Download or read book Mythistory and Other Essays written by William H. McNeill and published by . This book was released on 2008-11 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mythistory and Other Essays written by William Hardy McNeill and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Rise of the West written by William H. McNeill and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-07-30 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise of the West, winner of the National Book Award for history in 1964, is famous for its ambitious scope and intellectual rigor. In it, McNeill challenges the Spengler-Toynbee view that a number of separate civilizations pursued essentially independent careers, and argues instead that human cultures interacted at every stage of their history. The author suggests that from the Neolithic beginnings of grain agriculture to the present major social changes in all parts of the world were triggered by new or newly important foreign stimuli, and he presents a persuasive narrative of world history to support this claim. In a retrospective essay titled "The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years," McNeill shows how his book was shaped by the time and place in which it was written (1954-63). He discusses how historiography subsequently developed and suggests how his portrait of the world's past in The Rise of the West should be revised to reflect these changes. "This is not only the most learned and the most intelligent, it is also the most stimulating and fascinating book that has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of mankind. . . . To read it is a great experience. It leaves echoes to reverberate, and seeds to germinate in the mind."—H. R. Trevor-Roper, New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Mythistory written by Joseph Mali and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Herodotus declared in Histories that to preserve the memories of the great achievements of the Greeks and other nations he would count on their own stories, historians have debated whether and how they should deal with myth. Most have sided with Thucydides, who denounced myth as "unscientific" and banished it from historiography. In Mythistory, Joseph Mali revives this oldest controversy in historiography. Contesting the conventional opposition between myth and history, Mali advocates instead for a historiography that reconciles the two and recognizes the crucial role that myth plays in the construction of personal and communal identities. The task of historiography, he argues, is to illuminate, not eliminate, these fictions by showing how they have passed into and shaped historical reality. Drawing on the works of modern theorists and artists of myth such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Joyce and Eliot, Mali redefines modern historiography and relates it to the older notion and tradition of "mythistory." Tracing the origins and transformations of this historiographical tradition from the ancient world to the modern, Mali shows how Livy and Machiavelli sought to recover true history from uncertain myth-and how Vico and Michelet then reversed this pattern of inquiry, seeking instead to recover a deeper and truer myth from uncertain history. In the heart of Mythistory, Mali turns his attention to four thinkers who rediscovered myth in and for modern cultural history: Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Walter Benjamin. His elaboration of the different biographical and historiographical routes by which all four sought to account for the persistence and significance of myth in Western civilization opens up new perspectives for an alternative intellectual history of modernity-one that may better explain the proliferation of mythic imageries of redemption in our secular, all too secular, times.
Download or read book Essays on Sport History and Sport Mythology written by Allen Guttmann and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sport has always been a legitimate focus for human energy, and in the last fifteen years it has emerged as a legitimate focus for scholarly energy as well. In this interdisciplinary overview of the study of sport, sociology, intellectual history, psychology, anthropology, and literature are brought to bear in seeking new understanding of the role and significance of sport in society. Some of the conclusions will be controversial or even disturbing, and the breadth of the volume clearly demonstrates that sport history is not merely a hobby. As Jack W. Berryman notes in the introduction to the volume: "Each essay, in some distinctive manner, confronts the problem of general preconceptions and misconceptions in the study of sport history. The authors ask fundamental questions: what is sport, what is its significance over time, and how can sport be studied effectively?" Donald G. Kyle opens the questions with an examination of the myth of the decline of ancient Greek sport. Stephen Hardy proposes a new model for the interpretation of both early and modern sport. Steven A. Riess questions the historicity of the myth of social mobility through sport in America. Richard D. Mandell explains the history of theoretically profound and earnest modern criticism of sport. Allen Guttmann demythologizes the relationship between erotic impulses and sport. This serious and timely study of sport aids in the reevaluation of many popular beliefs and traditional scholarly interpretations concerning sport in various ages and cultures. It offers much of value to all those interested in contemplating the nature and history of the phenomenon of sport.
Download or read book Of Myths and Movements written by Haripriya Rangan and published by Verso. This book was released on 2000 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rangan appraises the grassroots social resistance within its cultural context to scrutinize the myths surrounding indigenous 'tree huggers'.
Download or read book Narrating the Nation written by Stefan Berger and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.
