Download or read book Inventing Paradise written by Paul Haddad and published by Santa Monica Press. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles traces the improbable rise of Los Angeles through the prism of six visionaries who had outsize influence on the city’s growth: Phineas Banning, Harrison Gray Otis, Henry Huntington, Harry Chandler, William Mulholland, and Moses Sherman. In the late 1870s, Los Angeles was a violent, dusty, 29-square-mile pueblo with a few thousand souls, largely unchanged since its founding in 1781. By 1930, its size had swelled to within 96% of its current 468 square miles, housing a staggering 1.2 million people. In just 50 years, L.A. had joined the ranks of other world-class cities. In the tradition of Mike Davis’s classic work City of Quartz, Paul Haddad (Freewaytopia and 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A.) debunks many myths about the City of Angels with a wildly entertaining narrative that sheds new light on the fascinating birth of modern Los Angeles. Power came from a select few, whose triumphs, scandals, and correspondence are well documented in Inventing Paradise, along with other little-known facts about L.A. history, including: How Los Angeles Times chief Harry Chandler pushed eugenics and endorsed “white spots” Henry Huntington’s and Moses Sherman’s trolley systems and the extortion-type practices that led to their expansion When Los Angeles was so desperate for water, it hired a miracle worker who promised rain How L.A.’s power elite peddled the lie that the Owens River used to flow into Los Angeles and rightfully belonged to the city When Los Angeles annexed a city in which monkeys cast votes How Venice, California, was not the first Venice, California William Mulholland’s game-changing construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which raised the city’s population ceiling from 250,000 to 2.5 million Haddad also covers the heavy costs that came with creating paradise in such a short period of time, including car dependency, environmental problems, and deep-seated inequities between wealthy white Angelenos and people of color due to racist policies. All have left an imprint on present-day Los Angeles. Los Angeles is known as a city that should not exist—and yet it does. Through Inventing Paradise, Haddad shows readers that Los Angeles is not a paradise found, but a paradise that was willed into existence, owing to the collective vision of these six Gilded Era-born tycoons.
Download or read book Inventing Paradise written by Edmund Keeley and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the looming shadow of an oppressive dictatorship and imminent world war, George Seferis and George Katsimbalis, along with other poets and writers from Greece's fabled Generation of the 1930s, welcomed Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell to their homeland. Together, as they spent evenings in Athenian tavernas, explored the Peloponnese, swam off island beaches, and considered the meaning of Greek life and freedom and art, they seemed to be inventing paradise. In a lyrical blend of personal memoir, literary criticism, and interpretative storytelling, Edmund Keeley takes readers on a journey into the poetry, friendships, and politics of this extraordinary time. A remarkable work of cultural history and imaginative criticism, his book recreates a lost paradise of immediate charm, literary greatness, and mythic reach.
Download or read book Inventing Eden written by Zachary McLeod Hutchins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previous scholars have noted the Puritans' edenic descriptions of New World landscapes, but Inventing Eden is the first study to fully uncover the integral relationship between the New England interest in paradise and the numerous iconic intellectual artifacts and social movements of colonial North America. Harvard Yard, the Bay Psalm Book, and the Quaker use of antiquated pronouns like thee and thou: these are products of a seventeenth-century desire for Eden. So, too, are the evangelical emphasis of the Great Awakening, the doctrine of natural law popularized by the Declaration of Independence, and the first United States judicial decision abolishing slavery. Be it public nudity or Freemasonry, Zachary Hutchins convincingly shows how a shared wish to bring paradise into the pragmatic details of colonial living had a profound effect on early New England life and its substantial culture of letters. Spanning two centuries and surveying the works of major British and American thinkers from James Harrington and John Milton to Anne Hutchinson and Benjamin Franklin, Inventing Eden is the history of an idea that irrevocably altered the theology, literature, and culture of colonial New England -- and, eventually, the new republic.
Download or read book Inventing Easter Island written by Beverley Haun and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2008-04-05 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as it is known to its inhabitants, is located in the Pacific Ocean, 3600 kilometres west of South America. Annexed by Chile in 1888, the island has been a source of fascination for the world beyond the island since the first visit by Europeans in 1722 due to its intriguing statues and complex history. Inventing 'Easter Island' examines narrative strategies and visual conventions in the discursive construction of 'Easter Island' as distinct from the native conception of 'Rapa Nui.' It looks at the geographic imaginary that pervaded the eighteenth century, a period of overwhelming imperial expansion. Beverley Haun begins with a discussion of forces that shaped the European version of island culture and goes on to consider the representation of that culture in the form of explorer texts and illustrations, as well as more recent texts and images in comic books and kitsch from off the island. Throughout, 'Easter Island' is used as a case study of the impact of imperialism on the view of a culture from outside. The study hinges on three key points - an inquiry into the formation of 'Easter Island' as a subject; an examination of how the constructed space and culture have been shaped, reshaped, and represented in discursive spaces; and a discussion of cultural memory and how the constraints of foreign texts and images have shaped thought and action about 'Easter Island.' Richly illustrated and unique in its findings, Inventing 'Easter Island' will appeal to cultural theorists, anthropologists, educators, and anyone interested in the history of the South Pacific.
Download or read book Inventing America written by José Rabasa and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Inventing America, José Rabasa presents the view that Columbus's historic act was not a discovery, and still less an encounter. Rather, he considers it the beginning of a process of inventing a New World in the sixteenth century European consciousness. The notion of America as a European invention challenges the popular conception of the New World as a natural entity to be discovered or understood, however imperfectly. This book aims to debunk complacency with the historic, geographic, and cartographic rudiments underlying our present picture of the world.
Download or read book Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination written by Martin McKinsey and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott follows the careers of three major poets of the European and North American periphery as they engage one of the master tropes of Western civilization. As colonial subjects, they inherited an Anglicized version of Hellenism whose borders might easily have excluded them as civilizational "others." The book describes the diverse strategies they used--from Bloomian kenosis to Afro-Caribbean "signifyin(g)"--to make Hellenism their own. Their use of Greek material, the book argues, is closely tied to their need as members of colonial minorities--Irish Protestant, Greek-Egyptian, and "part-white and Methodist"--to define themselves against mainstream metropolitan culture on the one hand, and nationalist constructions of the post-colonial homeland on the other. Their Hellenisms participate in the dialectic of local and global, as the poets at once indigenize the Universal Greek, and re-deploy him to hybridize national culture. The result is a triangulated dynamic that challenges established notions of the postcolonial. Among works discussed are Tennyson's "Ulysses," Yeats's "No Second Troy," C.P. Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," and Walcott's Omeros. Martin McKinsey is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.
Download or read book Cyprus from Colonialism to the Present Visions and Realities written by Anastasia Yiangou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is published in honour of the acclaimed work of Robert Holland, historian of the British Empire and the Mediterranean, and it brings together essays based on the original research of his colleagues, former students and friends. The focal theme is modern Cyprus, on which much of Robert Holland’s own history writing was concentrated for many years. The essays analyse British rule in Cyprus between 1878 and 1960, and especially the transition to independence; the coverage, however, also incorporates the post-colonial era and the construction of present-day dilemmas. The Cypriot experience intertwines with Anglo-Hellenic relations generally, so that a section of the book is devoted to those aspects that have been central to Robert Holland’s sustained contribution. The essays explore, inter alia, historiography, social history, economics, politics, ideology, education and the 2013 financial crisis. Taken as a collection the essays serve as an appropriate tribute to Robert Holland as well as an innovative addition to the existing historiography of colonial and post-colonial Cyprus. They will be of great interest to anyone interested in Imperial and Commonwealth History, Anglo-Hellenic relations and the Eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Download or read book In Byron s Shadow written by David Ernest Roessel and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2002 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bryon's Shadow draws on a wide range of sources to create a model for literary history that synthesizes literary investigation and cultural studies to develop a fuller understanding of the historical forces influencing the Anglo-American conception of modern Greece."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Ukulele written by Jim Tranquada and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its introduction to Hawai‘i in 1879, the ‘ukulele has been many things: a symbol of an island paradise; a tool of political protest; an instrument central to a rich musical culture; a musical joke; a highly sought-after collectible; a cheap airport souvenir; a lucrative industry; and the product of a remarkable synthesis of western and Pacific cultures. The ‘Ukulele: A History explores all of these facets, placing the instrument for the first time in a broad historical, cultural, and musical context. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, Jim Tranquada and John King tell the surprising story of how an obscure four-string folk guitar from Portugal became the national instrument of Hawai’i, of its subsequent rise and fall from international cultural phenomenon to “the Dangerfield of instruments,” and of the resurgence in popularity (and respect) it is currently enjoying among musicians from Thailand to Finland. The book shows how the technologies of successive generations (recorded music, radio, television, the Internet) have played critical roles in popularizing the ‘ukulele. Famous composers and entertainers (Queen Liliuokalani, Irving Berlin, Arthur Godfrey, Paul McCartney, SpongeBob SquarePants) and writers (Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie) wind their way through its history—as well as a host of outstanding Hawaiian musicians (Ernest Kaai, George Kia Nahaolelua, Samuel K. Kamakaia, Henry A. Peelua Bishaw). In telling the story of the ‘ukulele, Tranquada and King also present a sweeping history of modern Hawaiian music that spans more than two centuries, beginning with the introduction of western melody and harmony by missionaries to the Hawaiian music renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s.
Download or read book Founding Gods Inventing Nations written by William F. McCants and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the dawn of writing in Sumer to the sunset of the Islamic empire, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization. Investigating a vast range of primary sources, some of which are translated here for the first time, and focusing on the dynamic influence of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests of the Near East, William McCants looks at the ways the conquerors and those they conquered reshaped their myths of civilization's origins in response to the social and political consequences of empire. The Greek and Roman conquests brought with them a learned culture that competed with that of native elites. The conquering Arabs, in contrast, had no learned culture, which led to three hundred years of Muslim competition over the cultural orientation of Islam, a contest reflected in the culture myths of that time. What we know today as Islamic culture is the product of this contest, whose protagonists drew heavily on the lore of non-Arab and pagan antiquity. McCants argues that authors in all three periods did not write about civilization's origins solely out of pure antiquarian interest--they also sought to address the social and political tensions of the day. The strategies they employed and the postcolonial dilemmas they confronted provide invaluable context for understanding how authors today use myth and history to locate themselves in the confusing aftermath of empire.
Download or read book Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe written by Catherine Atkinson and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2007 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polydore Vergil of Urbino (ca.1470-1555) fired his readers' imagination with his encyclopaedic book On the inventors of all things ( De inventoribus rerum 1499). His account of the manifold origins of sciences, crafts and social institutions is a praise of man's inventive genius and a prototypical cultural history. Polydorus was a household name for several centuries. Erasmus envied his friend the book's success, Rabelais heaped scorn on it, Catholic censors put it on the index, while Protestants were fascinated with that papist work. In this first in-depth study of the Renaissance 'bestseller', Catherine Atkinson examines not only the Italian humanist's bona fide (mostly ancient) inventors, in books I-III, she enquires into the neglected and misunderstood, yet equally important, books IV-VIII (1521). This early modern text, written on the eve of the Reformation, is devoted to the highly controversial topic of the 'invention' of ecclesiastical institutions. The priest and humanist Vergil, who during his 50 years in England rose in the church hierarchy, is shown to be an acute observer of contemporary religious practice. He employs the inventor question (who was the first to do this?) as an instrument of historiography and by comparing medieval church rites and institutions with religious practice of antiquity, implicitly questions the singularity of the Christian church.
Download or read book Inventing Socrates written by Miles Hollingworth and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing Socrates is a book about the consequences of knowledge and the coming of age. It is written in knowledge's Western setting, making allegorical as well as literal use of the event known as the 'birth of philosophy' – an event that began in ancient Greece in the 6th-century B.C., when a handful of thinkers first looked at the natural world through the critical eyes of fledgling science. Very little of concrete fact is known about this first philosophy and its protagonists. Only scant fragments of their writings have survived; and these are nearly always poetical and esoteric, some no more than a single line. They are freighted with meanings that might take one in two different directions at once; and this ambidexterity between ancient and modern has always been their beguiling feature. Altogether these thinkers are known as the Presocratics, because they pioneered the rational methods that Socrates would take to the question of the good life. If Socrates stands today as an icon of Western self-esteem, these pioneers are said to show the emergence of that poise from the fug of myth and religion. Apparently they prove the evolution of Western intelligence and the value of living today – in the secular maturity of its latest, greatest hour. But what if their continuing readability and tactility were actually to become the demonstration against that? This is not just, then, a book about the foundations of Western thought. It is a book about all that we invest in the ideas of ancient and modern. Left to right is the Western way of learning and growing, but, as Miles Hollingworth shows, the truths of the human condition are subterranean corridors running psychologically and eternally.
Download or read book This I Believe written by Carlos Fuentes and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An A-Z of the things that Fuentes loves and passionately believes in: it is a kind of manifesto, but one that also draws on key moments in his life
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Modern Greece written by Dimitris Keridis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-06-06 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greece is a ancient land, blessed with a stunning natural beauty and an inspiring cultural heritage but burdened with history and conflict, it shares many traits and comparable trajectories with its neighbors and countries of a similar background. Modern Greece is a successor nation-state of the Ottoman Empire, created in the early 19th century through the interplay of an evolving Greek national idea, the crisis of the Ottoman state, and the intervention of great powers. Historical Dictionary of Modern Greece, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 200 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Greece.
Download or read book Borderlines written by Edmund Keeley and published by White Pine Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borderlines is a memoir of Greece, its life, culture, writers and people.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Life Writing written by Margaretta Jolly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 3905 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.
Download or read book Urban Ethics Under Conditions Of Crisis Politics Architecture Landscape Sustainability And Multidisciplinary Engineering written by Moraitis Konstantinos and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Ethics under Conditions of Crisis investigates the states of urban planning, architectural design, sustainability, landscape architecture, and engineering, and examines their correlation with social attitudes and dispositions that can impact on socio-cultural and political engagement internationally in conditions of crisis. The theme of the book emphasizes the need to acknowledge the controversial character of contemporary social life under critical social conditions, in correlation with urban space. It concerns the evaluation of critical issues such as:
