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1. | | Title: Heritage of China: contemporary perspectives on Chinese civilizationAuthor: Ropp, Paul S 1944- Published: University of California Press, 1990 Subjects: History | China | Asian HistoryPublisher's Description: The thirteen essays in this volume, all by experts in the field of Chinese studies, reflect the diversity of approaches scholars follow in the study of China's past. Together they reveal the depth and vitality of Chinese civilization and demonstrate how an understanding of traditional China can enri . . . [more]Similar Items | 2. | | Title: The other Greeks: the family farm and the agrarian roots of western civilizationAuthor: Hanson, Victor Davis Published: University of California Press, 1999 Subjects: Classics | European HistoryPublisher's Description: For generations, scholars have focused on the rise of the Greek city-state and its brilliant cosmopolitan culture as the ultimate source of the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and politics. This passionate book leads us outside the city walls to the countryside, where the vast majority of the Greek citizenry lived, to find the true source of the cultural wealth of Greek civilization. Victor Hanson shows that the real "Greek revolution" was not merely the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm.The farmers, vinegrowers, and herdsmen of ancient Greece are "the other Greeks," who formed the backbone of Hellenic civilization. It was these tough-minded, practical, and fiercely independent agrarians, Hanson contends, who gave Greek culture its distinctive emphasis on private property, constitutional government, contractual agreements, infantry warfare, and individual rights. Hanson's reconstruction of ancient Greek farm life, informed by hands-on knowledge of the subject (he is a fifth-generation California vine- and fruit-grower) is fresh, comprehensive, and absorbing. His detailed chronicle of the rise and tragic fall of the Greek city-state also helps us to grasp the implications of what may be the single most significant trend in American life today - the imminent extinction of the family farm. [brief]Similar Items | 3. | | Title: From the royal to the republican body: incorporating the political in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France Author: Melzer, Sara E Published: University of California Press, 1998 Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | European Literature | Cinema and Performance Arts | PoliticsPublisher's Description: In this innovative volume, leading scholars examine the role of the body as a primary site of political signification in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Some essays focus on the sacralization of the king's body through a gendered textual and visual rhetoric. Others show how the monarchy mastered subjects' minds by disciplining the body through dance, music, drama, art, and social rituals. The last essays in the volume focus on the unmaking of the king's body and the substitution of a new, republican body. Throughout, the authors explore how race and gender shaped the body politic under the Bourbons and during the Revolution. This compelling study expands our conception of state power and demonstrates that seemingly apolitical activities like the performing arts, dress and ritual, contribute to the state's hegemony. From the Royal to the Republican Body will be an essential resource for students and scholars of history, literature, music, dance and performance studies, gender studies, art history, and political theory. [brief]Similar Items | 4. | | Title: What is Enlightenment?: eighteenth-century answers and twentieth-century questionsAuthor: Schmidt, James Published: University of California Press, 1996 Subjects: Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | Intellectual History | German StudiesPublisher's Description: This collection contains the first English translations of a group of important eighteenth-century German essays that address the question, "What is Enlightenment?" The book also includes newly translated and newly written interpretive essays by leading historians and philosophers, which examine the origins of eighteenth-century debate on Enlightenment and explore its significance for the present.In recent years, critics from across the political and philosophical spectrum have condemned the Enlightenment for its complicity with any number of present-day social and cultural maladies. It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions.Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. [brief]Similar Items | 5. | | Title: Taste and power: furnishing Modern FranceAuthor: Auslander, Leora Published: University of California Press, 1996 Subjects: History | European History | Art History | European StudiesPublisher's Description: Louis XIV, regency, rococo, neoclassical, empire, art nouveau, and historicist pastiche: furniture styles march across French history as regimes rise and fall. In this extraordinary social history, Leora Auslander explores the changing meaning of furniture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, revealing how the aesthetics of everyday life were as integral to political events as to economic and social transformations. Enriched by Auslander's experience as a cabinetmaker, this work demonstrates how furniture served to represent and even generate its makers' and consumers' identities. [brief]Similar Items | 6. | | Title: Apocalypse and/or metamorphosisAuthor: Brown, Norman Oliver 1913- Published: University of California Press, 1991 Subjects: Philosophy | Psychology | HistoryPublisher's Description: Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books Life Against Death and Love's Body , this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.Brown writes that "the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social structure precipitated by the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to its injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war . . . that has been its history from start to finish." Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it. Thus the duality in his title: crisis and the hope for change. In pieces both poetic and philosophical, Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and Finnegan's Wake . The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death. [brief]Similar Items | 7. | | Title: Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the eighteenth century: a genealogy of modernityAuthor: Hundert, Gershon David 1946- Published: University of California Press, 2004 Subjects: History | European History | Jewish Studies | ReligionPublisher's Description: Missing from most accounts of the modern history of Jews in Europe is the experience of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world - an oversight that Gershon David Hundert corrects in this history of Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth century. The experience of eighteenth-century Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not fit the pattern of integration and universalization - in short, of westernization - that historians tend to place at the origins of Jewish modernity. Hundert puts this experience, that of the majority of the Jewish people, at the center of his history. He focuses on the relations of Jews with the state and their role in the economy, and on more "internal" developments such as the popularization of the Kabbalah and the rise of Hasidism. Thus he describes the elements of Jewish experience that became the basis for a "core Jewish identity" - an identity that accompanied the majority of Jews into modernity. [brief]Similar Items | 8. | | Title: The travels of Dean Mahomet: an eighteenth-Century journey through India Author: Mahomet, Sake Deen 1759-1851 Published: University of California Press, 1997 Subjects: History | Asian History | South Asia | Travel | Autobiographies and BiographiesPublisher's Description: This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Michael H. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of "oriental" medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India - the first book written in English by an Indian - framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur. Travels presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole.Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual. [brief]Similar Items | 9. | | Title: The New World of the gothic fox: culture and economy in English and Spanish AmericaAuthor: Véliz, Claudio Published: University of California Press, 1994 Subjects: History | Latin American Studies | Latin American HistoryPublisher's Description: Claudio Véliz adopts the provocative metaphor of foxes and hedgehogs that Isaiah Berlin used to describe opposite types of thinkers. Applying this metaphor to modern culture, economic systems, and the history of the New World, Véliz provides an original and lively approach to understanding the development of English and Spanish America over the past 500 years.According to Véliz, the dominant cultural achievements of Europe's English- and Spanish-speaking peoples have been the Industrial Revolution and the Counter-Reformation, respectively. These overwhelming cultural constructions have strongly influenced the subsequent historical developments of their great cultural outposts in North and South America. The British brought to the New World a stubborn ability to thrive on diversity and change that was entirely consistent with their vernacular Gothic style. The Iberians, by contrast, brought a cultural tradition shaped like a vast baroque dome, a monument to their successful attempt to arrest the changes that threatened their imperial moment.Véliz writes with erudition and wit, using a multitude of sources - historians and classical sociologists, Greek philosophers, today's newspaper sports pages, and modern literature - to support a novel explanation of the prosperity and expanding cultural influence of the gothic fox and the economic and cultural decline endured by the baroque hedgehog. [brief]Similar Items | 10. | | Title: Customers and patrons of the mad-trade: the management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London: with the complete text of John Monro's 1766 case bookAuthor: Andrews, Jonathan 1961- Published: University of California Press, 2003 Subjects: History | History of Science | Psychology | Social Problems | PsychiatryPublisher's Description: This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness. [brief]Similar Items | 11. | | Title: Magnetic mountain: Stalinism as a civilizationAuthor: Kotkin, Stephen Published: University of California Press, 1997 Subjects: History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | European HistoryPublisher's Description: This study is the first of its kind: a street-level inside account of what Stalinism meant to the masses of ordinary people who lived it. Stephen Kotkin was the first American in 45 years to be allowed into Magnitogorsk, a city built in response to Stalin's decision to transform the predominantly agricultural nation into a "country of metal." With unique access to previously untapped archives and interviews, Kotkin forges a vivid and compelling account of the impact of industrialization