Download or read book Humboldt s Cosmos written by Gerard Helferich and published by Tantor eBooks. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1799 to 1804, German naturalist and adventurer Alexander von Humboldt conducted the first extensive scientific exploration of Latin America. At the completion of his arduous 6,000-mile journey, he was feted by Thomas Jefferson, presented to Napoleon and, after the publication of his findings, hailed as the greatest scientific genius of his age. Humboldt’s Cosmos tells the story of this extraordinary man who was equal parts Einstein and Livingstone, and of the adventure that defined his life. Gerard Helferich vividly recounts Humboldt’s expedition through the Amazon, over the Andes, and across Mexico and Cuba, highlighting his paradigm-changing discoveries along the way. During the course of the expedition, Humboldt cataloged more than 60,000 plants, set an altitude record climbing the volcano Chimborazo, and introduced millions of Europeans and Americans to the great cultures of the Inca and the Aztecs. In the process, he also revolutionized geology and laid the groundwork for modern sciences such as climatology, oceanography, and geography. His contributions would profoundly influence future greats such as Charles Darwin and shape the course of science for centuries to come. Humboldt’s Cosmos is a dramatic tribute to one of history’s most audacious adventurers, who, as Stephen Jay Gould noted, "may well have been the world’s most famous and influential intellectual."

Download or read book Alexander von Humboldt written by Andreas W. Daum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-22 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging account of the life and work of the legendary polymath Alexander von Humboldt In this lucid biography, Andreas Daum offers a succinct and novel interpretation of the life and oeuvre of Alexander von Humboldt (1769―1859). A Prussian nobleman born into the age of European Enlightenment, Humboldt was a contemporary of Napoleon, Simón Bolívar, and Charles Darwin. As a naturalist and scholar, he traveled the world, from the Americas to Central Asia, and recorded his observations in multiple volumes. Humboldt is still admired today for his interdisciplinary outreach and ecological awareness. Moving beyond the conventional views of Humboldt as either intellectual superhero or gentleman colonizer, Daum’s incisive account focuses on Humboldt in the context of the tumultuous period of history in which he lived. Humboldt embodied the contradictions that marked the age of Atlantic Revolutions. He became a critic of slavery and embraced the emerging civil society but remained close to authoritarian rulers. He dedicated his life to scientific research yet was driven by emotional impulses and pleaded for an aesthetic appreciation of nature. Daum introduces a man passionately striving to establish a “cosmic” understanding of nature while grappling with the era’s explosion of knowledge. This book provides the first concise biography of Humboldt, covering all periods of his life, exploring his personality, the vast range of his works, and his intellectual networks. Daum helps us understand Humboldt as a seminal historical figure and illuminates the role of science at the dawn of the global world.

Download or read book The Humboldt Current written by Aaron Sachs and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cornell University history and American studies professor Aaron Sachs offers a masterly intellectual history of the impact of 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt on American culture and science.

Download or read book Transatlantic Echoes written by Rex Clark and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-04 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a world traveler, bestselling writer, and versatile researcher, a European salon sensation, and global celebrity. Yet the enormous literary echo he generated has remained largely unexplored. Humboldt inspired generations of authors, from Goethe and Byron to Enzensberger and García Márquez, to reflect on cultural difference, colonial ideology, and the relation between aesthetics and science. This collection of one-hundred texts features tales of adventure, travel reports, novellas, memoirs, letters, poetry, drama, screenplays, and even comics—many for the first time in English. The selection covers the foundational myths and magical realism of Latin America, the intellectual independence of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Whitman in the United States, discourses in Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, East, and West Germany, as well as recent films and fiction. This documented source book addresses scholars in cultural and postcolonial studies as well as readers in history and comparative literature.

Download or read book The Other Worlds of Hector Berlioz written by Inge van Rij and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berlioz frequently explored other worlds in his writings, from the imagined exotic enchantments of New Zealand to the rings of Saturn where Beethoven's spirit was said to reside. The settings for his musical works are more conservative, and his adventurousness has instead been located in his mastery of the orchestra, as both orchestrator and conductor. Inge van Rij's book takes a new approach to Berlioz's treatment of the orchestra by exploring the relationship between these two forms of control – the orchestra as abstract sound, and the orchestra as collective labour and instrumental technology. Van Rij reveals that the negotiation between worlds characteristic of Berlioz's writings also plays out in his music: orchestral technology may be concealed or ostentatiously displayed; musical instruments might be industrialised or exoticised; and the orchestral musicians themselves move between being a society of distinctive individuals and being a machine played by Berlioz himself.

