Download or read book The Wise King written by Simon R. Doubleday and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating biography of Alfonso X, the 13th-century philosopher-king whose affinity for Islamic culture left an indelible mark on Western civilization "If I had been present at the Creation," the thirteenth-century Spanish philosopher-king Alfonso X is said to have stated, "Many faults in the universe would have been avoided." Known as El Sabio, "the Wise," Alfonso was renowned by friends and enemies alike for his sparkling intellect and extraordinary cultural achievements. In The Wise King, celebrated historian Simon R. Doubleday traces the story of the king's life and times, leading us deep into his emotional world and showing how his intense admiration for Spain's rich Islamic culture paved the way for the European Renaissance. In 1252, when Alfonso replaced his more militaristic father on the throne of Castile and Leóthe battle to reconquer Muslim territory on the Iberian Peninsula was raging fiercely. But even as he led his Christian soldiers onto the battlefield, Alfonso was seduced by the glories of Muslim Spain. His engagement with the Arabic-speaking culture of the South shaped his pursuit of astronomy, for which he was famed for centuries, and his profoundly humane vision of the world, which Dante, Petrarch, and later Italian humanists would inherit. A composer of lyric verses, and patron of works on board games, hunting, and the properties of stones, Alfonso is best known today for his Cantigas de Santa Marí/i> (Songs of Holy Mary), which offer a remarkable window onto his world. His ongoing struggles as a king and as a man were distilled-in art, music, literature, and architecture-into something sublime that speaks to us powerfully across the centuries. An intimate biography of the Spanish ruler in whom two cultures converged, The Wise King introduces readers to a Renaissance man before his time, whose creative energy in the face of personal turmoil and existential threats to his kingdom would transform the course of Western history.

Download or read book A Simple Matter of Salt written by Renate Lellep Fernandez and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do certain easily preventable diseases persist in the modern world? Renate Lellep Fernandez sheds light on this paradox by investigating the high incidence of iodine deficiency disease (IDD) among mountain villagers in northern Spain. Just as the mystery of non-prevention leads the author far beyond the confines of a single place, so are the experiences of these villagers rich in lessons for biocultural anthropology and public health in many contexts. The symptoms of iodine deficiency include not only the disfiguring goiters associated with the disease but also a catalog of more serious and even fatal complications. The burden of caring for victims of IDD has taxed the resources of this Spanish village beyond reason. Yet even though its people were—and are—eager for good health and quick to take advantage of modern medical treatment, which has long been available, until very recently they failed to learn that iodized salt prevents the disease. A Simple Matter of Salt unveils the social and political obstacles that have impeded the successful dissemination of preventive knowledge. Here are valuable implications for the prevention of other endemic diseases on a global scale. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Download or read book The Long Lingering Shadow written by Robert J. Cottrol and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students of American history know of the law’s critical role in systematizing a racial hierarchy in the United States. Showing that this history is best appreciated in a comparative perspective, The Long, Lingering Shadow looks at the parallel legal histories of race relations in the United States, Brazil, and Spanish America. Robert J. Cottrol takes the reader on a journey from the origins of New World slavery in colonial Latin America to current debates and litigation over affirmative action in Brazil and the United States, as well as contemporary struggles against racial discrimination and Afro-Latin invisibility in the Spanish-speaking nations of the hemisphere. Ranging across such topics as slavery, emancipation, scientific racism, immigration policies, racial classifications, and legal processes, Cottrol unravels a complex odyssey. By the eve of the Civil War, the U.S. slave system was rooted in a legal and cultural foundation of racial exclusion unmatched in the Western Hemisphere. That system’s legacy was later echoed in Jim Crow, the practice of legally mandated segregation. Jim Crow in turn caused leading Latin Americans to regard their nations as models of racial equality because their laws did not mandate racial discrimination— a belief that masked very real patterns of racism throughout the Americas. And yet, Cottrol says, if the United States has had a history of more-rigid racial exclusion, since the Second World War it has also had a more thorough civil rights revolution, with significant legal victories over racial discrimination. Cottrol explores this remarkable transformation and shows how it is now inspiring civil rights activists throughout the Americas.

Download or read book Contested Pasts written by Katharine Hodgkin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory. In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent.

Download or read book Writing Across Cultures written by Angel Rama and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ángel Rama was one of twentieth-century Latin America's most distinguished men of letters. Writing across Cultures is his comprehensive analysis of the varied sources of Latin American literature. Originally published in 1982, the book links Rama's work on Spanish American modernism with his arguments about the innovative nature of regionalist literature, and it foregrounds his thinking about the close relationship between literary movements, such as modernism or regionalism, and global trends in social and economic development. In Writing across Cultures, Rama extends the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz's theory of transculturation far beyond Cuba, bringing it to bear on regional cultures across Latin America, where new cultural arrangements have been forming among indigenous, African, and European societies for the better part of five centuries. Rama applies this concept to the work of the Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist José María Arguedas, whose writing drew on both Spanish and Quechua, Peru's two major languages and, by extension, cultures. Rama considered Arguedas's novel Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers) to be the most accomplished example of narrative transculturation in Latin America. Writing across Cultures is the second of Rama's books to be translated into English.

Download or read book Spanish Romanticism and the Uses of History written by Derek Flitter and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flitter examines those narratives within the intellectual parameters that defined them, probing the conceptual strategies by which writers represented history.