on a single urban community.Kotkin argues that Stalinism offered itself as an opportunity for enlightenment. The utopia it proffered, socialism, would be a new civilization based on the repudiation of capitalism. The extent to which the citizenry participated in this scheme and the relationship of the state's ambitions to the dreams of ordinary people form the substance of this fascinating story. Kotkin tells it deftly, with a remarkable understanding of the social and political system, as well as a keen instinct for the details of everyday life.Kotkin depicts a whole range of life: from the blast furnace workers who labored in the enormous iron and steel plant, to the families who struggled with the shortage of housing and services. Thematically organized and closely focused, Magnetic Mountain signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of Soviet social history. [brief]Similar Items | 12. | | Title: France at the Crystal Palace: bourgeois taste and artisan manufacture in the nineteenth centuryAuthor: Walton, Whitney Published: University of California Press, 1992 Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies | French StudiesPublisher's Description: Whitney Walton approaches the nineteenth-century French industrial development from a new perspective - that of consumption. She analyzes the French performance at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to illustrate how bourgeois consumers influenced France's distinctive pattern of industrial development. She also demonstrates the importance of consumption and gender in class formation and reveals how women influenced industry in their role as consumers.Walton examines important consumer goods industries that have been rarely studied by historians, such as the manufacture of wallpaper, furniture, and bronze statues. Using archival sources on household possessions of the Parisian bourgeoisie as well as published works, she shows how consumers' taste for fashionable, artistic, well-made furnishings and apparel promoted a specialization unique to nineteenth-century France. [brief]Similar Items | 13. | | Title: Love customs in eighteenth-century Spain Author: Martín Gaite, Carmen Published: University of California Press, 1991 Subjects: History | European History | Gender StudiesSimilar Items | 14. | | Title: A usable past: essays in European cultural history Author: Bouwsma, William James 1923- Published: University of California Press, 1990 Subjects: History | European HistoryPublisher's Description: The essays assembled here represent forty years of reflection about the European cultural past by an eminent historian. The volume concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation, while providing a lens through which to view problems of perennial interest. A Usable Past is a book of unusual scope, touching on such topics as political thought and historiography, metaphysical and practical conceptions of order, the relevance of Renaissance humanism to Protestant thought, the secularization of European culture, the contributions of particular professional groups to European civilization, and the teaching of history.The essays in A Usable Past are unified by a set of common concerns. William Bouwsma has always resisted the pretensions to science that have shaped much recent historical scholarship and made the work of historians increasingly specialized and inaccessible to lay readers. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he argues that since history is a kind of public utility, historical research should contribute to the self-understanding of society. [brief]Similar Items | 15. | | Title: Hellenistic constructs: essays in culture, history, and historiographyAuthor: Cartledge, Paul Published: University of California Press, 1997 Subjects: Classics | Classical History | History | Ancient HistoryPublisher's Description: The Hellenistic period (approximately the last three centuries B.C.), with its cultural complexities and enduring legacies, retains a lasting fascination today. Reflecting the vigor and productivity of scholarship directed at this period in the past decade, this collection of original essays is a wide-ranging exploration of current discoveries and questions. The twelve essays emphasize the cultural interaction of Greek and non-Greek societies in the Hellenistic period, in contrast to more conventional focuses on politics, society, or economy. The result of original research by some of the leading scholars in Hellenistic history and culture, this volume is an exemplary illustration of the cultural richness of this period.Paul Cartledge's introduction contains an illuminating introductory overview of current trends in Hellenistic scholarship. The essays themselves range over broad questions of comparative historiography, literature, religion, and the roles of Athens, Rome, and the Jews within the context of the Hellenistic world. The volume is dedicated to Frank Walbank and includes an updated bibliography of his work which has been essential to our understanding of the Hellenistic period. [brief]Similar Items | 16. | | Title: The eye expanded: life and the arts in Greco-Roman antiquityAuthor: Titchener, Frances B 1954- Published: University of California Press, 1999 Subjects: Classics | Classical History | Classical Literature and Language | Art and Architecture | Classical Politics | Classical Religions | Ancient HistoryPublisher's Description: Plato and Aristotle both believed that the arts were mimetic creations of the human mind that had the power to influence society. In this they were representative of a widespread consensus in ancient culture. Cultural and