier family carving a homestead out of the wilderness
with an axe persists to this day, alongside later images and
narratives. In the book's conclusion, Nye considers the relation
between these earlier stories and such later American developments
as the conservation movement, narratives of environmental recovery,
and the idealization of wilderness.
Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary
people engaged in normal activities. How did the United States
become the world's largest consumer of energy? David Nye shows that
this is less a question about the development of technology than it
is a question about the development of culture. In Consuming Power,
Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary
people engaged in normal activities. He looks at how these
activities changed as new energy systems were constructed, from
colonial times to recent years. He also shows how, as Americans
incorporated new machines and processes into their lives, they
became ensnared in power systems that were not easily changed: they
made choices about the conduct of their lives, and those choices
accumulated to produce a consuming culture. Nye examines a sequence
of large systems that acquired and then lost technological momentum
over the course of American history, including water power, steam
power, electricity, the internal-combustion engine, atomic power,
and computerization. He shows how each system became part of a
larger set of social constructions through its links to the home,
the factory, and the city. The result is a social history of
America as seen through the lens of energy consumption.
American Technological Sublime continues the exploration of the
social construction of technology that David Nye began in his
award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye examines the
continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a term coined by
Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history, using as examples
the natural sites, architectural forms, and technological
achievements that ordinary people have valued intensely. Technology
has long played a central role in the formation of Americans' sense
of selfhood. From the first canal systems through the moon landing,
Americans have, for better or worse, derived unity from the common
feeling of awe inspired by large-scale applications of
technological prowess. American Technological Sublime continues the
exploration of the social construction of technology that David Nye
began in his award-winning book Electrifying America. Here Nye
examines the continuing appeal of the "technological sublime" (a
term coined by Perry Miller) as a key to the nation's history,
using as examples the natural sites, architectural forms, and
technological achievements that ordinary people have valued
intensely. American Technological Sublime is a study of the
politics of perception in industrial society. Arranged
chronologically, it suggests that the sublime itself has a history
- that sublime experiences are emotional configurations that emerge
from new social and technological conditions, and that each new
configuration to some extent undermines and displaces the older
versions. After giving a short history of the sublime as an
aesthetic category, Nye describes the reemergence and
democratization of the concept in the early nineteenth century as
an expression of the American sense of specialness. What has filled
the American public with wonder, awe, even terror? David Nye
selects the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the eruption of Mt. St.
Helens, the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, Eads
Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, the major international expositions, the
Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909, the Empire State Building, and
Boulder Dam. He then looks at the atom bomb tests and the Apollo
mission as examples of the increasing ambivalence of the
technological sublime in the postwar world. The festivities
surrounding the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986
become a touchstone reflecting the transformation of the American
experience of the sublime over two centuries. Nye concludes with a
vision of the modern-day "consumer sublime" as manifested in the
fantasy world of Las Vegas.
From the Model T to today's "lean manufacturing": the assembly line
as crucial, yet controversial, agent of social and economic
transformation. The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913
and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most
familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers
and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and
satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to
keep up with a factory conveyor belt.) In America's Assembly Line,
David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made the United
States productive and wealthy in the twentieth century. The
assembly line-developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the
mass production of Model Ts-first created and then served an
expanding mass market. It also transformed industrial labor. By
1980, Japan had reinvented the assembly line as a system of "lean
manufacturing"; American industry reluctantly adopted the new
approach. Nye describes this evolution and the new global landscape
of increasingly automated factories, with fewer industrial jobs in
America and questionable working conditions in developing
countries. A century after Ford's pioneering innovation, the
assembly line continues to evolve toward more sustainable
manufacturing.
How did electricity enter everyday life in America? Using
Muncie, Indiana - the Lynds' now iconic Middletown - as a
touchstone, David Nye explores how electricity seeped into and
redefined American culture. With an eye for telling details from
archival sources and a broad understanding of cultural and social
history, he creates a thought-provoking panorama of a technology
fundamental to modern life.Emphasizing the experiences of ordinary
men and women rather than the lives of inventors and entrepreneurs,
Nye treats electrification as a set of technical possibilities that
were selectively adopted to create the streetcar suburb, the
amusement park, the "Great White Way," the assembly line, the
electrified home, and the industrialized farm. He shows how
electricity touched every part of American life, how it became an
extension of political ideologies, how it virtually created the
image of the modern city, and how it even pervaded colloquial
speech, confirming the values of high energy and speed that have
become hallmarks of the twentieth century. He also pursues the
social meaning of electrification as expressed in utopian ideas and
exhibits at world's fairs, and explores the evocation of electrical
landscapes in painting, literature, and photography.Electrifying
America combines chronology and topicality to examine the major
forms of light and power as they came into general use. It shows
that in the city electrification promoted a more varied landscape
and made possible new art forms and new consumption environments.
In the factory, electricity permitted a complete redesign of the
size and scale of operations, shifting power away from the shop
floor to managers. Electrical appliances redefined domestic work
and transformed the landscape of the home, while on the farm
electricity laid the foundation for today's agribusiness.David E.
Nye teaches American history at the University of Copenhagen. He
has published books on Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, as well as
Image Worlds, a study of photography and corporate identities at
General Electric.
|
|