Download or read book Myth Truth and Narrative in Herodotus written by Emily Baragwanath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herodotus, the 'Father of History', is infamously known for having employed elements more akin to mythological tales than to unvarnished 'truth' in translating his historical research into narrative form. While these narratives provide valuable source material, he could not have surmised the hostile reception his work would receive in later generations. This mythical aspect of the Histories led many successors, most notoriously Plutarch, to blame Herodotus for spinning far-fetched lies, and to set him apart as an untrustworthy historian. Echoes of the same criticism resounded in twentieth-century scholarship, which found it difficult to reconcile Herodotus' ambition to write historical stories 'as they really happened' with the choices he made in shaping their form. This volume brings together 13 original articles written by specialists in the fields of ancient Greek literature and history. Each article seeks to review, re-establish, and rehabilitate the origins, forms, and functions of the Histories' mythological elements. These contributions throw new light on Herodotus' talents as a narrator, underline his versatility in shaping his work, and reveal how he was inspired by and constantly engaged with his intellectual milieu. The Herodotus who emerges is a Herculean figure, dealing with a vast quantity of material, struggling with it as with the Hydra's many-growing heads, and ultimately rising with consummate skill to the organisational and presentational challenges it posed. The volume ultimately concludes that far from being unrelated to the 'historical' aspects of Herodotus' text, the 'mythic' elements prove vital to his presentation of history.
Download or read book Plots of Epiphany written by John B. Weaver and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-02-06 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Past scholarship on the prison-escapes in the Acts of the Apostles has tended to focus on lexical similarities to Euripides' Bacchae, going so far as to argue for direct literary dependence. Moving beyond such explanations, the present study argues that miraculous prison-escape was a central event in a traditional and culturally significant story about the introduction and foundation of cults - a story discernable in the Bacchae and other ancient texts. When the mythic quality and cultural diffusion of the prison-escape narratives are taken into account, the resemblance of Lukan and Dionysian narrative episodes is seen to depend less on specific literary borrowing, and more on shared familiarity with cultural discourses involving the legitimating portrayal of new cults in the ancient world.
Download or read book Exploring the Next Frontier written by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1960s and early 70s saw the evolution of Frontier Myths even as scholars were renouncing the interpretive value of myths themselves. Works like Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War exemplified that rejection using his experiences during the Vietnam War to illustrate the problematic consequences of simple mythic idealism. Simultaneously, Americans were playing with expanded and revised versions of familiar Frontier Myths, though in a contemporary context, through NASA’s lunar missions, Star Trek, and Gerard K. O’Neill’s High Frontier. This book examines the reasons behind the exclusion of Frontier Myths to the periphery of scholarly discourse, and endeavors to build a new model for understanding their enduring significance. This model connects NASA’s failed attempts to recycle earlier myths, wholesale, to Star Trek’s revision of those myths and rejection of the idea of a frontier paradise, to O’Neill’s desire to realize such a paradise in Earth’s orbit. This new synthesis defies the negative connotations of Frontier Myths during the 1960s and 70s and attempts to resuscitate them for relevance in the modern academic context.
Download or read book Marxism and Phenomenology written by Bryan Smyth and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, edited by Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman, offers new perspectives on the possibility of a philosophical outlook that combines Marxism and phenomenology in the critique of capitalism. Although Marxism’s focus on impersonal social structures and phenomenology’s concern with lived experience can make these traditions appear conceptually incompatible, the potential critical force of a theoretical reconciliation inspired several attempts in the twentieth century to articulate a phenomenological Marxism. Updating and extending this approach, the contributors to this volume identify and develop new and previously overlooked connections between the traditions, offering new perspectives on Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger; exploring themes such as alienation, reification, and ecology; and examining the intersection of Marxism and phenomenology in figures such as Michel Henry, Walter Benjamin, and Frantz Fanon. These glimpses of a productive reconciliation of the respective strengths of phenomenology and Marxism offer promising possibilities for illuminating and resolving the increasingly intense social crises of capitalism in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America 1886 1965 written by John S. Gilkeson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the intersection of cultural anthropology and American cultural nationalism from 1886, when Franz Boas left Germany for the United States, until 1965, when the National Endowment for the Humanities was established. Five chapters trace the development within academic anthropology of the concepts of culture, social class, national character, value, and civilization, and their dissemination to non-anthropologists. As Americans came to think of culture anthropologically, as a 'complex whole' far broader and more inclusive than Matthew Arnold's 'the best which has been thought and said', so, too, did they come to see American communities as stratified into social classes distinguished by their subcultures; to attribute the making of the American character to socialization rather than birth; to locate the distinctiveness of American culture in its unconscious canons of choice; and to view American culture and civilization in a global perspective.
