Download or read book The Alchemy of Conquest written by Ralph Bauer and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about the Americas during the early modern period. As sailors, conquerors, travelers, and missionaries were exploring "new worlds," and claiming ownership of them, early modern men of science redefined what it means to "discover" something. Bauer explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the discovery of the Americas and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. The book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, José de Acosta, Nicolás Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.
Download or read book The Scientific Conquest of Death written by Immortality Institute and published by Bruce Klein. This book was released on 2004 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteen scientists, doctors and philosophers share their perspective on what is arguably the most significant scientific development that humanity has ever faced - the eradication of aging and mortality. This anthology is both a gentle introduction to the multitude of cutting-edge scientific developments, and a thoughtful, multidisciplinary discussion of the ethics, politics and philosophy behind the scientific conquest of aging.
Download or read book Whiteness of a Different Color written by Matthew Frye Jacobson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities, in becoming American, were re-racialized to become Caucasian.
Download or read book Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold written by Tom Shachtman and published by HMH. This book was released on 2000-12-12 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A lovely, fascinating book, which brings science to life.” —Alan Lightman Combining science, history, and adventure, Tom Shachtman “holds the reader’s attention with the skill of a novelist” as he chronicles the story of humans’ four-centuries-long quest to master the secrets of cold (Scientific American). “A disarming portrait of an exquisite, ferocious, world-ending extreme,” Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold demonstrates how temperature science produced astonishing scientific insights and applications that have revolutionized civilization (Kirkus Reviews). It also illustrates how scientific advancement, fueled by fortuitous discoveries and the efforts of determined individuals, has allowed people to adapt to—and change—the environments in which they live and work, shaping man’s very understanding of, and relationship, with the world. This “truly wonderful book” was adapted into an acclaimed documentary underwritten by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, directed by British Emmy Award winner David Dugan, and aired on the BBC and PBS’s Nova in 2008 (Library Journal). “An absorbing account to chill out with.” —Booklist
Download or read book Alchemical Belief written by Bruce Janacek and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-08-21 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did it mean to believe in alchemy in early modern England? In this book, Bruce Janacek considers alchemical beliefs in the context of the writings of Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole. Rather than examine alchemy from a scientific or medical perspective, Janacek presents it as integrated into the broader political, philosophical, and religious upheavals of the first half of the seventeenth century, arguing that the interest of these elite figures in alchemy was part of an understanding that supported their national—and in some cases royalist—loyalty and theological orthodoxy. Janacek investigates how and why individuals who supported or were actually placed at the traditional center of power in England’s church and state believed in the relevance of alchemy at a time when their society, their government, their careers, and, in some cases, their very lives were at stake.
Download or read book Stories written by Andrew Lytle and published by . This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gunpowder written by Jack Kelly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Chinese alchemists fashioned the first manmade explosion sometime during the tenth century, no one could have foreseen its full revolutionary potential. Invented to frighten evil spirits rather than fuel guns or bombs-neither of which had been thought of yet-their simple mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal went on to make the modern world possible. As word of its explosive properties spread from Asia to Europe, from pyrotechnics to battleships, it paved the way for Western exploration, hastened the end of feudalism and the rise of the nation state, and greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution. With dramatic immediacy, novelist and journalist Jack Kelly conveys both the distant time in which the "devil's distillate" rose to conquer the world, and brings to rousing life the eclectic cast of characters who played a role in its epic story, including Michelangelo, Edward III, Vasco da Gama, Cortez, Guy Fawkes, Alfred Nobel, and E.I. DuPont. A must-read for history fans and military buffs alike, Gunpowder brings together a rich terrain of cultures and technological innovations with authoritative research and swashbuckling style.
Download or read book Transnational Perspectives on the Conquest and Colonization of Latin America written by Jenny Mander and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging geographically from Tierra del Fuego to California and the Caribbean, and historically from early European sightings and the utopian projects of would-be colonizers to the present-day cultural politics of migrant communities and international relations, this volume presents a rich variety of case studies and scholarly perspectives on the interplay of diverse cultures in the Americas since the European conquest. Subjects covered include documentary and archaeological evidence of cultural interaction, the collection of native artifacts and the role of museums in the interpretation of indigenous traditions, the cultural impact of Christian missions and the representation of indigenous cultures in writings addressed to European readers, the development of Latin American artistic traditions and the incorporation of motifs from European classical antiquity into modern popular culture, the contribution of Afro-descendants to the cultural mix of Latin America and the erasure of the Hispanic heritage from cultural perceptions of California since the nineteenth century. By offering accessible and well-illustrated accounts of a wide range of particular cases, the volume aims to stimulate thinking about historical and methodological issues, which can be exploited in a teaching context as well as in the furtherance of research projects in a comparative and transnational framework.
Download or read book Inventing the American Astronaut written by Matthew H. Hersch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who were the men who led America's first expeditions into space? Soldiers? Daredevils? The public sometimes imagined them that way: heroic military men and hot-shot pilots without the capacity for doubt, fear, or worry. However, early astronauts were hard-working and determined professionals - 'organization men' - who were calm, calculating, and highly attuned to the politics and celebrity of the Space Race. Many would have been at home in corporate America - and until the first rockets carried humans into space, some seemed to be headed there. Instead, they strapped themselves to missiles and blasted skyward, returning with a smile and an inspiring word for the press. From the early days of Project Mercury to the last moon landing, this lively history demystifies the American astronaut while revealing the warring personalities, raw ambition, and complex motives of the men who were the public face of the space program.