Download or read book To the Other written by Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best introduction available for students of one of the most important philosophers of this century."--"American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly." (Philosophy)

Download or read book The Master of the Prado written by Javier Sierra and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Author Javier Sierra embarks on a grand tour of the Prado museum in this historical novel that illuminates the fascinating mysteries behind some of the greatest paintings in the world--complete with gorgeous, full-color inserts of artwork by Raphael, Boticelli, and other masters"--

Download or read book Bilingual written by François Grosjean and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-15 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether in family life, social interactions, or business negotiations, half the people in the world speak more than one language every day. Yet many myths persist about bilingualism and bilinguals. In a lively and entertaining book, an international authority on bilingualism explores the many facets of life with two or more languages.

Download or read book Malevolent Tales written by Clemente Palma and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The State and the Tributary Mode of Production written by John F. Haldon and published by Verso. This book was released on 1993 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking critique of both traditional and Marxist notions of feudalism and of the pre-capitalist state, John Haldon considers the configuration of state and social relations in medieval Europe and Mughal India as well as in Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. He argues that a Marxist reading of the pre-capitalist state can take account of the autonomy of power relations and avoid economic reductionism while still focusing on the forms of tribute which sustained the ruling power. Haldon explores the conflicts to which these gave rise and shows the Ottoman state elite, often held to be a clear example of independence from underlying social relations, to be deeply enmeshed in economic relationships and the extraction of tribute. Haldon argues that feudalism was the specifically European form of a much more widely diffused tributary mode, whose characteristic social relations and structural constraints can be seen at work in the Byzantine, Ottoman and Mughal empires as well. While acknowledging the range of ideological and cultural variation within and between these examples of the tributary mode, Haldon denies the thesis that such “superstructural” variations themselves yielded fundamentally contrasting social relations.

Download or read book Media Technology and Literature in the Nineteenth Century written by Dr Colette Colligan and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Operating at the intersection where new technology meets literature, this collection discovers the relationship among image, sound, and touch in the long nineteenth century. The chapters speak to the special mixed-media properties of literature, while exploring the important interconnections of science, technology, and art at the historical moment when media was being theorized, debated, and scrutinized. Each chapter focuses on a specific visual, acoustic, or haptic dimension of media, while also calling attention to the relationships among the three. Famous works such as Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and Shelley's Frankenstein are discussed alongside a range of lesser-known literary, scientific, and pornographic writings. Topics include the development of a print culture for the visually impaired; the relationship between photography and narrative; the kaleidoscope and modern urban experience; Christmas gift books; poetry, painting and music as remediated forms; the interface among the piano, telegraph, and typewriter; Ernst Heinrich Weber's model of rationalized tactility; and how the shift from visual to auditory telegraphic instruments amplified anxieties about the place of women in nineteenth-century information networks. Full of surprising insights and connections, the collection offers new impetus for stimulating historical conversations and debates about nineteenth-century media, while also contributing fresh perspectives on new media and (re)mediation today.

Download or read book Afro Argentine Discourse written by Marvin A. Lewis and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Afro-Argentine Discourse, Marvin A. Lewis attempts to write blacks back into the literary history of Argentina by treating in depth, for the first time, the written expression of Argentines of African descent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because their contributions are overlooked or minimized in most literary histories, it is often assumed that blacks had little or no part in the development of Argentine literature. Through original archival research, Lewis corrects this erroneous assumption by examining texts never before made available to the academic community. Afro-Argentine Discourse investigates a new dimension of the black experience in the Americas and will stir much interest and debate regarding the black presence in Argentina.

Download or read book Feminine Endings written by Susan McClary and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking collection of essays in feminist music criticism, this book addresses problems of gender and sexuality in repertoires ranging from the early seventeenth century to rock and performance art. ". . . this is a major book . . . [McClary's] achievement borders on the miraculous." The Village Voice"No one will read these essays without thinking about and hearing music in new and interesting ways. Exciting reading for adventurous students and staid professionals." Choice"Feminine Endings, a provocative 'sexual politics' of Western classical or art music, rocks conservative musicology at its core. No review can do justice to the wealth of ideas and possibilities [McClary's] book presents. All music-lovers should read it, and cheer." The Women's Review of Books"McClary writes with a racy, vigorous, and consistently entertaining style. . . . What she has to say specifically about the music and the text is sharp, accurate, and telling; she hears what takes place musically with unusual sensitivity."-The New York Review of Books

Download or read book Laocoonte devorado written by and published by Artium Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Partiendo del personaje de Laocoonte, devorado por la violencia desatada entre dos ciudades helénicas, la muestra, además de incluir la serie de "Los desastres de la guerra", de Goya, reúne a más de treinta artistas, nacionales e internacionales, comprometidos con su tiempo, cuya mirada nos enfrenta a situaciones y sentimientos que brotan de la sinrazón, del miedo, de la amenaza, situaciones que proceden de la política, esto es, de la instancia pública que debería ser garante de la paz, la libertad de actuación y pensamiento, y la concordia, y que, si bien han existido en todas las épocas, alcanzan en nuestro tiempo unas cotas inimaginables de impunidad -irresponsabilidad- y amplitud -genocidio.

Download or read book Ethnic Humor Around the World written by Christie Davies and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features a scholarly study of various societies' hostile humor. This book takes a serious look at humor, drawing on the work of psychologists, folklorists, and philosophers, but also is intended for those who are curious as to why we laugh at ethnic jokes.

Download or read book Economic and biological interactions in pre industrial Europe from the 13th to the 18th century written by Istituto internazionale di storia economica F. Datini. Settimana di studio and published by Firenze University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: