Download or read book A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age written by Laurie Wilkie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age covers the period 1900 to today, a time marked by massive global changes in production, transportation, and information-sharing in a post-colonial world. New materials and inventions - from plastics to the digital to biotechnology - have created unprecedented scales of disruption, shifting and blurring the categories and meanings of the object. If the 20th century demonstrated that humans can be treated like things whilst things can become ever more human, where will the 21st century take us? The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Laurie A. Wilkie is Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, USA. John M. Chenoweth, is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte
Download or read book A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age written by Laurie Wilkie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age covers the period 1900 to today, a time marked by massive global changes in production, transportation, and information-sharing in a post-colonial world. New materials and inventions - from plastics to the digital to biotechnology - have created unprecedented scales of disruption, shifting and blurring the categories and meanings of the object. If the 20th century demonstrated that humans can be treated like things whilst things can become ever more human, where will the 21st century take us? The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Laurie A. Wilkie is Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, USA. John M. Chenoweth, is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte
Download or read book Early Modern Things written by Paula Findlen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on ‘encountering things’ to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.
Download or read book Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age written by Haidy Geismar and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-05-14 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.
Download or read book The Authority of Everyday Objects written by Paul Betts and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-06-09 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Werkbund to the Bauhaus to Braun, from furniture to automobiles to consumer appliances, twentieth-century industrial design is closely associated with Germany. In this pathbreaking study, Paul Betts brings to light the crucial role that design played in building a progressive West German industrial culture atop the charred remains of the past. The Authority of Everyday Objects details how the postwar period gave rise to a new design culture comprising a sprawling network of diverse interest groups—including the state and industry, architects and designers, consumer groups and museums, as well as publicists and women's organizations—who all identified industrial design as a vital means of economic recovery, social reform, and even moral regeneration. These cultural battles took on heightened importance precisely because the stakes were nothing less than the very shape and significance of West German domestic modernity. Betts tells the rich and far-reaching story of how and why commodity aesthetics became a focal point for fashioning a certain West German cultural identity. This book is situated at the very crossroads of German industry and aesthetics, Cold War politics and international modernism, institutional life and visual culture.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Industry written by Carolyn White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Industry covers the period 1760 to 1900, a time of dramatic change in the material world as objects shifted from the handmade to the machine made. The revolution in making, and in consuming the things which were made, impacted on lives at every scale –from body to home to workplace to city to nation. Beyond the explosion in technology, scientific knowledge, manufacturing, trade, and museums, changes in class structure, politics, ideology, and morality all acted to transform the world of objects. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Carolyn White is Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA. Volume 5 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte
Download or read book A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age written by David Howes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 20th century, many aspects of life became 'a matter of perception' in the wake of the multiplication of media, stylistic experimentation, and the rise of multiculturalism. Life sped up as a result of new modes of transportation – automobiles and airplanes – and communication – telephones and personal computers – which emphasized the rapid movement of people and ideas. The proliferation of synthetic products and simulated experiences, from artificial flavors to video games, in turn, created heady virtual worlds of sensation. This progressive mediation and acceleration of sensation, along with the sensory and environmental pollution it often spawned, also sparked various countertrends, such as the 'back to nature' movement, the craft movement, slow food and alternative medicine. This volume shows how attending to the sensory dynamics of the modern age yields many fresh insights into the intertwined processes which gave the 20th century its particular feel of technological prowess and gaudy artificiality. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.
Download or read book A History of the World in 100 Objects written by Neil MacGregor and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a dramatically original approach to the history of humanity, using objects which previous civilisations have left behind them, often accidentally, as prisms through which we can explore past worlds and the lives of the men and women who lived in them. The book's range is enormous. It begins with one of the earliest surviving objects made by human hands, a chopping tool from the Olduvai gorge in Africa, and ends with an object from the 21st century which represents the world we live in today. Neil MacGregor's aim is not simply to describe these remarkable things, but to show us their significance - how a stone pillar tells us about a great Indian emperor preaching tolerance to his people, how Spanish pieces of eight tell us about the beginning of a global currency or how an early Victorian tea-set tells us about the impact of empire. Each chapter immerses the reader in a past civilisation accompanied by an exceptionally well-informed guide. Seen through this lens, history is a kaleidoscope - shifting, interconnected, constantly surprising, and shaping our world today in ways that most of us have never imagined. An intellectual and visual feast, it is one of the most engrossing and unusual history books published in years.
Download or read book Cultural Histories of the Material World written by Peter N. Miller and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All across the humanities fields there is a new interest in materials and materiality. This is the first book to capture and study the “material turn” in the humanities from all its varied perspectives. Cultural Histories of the Material World brings together top scholars from all these different fields—from Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Folklore, History, History of Science, Literature, Philosophy—to offer their vision of what cultural history of the material world looks like and attempt to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. The result is a spectacular kaleidoscope of future possibilities and new perspectives.
Download or read book Wonders in the Sky written by Jacques Vallee and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-10-28 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most ambitious works of paranormal investigation of our time, here is an unprecedented compendium of pre-twentieth-century UFO accounts, written with rigor and color by two of today's leading investigators of unexplained phenomena. In the past century, individuals, newspapers, and military agencies have recorded thousands of UFO incidents, giving rise to much speculation about flying saucers, visitors from other planets, and alien abductions. Yet the extraterrestrial phenomenon did not begin in the present era. Far from it. The authors of Wonders in the Sky reveal a thread of vividly rendered-and sometimes strikingly similar- reports of mysterious aerial phenomena from antiquity through the modern age. These accounts often share definite physical features- such as the heat felt and described by witnesses-that have not changed much over the centuries. Indeed, such similarities between ancient and modern sightings are the rule rather than the exception. In Wonders in the Sky, respected researchers Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck examine more than 500 selected reports of sightings from biblical-age antiquity through the year 1879-the point at which the Industrial Revolution deeply changed the nature of human society, and the skies began to open to airplanes, dirigibles, rockets, and other opportunities for misinterpretation represented by military prototypes. Using vivid and engaging case studies, and more than seventy-five illustrations, they reveal that unidentified flying objects have had a major impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion, and on the models of the world humanity has formed from deepest antiquity. Sure to become a classic among UFO enthusiasts and other followers of unexplained phenomena, Wonders in the Sky is the most ambitious, broad-reaching, and intelligent analysis ever written on premodern aerial mysteries.