Download or read book Cosmic Alchemy written by C. C. Zain and published by Brotherhood of Light Lessons. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the seventeenth book in a series of 21 Brotherhood of Light Courses by C. C. Zain on the Hermetic Sciences, Astrology, Alchemy, Tarot, Kabbalah and the Occult. Each individual is a unique and necessary member of a world society. Learning to appropriately view oneself as an active member of the whole leads to the recognition of a power to influence the progress of society. This book teaches how to recognize that by working energetically towards the realization of God's Evolutionary Plan each person receives benefit. Cosmic alchemy is used to transform the energies of society as a whole into channels of action that cultivate the highest development of its members. The book explains how, and with what tools, the Cosmic Alchemist works to create a world where there is ample opportunity for all people to make both intellectual and spiritual progress, and illuminates the often misunderstood concept of spirituality.
Download or read book We Sell Drugs written by Suzanna Reiss and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-08 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of US-led international drug control provides new perspectives on the economic, ideological, and political foundations of a Cold War American empire. US officials assumed the helm of international drug control after World War II at a moment of unprecedented geopolitical influence embodied in the growing economic clout of its pharmaceutical industry. We Sell Drugs is a study grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca-leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching from Peru and Bolivia into the United States. More than a narrow biography of one famous plant and its equally famous derivative products—Coca-Cola and cocaine—this book situates these commodities within the larger landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Suzanna Reiss provides a geographic and legal basis for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality. The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is largely premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the drug itself. Drug control is a powerful tool for ordering international trade, national economies, and society’s habits and daily lives. In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, hegemony, and racial equality, We Sell Drugs insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a major weapon in asserting control of domestic and international affairs.
Download or read book Dance and Alchemy written by Damiano Fina and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The days of hunting and dancing around the fire are still in our cells, along with ancient world views. Alchemy was not born as a science for its own sake, as we know it today, but it bloomed from the conquest of matter through fire and guarded the initiatory secret that unites humanity with sky. In "Dance and Alchemy" Damiano Fina takes dance back to its origins to illuminate its future, without neglecting the history of performance at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. According to the author, today it is necessary to bring the performing arts back to the sacred and ritual: "There is an immeasurable distance between those who participate in the sacred ritual and those who, instead, enjoy as an aesthete the beauty or horror of scenery, music, dance and opera. Not only is it fundamental to bring the performance back to its ritual origins, but it is also necessary to look for a way to restore the relationship with the sacred in contemporary society, which has desacralized its festivities, its rites of passage and its relationship with the universe." In order to restore this link between the sacred and the profane, art must take an interest in pedagogy. Thus the FÜYA method was born, because dance and performance are educational.
Download or read book Bress n Nyam Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth Generation Farmer written by Matthew Raiford and published by The Countryman Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 100 heirloom recipes from a dynamic chef and farmer working the lands of his great-great-great grandfather. From Hot Buttermilk Biscuits and Sweet Potato Pie to Salmon Cakes on Pepper Rice and Gullah Fish Stew, Gullah Geechee food is an essential cuisine of American history. It is the culinary representation of the ocean, rivers, and rich fertile loam in and around the coastal South. From the Carolinas to Georgia and Florida, this is where descendants of enslaved Africans came together to make extraordinary food, speaking the African Creole language called Gullah Geechee. In this groundbreaking and beautiful cookbook, Matthew Raiford pays homage to this cuisine that nurtured his family for seven generations. In 2010, Raiford’s Nana handed over the deed to the family farm to him and his sister, and Raiford rose to the occasion, nurturing the farm that his great-great-great grandfather, a freed slave, purchased in 1874. In this collection of heritage and updated recipes, he traces a history of community and family brought together by food.
Download or read book The Alchemist written by Paulo Coelho and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A special 25th anniversary edition of the extraordinary international bestseller, including a new Foreword by Paulo Coelho. Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder into an inspiring tale of self-discovery, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations. Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different—and far more satisfying—than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.
Download or read book The Passage to Cosmos written by Laura Dassow Walls and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explorer, scientist, writer, and humanist, Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous intellectual of the age that began with Napoleon and ended with Darwin. With Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, Humboldt offered to the world his vision of humans and nature as integrated halves of a single whole. In it, Humboldt espoused the idea that, while the universe of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty and order, the very idea of the whole it composes, are human achievements: cosmos comes into being in the dance of world and mind, subject and object, science and poetry. Humboldt’s science laid the foundations for ecology and inspired the theories of his most important scientific disciple, Charles Darwin. In the United States, his ideas shaped the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman. They helped spark the American environmental movement through followers like John Muir and George Perkins Marsh. And they even bolstered efforts to free the slaves and honor the rights of Indians. Laura Dassow Walls here traces Humboldt’s ideas for Cosmos to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world’s peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. In reclaiming Humboldt’s transcultural and transdisciplinary project, Walls situates America in a lively and contested field of ideas, actions, and interests, and reaches beyond to a new worldview that integrates the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities. To the end of his life, Humboldt called himself “half an American,” but ironically his legacy has largely faded in the United States. The Passage to Cosmos will reintroduce this seminal thinker to a new audience and return America to its rightful place in the story of his life, work, and enduring legacy.
Download or read book The Alchemy of Conquest written by Ralph Bauer and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores Bacon's idea that the discovery of America was not as important as its conquest; and so with the rest of the western world's discoveries, the "conquest of nature."
Download or read book The Years of Rice and Salt written by Kim Stanley Robinson and published by Spectra. This book was released on 2003-06-03 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the same unique vision that brought his now classic Mars trilogy to vivid life, bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly different from the one we know. . . . “A thoughtful, magisterial alternate history from one of science fiction’s most important writers.”—The New York Times Book Review It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur—the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if the plague had killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been—one that stretches across centuries, sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, and spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson navigates a world where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions, while Christianity is merely a historical footnote. Probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power—and even love—in this bold New World. “Exceptional and engrossing.”—New York Post “Ambitious . . . ingenious.”—Newsday
