Thunder and lightning have been seen from time immemorial as God’s instruments of punishment. Until the invention of the lightning rod by Benjamin Franklin in 1752. In Lightning in the Age of ...Benjamin Franklin. Facts and Fictions in Science, Religion, and Art Jan Wim Buisman shows how the Enlightenment and Romanticism have changed our scientific, religious and artistic image of natural violence forever. In the eighteenth century, thunderstorms are experienced less and less as a threat and more and more as something extraordinary. The image of God and the image of nature changed radically. The religion of enlightened people, for example, was more determined by joy than by fear. And nature was almost experienced as a girlfriend. That had significant consequences because those who no longer had to be afraid of the thunderstorm could play with it without hesitation. That’s what poets, painters and musicians did to their heart’s content. Never before the beauty of the storm was depicted as much in the western culture as during the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism.
Stalin's Quest for Gold tells the story of Torgsin, a chain of retail shops established in 1930 with the aim of raising the hard currency needed to finance the USSR's ambitious industrialization ...program. At a time of desperate scarcity, Torgsin had access to the country's best foodstuffs and goods. Initially, only foreigners were allowed to shop in Torgsin, but the acute demand for hard-currency revenues forced Stalin to open Torgsin to Soviet citizens who could exchange tsarist gold coins and objects made of precious metals and gemstones, as well as foreign monies, for foods and goods in its shops. Through her analysis of the large-scale, state-run entrepreneurship represented by Torgsin, Elena Osokina highlights the complexity and contradictions of Stalinism. Driven by the state's hunger for gold and the people's starvation, Torgsin rejected Marxist postulates of the socialist political economy: the notorious class approach and the state hard-currency monopoly. In its pursuit for gold, Torgsin advertised in the capitalist West, encouraging foreigners to purchase goods for their relatives in the USSR; and its seaport shops and restaurants operated semilegally as brothels, inducing foreign sailors to spend hard currency for Soviet industrialization. Examining Torgsin from multiple perspectives—economic expediency, state and police surveillance, consumerism, even interior design and personnel— Stalin's Quest for Gold radically transforms the stereotypical view of the Soviet economy and enriches our understanding of everyday life in Stalin's Russia.
Charles Macklin (1699?-1797) was one of the most important figures
in the eighteenth-century theatre. Born in Ireland, he began acting
in London in around 1725 and gave his final performance in 1789 ...-
no other actor can claim to have acted across seven decades of the
century, from the reign of George I to the Regency Crisis of 1788.
He is credited alongside Garrick with the development of the
natural school of acting and gave a famous performance of Shylock
that gave George II nightmares. As a dramatist, he wrote one of the
great comic pieces of the mid-century ( Love à la Mode ,
1759), as well as the only play of the century to be twice refused
a performance licence ( The Man of the World , 1781). He
opened an experimental coffeehouse in Covent Garden, he advocated
energetically for actors' rights and copyright reform for
dramatists, and he successfully sued theatre rioters. In short, he
had an astonishingly varied career. With essays by leading experts
on eighteenth-century culture, this volume provides a sustained
critical examination of his career, illuminating many aspects of
eighteenth-century theatrical culture and of the European
Enlightenment, and explores the scholarly benefit - and thrill - of
restaging Macklin's work in the twenty-first century.
This volume includes an unpublished manuscript and selected portions of five seminars by Harold Garfinkel – the founder of ethnomethodology – on the topic of practices in the natural sciences and ...mathematics. The volume provides a coherent and sustained account of his program for the study of ordinary and specialized social actions. Presenting broader theoretical and methodological initiatives, as well as discussions and summaries of exemplary studies of social phenomena within and beyond the sciences, this work dates to the period in the 1980s during which the field of Science and Technology Studies was taking shape, with ethnomethodological studies of scientific practice forming a major part of its development at the time. Aside from their historical importance, the manuscript and seminars present a distinctive perspective on the natural and social sciences that remains highly original and pertinent to research on science, social science, and everyday life today. Offering critical insights and proposals relating to developments in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this volume will appeal to scholars of Sociology and Science and Technology Studies with interests in the work of Garfinkel.
New details about the founding of China's Navy reveals critical historical context and insight into future strategy From 1949 to 1950, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) made crucial decisions to ...establish a navy and secure China's periphery. The civil war had been fought with a peasant army, yet in order to capture key offshore islands from the Nationalist rival, Mao Zedong needed to develop maritime capabilities. Mao's Army Goes to Sea is a ground-breaking history of the founding of the Chinese navy and Communist China's earliest island-seizing campaigns. In this definitive account of a little-known yet critical moment in China's naval history, Toshi Yoshihara shows that Chinese leaders refashioned the stratagems and tactics honed over decades of revolutionary struggle on land for nautical purposes. Despite significant challenges, the PLA ultimately scored important victories over its Nationalist foes as it captured offshore islands to secure its position. Drawing extensively from newly available Chinese-language sources, this book reveals how the navy-building process, sea battles, and contested offshore landings had a lasting influence on the PLA. Even today, the institution's identity, strategy, doctrine, and structure are conditioned by these early experiences and myths. Mao's Army Goes to Sea will help US policymakers and scholars place China's recent maritime achievements in proper historical context—and provide insight into how its navy may act in the future.
This is the first biography written from a legal perspective on the public life of Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884); a prominent figure in the common law world in the second half of the 19th century. ...Drawing on a range of primary source materials including newspaper articles, case law and extensive archival research in the UK and USA, it charts his rise as a lawyer first in the mixed legal system of Louisiana and then nationally. In 1853 he was the first person of Jewish heritage to be offered nomination to the US Supreme Court – an honour he declined. Benjamin was also a member of the US Senate, a slave owner and a supporter of Southern secession. In the Civil War he served continuously in the Confederate Cabinet initially as Attorney General, then as Secretary of War and finally as Secretary of State. Following the victory of the Union he fled America, a fugitive. In political exile in England he requalified as a Barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. Within a decade he had written a scholarly and long-enduring treatise on commercial law and become the undisputed advocate of choice in appeals before the House of Lords and the Privy Council. This book considers the extraordinary career of this distinguished jurist and reflects upon his legal legacy.
Anthropological Witness tells the story of Alexander Laban Hinton's encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, Hinton's attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert ...testimony. In March 2016, Hinton served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes committed during the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide. His testimony culminated in a direct exchange with Pol Pot's notorious right-hand man, Nuon Chea, who was engaged in genocide denial. Anthropological Witness looks at big questions about the ethical imperatives and epistemological assumptions involved in explanation and the role of the public scholar in addressing issues relating to truth, justice, social repair, and genocide. Hinton asks: Can scholars who serve as expert witnesses effectively contribute to international atrocity crimes tribunals where the focus is on legal guilt as opposed to academic explanation? What does the answer to this question say more generally about academia and the public sphere? At a time when the world faces a multitude of challenges, the answers Hinton provides to such questions about public scholarship are urgent.
A groundbreaking theoretical physicist traces his career, reflecting on the successes and failures, triumphs and insecurities of a life cut short by cancer. The groundbreaking theoretical physicist ...Joseph Polchinski explained the genesis of his memoir this way: “Having only two bodies of knowledge, myself and physics, I decided to write an autobiography about my development as a theoretical physicist.” In this posthumously published account of his life and work, Polchinski (1954–2018) describes successes and failures, triumphs and insecurities, and the sheer persistence that led to his greatest discoveries. Writing engagingly and accessibly, with the wry humor for which he was known, Polchinski gives theoretical physics a very human face. Polchinski, famous for his contributions to string theory, may have changed the course of modern theoretical physics, but he was a late bloomer—doing most of his important work after the age of forty. His death from brain cancer at sixty-three cut short a career at its peak. Working on the memoir after his diagnosis, using a text-to-speech algorithm because he could no longer read words on a page, he was able to recapitulate his entire career, down to the details of problems he had worked on. For Polchinski, physics went deeper than words. This edition includes photographs from Polchinski's professional and family life, as well as physics explainer boxes, other technical edits, and bibliographic notes by his former student Ahmed Almheiri, a foreword by Andrew Strominger, and an afterword by his wife Dorothy Chun and sons Steven and Daniel.
The book offers an overview of experiences, theories and conceptions of time in the Graeco-Roman world. It presents the results of new research on neglected medical texts, relating to time ...management, aging and times of life, and the importance of the accurate time assessment. At the same time it draws together the most important findings of much recent classical scholarship on ancient attitudes to time, and presents them in accessible form.