Download or read book Objects of Culture written by H. Glenn Penny and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-10-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, Germans spearheaded a worldwide effort to preserve the material traces of humanity, designing major ethnographic museums and building extensive networks of communication and exchange across the globe. In this groundbreaking study, Glenn Penny explores the appeal of ethnology in Imperial Germany and analyzes the motivations of the scientists who created the ethnographic museums. Penny shows that German ethnologists were not driven by imperialist desires or an interest in legitimating putative biological or racial hierarchies. Overwhelmingly antiracist, they aspired to generate theories about the essential nature of human beings through their museums' collections. They gained support in their efforts from boosters who were enticed by participating in this international science and who used it to promote the cosmopolitan character of their cities and themselves. But these cosmopolitan ideals were eventually overshadowed by the scientists' more modern, professional, and materialist concerns, which dramatically altered the science and its goals. By clarifying German ethnologists' aspirations and focusing on the market and conflicting interest groups, Penny makes important contributions to German history, the history of science, and museum studies.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment written by Audrey Horning and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment covers the period 1600 to 1760, a time marked by the movement of people, ideas and goods. The objects explored in this volume –from scientific instrumentation and Baroque paintings to slave ships and shackles –encapsulate the contradictory impulses of the age. The entwined forces of capitalism and colonialism created new patterns of consumption, facilitated by innovations in maritime transport, new forms of exchange relations, and the exploitation of non-Western peoples and lands. The world of objects in the Enlightenment reveal a Western material culture profoundly shaped by global encounters. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Audrey Horning is Professor at William & Mary, USA, and at Queen's University Belfast, UK. Volume 4 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte
Download or read book Loving Literature written by Deidre Lynch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Of the many charges laid against contemporary literary scholars, one of the most common--and perhaps the most wounding--is that they simply don't love books. And while the most obvious response is that, no, actually the profession of literary studies does acknowledge and address personal attachments to literature, that answer risks obscuring a more fundamental question: Why should they? That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature, and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is that books, and the attachments we form to them, have long played a role in the formation of private life--that the love of literature, in other words, is neither incidental to, nor inextricable from, the history of literature. Yet at the same time, there is nothing self-evident or ahistorical about our love of literature: our views of books as objects of affection have clear roots in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century publishing, reading habits, and domestic history."--Publisher's Web site.
Download or read book New World Objects of Knowledge written by Mark Thurner and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Cultural History of Objects written by Dan Hicks and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The aim of this book, as of all six volumes of A Cultural History of Objects is to offer an account of the increasing entanglement of humans and things, not simply assessing the changing extent of the entanglement but revealing important shifts in the nature of that entanglement"--
Download or read book The Return of Curiosity written by Nicholas Thomas and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spy Museum, the Vacuum Cleaner Museum, the National Mustard Museum—not to mention the Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Getty Center: museums have never been more robust, curating just about everything there is and assuming a new prominence in public life. The Return of Curiosity explores museums in the modern age, offering a fresh perspective on some of our most important cultural institutions and the vital function they serve as stewards of human and natural history. Reflecting on art galleries, science and history institutions, and collections all around the world, Nicholas Thomas argues that, in times marked by incredible insecurity and turbulence, museums help us sustain and enrich society. Moreover, they stimulate us to think in new ways about our world, compelling our curiosity and showing us the importance of understanding one another. Thomas looks at museums not simply as storehouses of old things but as the products of meaningful relationships between curators, the public, history, and culture. These relationships, he shows, don’t always go smoothly, but they do always offer new insights into the many ways we value—and try to preserve—the world we live in. The result is a refreshing and hopeful look at museums as a cultural force, one that, by gathering together paintings, tropical birds, antiques, or even our own bodies, offers an illuminating reflection of who we are.
Download or read book The Global Lives of Things written by Anne Gerritsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Global Lives of Things considers the ways in which ‘things’, ranging from commodities to works of art and precious materials, participated in the shaping of global connections in the period 1400-1800. By focusing on the material exchange between Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia, this volume traces the movements of objects through human networks of commerce, colonialism and consumption. It argues that material objects mediated between the forces of global economic exchange and the constantly changing identities of individuals, as they were drawn into global circuits. It proposes a reconceptualization of early modern global history in the light of its material culture by asking the question: what can we learn about the early modern world by studying its objects? This exciting new collection draws together the latest scholarship in the study of material culture and offers students a critique and explanation of the notion of commodity and a reinterpretation of the meaning of exchange. It engages with the concepts of ‘proto-globalization’, ‘the first global age’ and ‘commodities/consumption’. Divided into three parts, the volume considers in Part One, Objects of Global Knowledge, in Part Two, Objects of Global Connections, and finally, in Part Three, Objects of Global Consumption. The collection concludes with afterwords from three of the leading historians in the field, Maxine Berg, Suraiya Faroqhi and Paula Findlen, who offer their critical view of the methodologies and themes considered in the book and place its arguments within the wider field of scholarship. Extensively illustrated, and with chapters examining case studies from Northern Europe to China and Australia, this book will be essential reading for students of global history.