Download or read book The Myth of Continents written by Martin W. Lewis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Despite the recent surge of interest in geographical concepts and ideas, most social, cultural, and political studies are riddled with unexamined spatial assumptions. The Myth of Continents initiates a much-needed consideration of this state of affairs. Through a wide-ranging analysis of such metageographical constructs as East, West, Europe, and Asia, Lewis and Wigen provide provocative insights into the nature and significance of the ways we usually divide up the world. Moreover, they do so in an engaging and highly readable style. Readers of The Myth of Continents will never again see the world regions in quite the same way."--Alexander B. Murphy, author of The Regional Dynamics of Language Differentiation in Belgium "An exciting, thoughtful, engaging, innovative book that demonstrates the need to reexamine commonly held assumptions about the world's division into continents, East/West, First/Second/Third World, etc. Readers will be drawn to its 'big-think' quality of shattering commonly held assumptions and to its up-to-the-minute contemporary feel."--Benjamin Orlove, coeditor of State, Capital, and Rural Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Political Economy in Mexico and the Andes "An important and long overdue housecleaning of old geographical concepts, based upon an impressively wide reading of regional literatures."--Edmund Burke III, editor of Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East
Download or read book The New World History written by Ross E. Dunn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New World History is a comprehensive volume of essays selected to enrich world history teaching and scholarship in this rapidly expanding field. The forty-four articles in this book take stock of the history, evolving literature, and current trajectories of new world history. These essays, together with the editors’ introductions to thematic chapters, encourage educators and students to reflect critically on the development of the field and to explore concepts, approaches, and insights valuable to their own work. The selections are organized in ten chapters that survey the history of the movement, the seminal ideas of founding thinkers and today’s practitioners, changing concepts of world historical space and time, comparative methods, environmental history, the “big history” movement, globalization, debates over the meaning of Western power, and ongoing questions about the intellectual premises and assumptions that have shaped the field.
Download or read book The Oldest One in Russia written by Kati Parppei and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-05-06 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributing, for instance, to the fields of nationality and borderland studies, this book offers a fascinating study of the process of “writing a worthy past” for the Russian Orthodox monastery of Valaam during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Download or read book The Myth of the Welfare State written by Jack D. Douglas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Myth of the Welfare Stale is a basic and sweeping explanation of the rise and fall of great powers, and of the profound impacts of these megastates on ordinary lives. Its central theme is the rise of bureaucratic collectivization in American society. It is Douglas's conviction, which he supports with a wealth of detail, that statist bureaucracies produce siagnation, often exacerbated by inflation, which in turn produces the waning of state power.Douglas has his own set of ""isms"" that require concerted attention: mass mediated rationalism, scientism, technologism, credentialism, and expertism. People who make policies have little, if any, awareness of the actual way social processes evolve: agricultural policy is set by people who know little of farming, arid manufacturing policy is set by people who have never set foot on a factory floor. In light of this ""soaring average ignorance,"" it is little wonder that policy-making has Alice-in-Wonderland characteristics and effects.Douglas sees the notion of a welfare state as a contradiction in terms; its widespread insinuation into the culture is made possible by its weak mythological form and benign-sounding characteristics. In fact, welfare states in whatever form they appear have failed in their purpose: to redistribute income or increase real wealth. The megastates are the source of social instability and economic downturn. They grow like a tidal drift. They start out to correct the historical grievances of the laissez-faire states, only to increase the problems they seek to correct. In this, the welfare state is a weakened form of the totalitarian state, producing similarly unhappy results.Professor Douglas has produced a work of ""anti-policy"" - arguing that freedom leavened by an ordinary sense of self-interest and social concern can overcome the shortfalls of the megastates and their myth-making, self-serving, propensities.
Download or read book The Return of Science written by Philip Pomper and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays, historians discuss the applications of evolutionary theory to cultural, social, economic and political phenomena. William H. McNeill presents a magisterial statement about the convergence of the sciences toward an evolutionary worldview. Several contributors offer support for this thesis. Anthropologist Donald Brown and archaeologist Albert Naccache bring together the realms of biology and culture in examinations of evolved human features and modes of evolution. Demographer Noel Bonneuil and neuroscientist Alonso Pena apply mathematics to historical evolutionary processes such as the decision-making of human agents and cultural diffusion.