political impulses informed the fine arts, and these in turn shaped - and were often intended to shape - the living world. The contributors to this volume, all of whom have been encouraged and inspired by the work of Peter Green, document the interaction between life and the arts that has made art more lively and life more artful in sixteen essays with subjects ranging from antiquity to modern times.With topics ranging from Antigone to D. H. Lawrence and Norman Douglas, and from Bactrian coins to Livy's characterization of women, the scope, the zest, and the scholarship of these essays will illuminate new avenues in our understanding of the relationship between classics and culture, and in our appreciation of both the artistic products that have come down to us and the varieties of life from which they spring. [brief]Similar Items | 17. | | Title: Exits from the labyrinth: culture and ideology in the Mexican national spaceAuthor: Lomnitz Adler, Claudio Published: University of California Press, 1993 Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American HistoryPublisher's Description: Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? Claudio Lomnitz-Adler takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the study of national culture. His sweeping and innovative interpretation of Mexican national ideology constructs an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. With an analysis of culture and ideology in internally differentiated regional spaces - in this case Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico - Exits from the Labyrinth links rich ethnographic and historical research to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology. [brief]Similar Items | 18. | | Title: The magistrate's tael: rationalizing fiscal reform in eighteenth-century Chʿing China Author: Zelin, Madeleine Published: University of California Press, 1984 Subjects: History | Asian History | ChinaPublisher's Description: Madeleine Zelin shatters the image of China as a backward empire wracked by corruption and economic stagnation, thrust into the modern world when the western gunboats arrived in the 1840s, by providing an account of the indigenous evolution of the Chinese state. The Magistrate's Tael makes it possib . . . [more]Similar Items | 19. | | Title: Haiti, history, and the godsAuthor: Dayan, Joan 1949- Published: University of California Press, 1996 Subjects: Literature | History | Folklore and Mythology | Cultural AnthropologyPublisher's Description: In Haiti, History, and the Gods Joan Dayan charts the cultural imagination of Haiti not only by reconstructing the island's history but by highlighting ambiguities and complexities that have been ignored. She investigates the confrontational space in which Haiti is created and recreated in fiction and fact, text and ritual, discourse and practice. Dayan's ambitious project is a research tour de force that gives human dimensions to this eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today.In examining the complex social fabric of French Saint-Domingue, which in 1804 became Haiti, Dayan uncovers a silenced, submerged past. Instead of relying on familiar sources to reconstruct Haitian history, she uses a startling diversity of voices that have previously been unheard. Many of the materials recovered here - overlooked or repressed historical texts, legal documents, religious works, secret memoirs, letters, and literary fictions - have never been translated into English. Others, such as Marie Vieux Chauvet's radical novel of vodou, Fonds des Nègres , are seldom used as historical sources.Dayan also argues provocatively for the consideration of both vodou rituals and narrative fiction as repositories of history. Her scholarship is enriched by the insights she has gleaned from conversations and experiences during her many trips to Haiti over the past twenty years. Taken together, the material presented in Haiti, History, and the Gods not only restores a lost chapter of Haitian history but suggests necessary revisions to the accepted histories of the New World. [brief]Similar Items | 20. | | Title: Jews in the notarial culture: Latinate wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250-1350 Author: Burns, Robert Ignatius Published: University of California Press, 1996 Subjects: Medieval Studies | Judaism | Jewish Studies | European History | Law | Medieval HistoryPublisher's Description: In the rapidly transforming world of thirteenth-century Mediterranean Spain, the all-purpose scribe and contract lawyer known as the notary became a familiar figure. Most legal transactions of the Roman Law Renaissance were framed in this functionary's notoriously hasty shorthand. Notarial archives, then, offer a remarkable window on the daily life of this pluri-ethnic society. Robert I. Burns brings together the testimony of a multitude of documents, and transcribes in full nearly fifty will-related charters prepared by notaries, to give a never-before-seen view of Jewish society in that place and time.Wills can display the religious conscience, ethical institutions, social mobility, and property dynamics of whole groups or regions. Even a single testament allows a glimpse into the testator's family and into the life and times of the living person. Burns devotes special attention to women in wills and to women's wills, extracting rich information on medieval women and gender relationships.While learning much about the role of kings and courts and the dynamics of Christian-Jewish relations, the reader also gains rare insights into a unique Jewish community. [brief]Similar Items |
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