Download or read book Between the Pipes written by Randi Druzin and published by Greystone Books. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Canadian sportswriter profiles twelve legendary NHL goaltenders in a book that “reveals the changing face of professional hockey in the last half century” (Publishers Weekly). Some NHL goalies are great and others are intriguing characters, but a select few are legends because they're both. Such is the case with the dozen players featured here. In Between the Pipes, veteran hocky writer Randi Druzin profiles these athletes, revealing the traits that make each one unique. Gump Worsley defied the laws of biomechanics by being nimble despite having a cabbage-shaped body. He was also one of the funniest men ever to start in goal. Glenn Hall used to wrestle with a trainer in the dressing room before games and Jacques Plante refused to stay at a particular Toronto hotel. Despite their quirks, these twelve goalies are among the best the game has ever seen. With wit and verve, Druzin paints unforgettable portraits of these masked mavericks.

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 2011-11-15 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humboldt offered the world a vision of humans & nature as integrated halves of a single whole. He espoused the idea that while the univerise of nature exists apart from human purpose, its beauty & order are human achievements. Laura Dassow Walls traces the emergence of this philosophy to Humboldt's 1799 journey to America.

Download or read book Brave Companions written by David McCullough and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than two decades, McCullough has fascinated readers with portraits of exceptional men and women who not only have shaped the course of history but whose stories express much that is timeless about the human condition. From Harriet Beecher Stowe to a young Theodore Roosevelt, the subjects possess a sense of purpose that make for unforgettable reading.

Download or read book The Pacific Historian written by and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Open Court written by Paul Carus and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Open court written by and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Historical Records of the 72d Highlanders Now 1st Battalion Seaforth Highlanders 1777 1886 written by and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Home Town News written by Sally Foreman Griffith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1989-01-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1895, a 27-year-old journalist named William Allen White returned to his home town of Emporia, Kansas, to edit a little down-at-the-heels newspaper he had just purchased for $3,000. "The new editor," he wrote in his first editorial, "hopes to live here until he is the old editor, until some of the visions which rise before him as he dreams shall have come true." White did become "the old editor," remaining with the Emporia Gazette until his death 50 years later. During his long tenure he gained nation-wide fame as an author, political leader, and social commentator. But more than anything else, he became the national embodiment of the small-town newspaperman and all the treasured virtues that small towns represented in the minds of Americans. Home Town News is both a fascinating biography and a compelling social history. As Sally Foreman Griffith shows, White's popular image--kindly yet crusading, fiercely independent yet deeply rooted in his community--doesn't do justice to the man's complexity. Shrewdly carving out a position of leadership in a faction-torn town, White carefully shaped his paper's vision of its community to promote local economic growth, Republican political control, and social harmony. With his emergence as a leader among Midwestern progressives, he carefully adapted the ideas and rhetoric of small-town boosterism to changing economic realities. The book uses White's career to help us understand the role of journalism--and the journalist--in turn-of-the-century American culture. Far from being a simple chronicler of daily events, the small-town newspaperman carried considerable weight in his community. He was a leading force in local business, a galvanizing influence in civic life, and a key political activist. As giant corporations came to dominate the national economy, the newspaperman played a pivotal yet ambivalent role in the resulting social transformation: he sought to preserve local autonomy even as his paper introduced his readers to mass-produced consumer goods. Home Town News also tells the story of Emporia, Kansas, during this period of social change. Its richly textured descriptions of small-town life take us beyond abstractions like "modernization," "progressivism," and "boosterism." As we observe the Emporia Street Fair of 1899, the heated controversy over the morality of a local doctor in 1902, and the elaborate campaign to build a Y.M.C.A. in 1914, we gain new insights into the processes that have shaped modern America.

Download or read book The Story of a Scandinavian Summer written by Katharine E. Tyler and published by . This book was released on 1881 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Minding the Law written by Anthony G. AMSTERDAM and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable collaboration, one of the nation's leading civil rights lawyers joins forces with one of the world's foremost cultural psychologists to put American constitutional law into an American cultural context. By close readings of key Supreme Court opinions, they show how storytelling tactics and deeply rooted mythic structures shape the Court's decisions about race, family law, and the death penalty. Minding the Law explores crucial psychological processes involved in the work of lawyers and judges: deciding whether particular cases fit within a legal rule ("categorizing"), telling stories to justify one's claims or undercut those of an adversary ("narrative"), and tailoring one's language to be persuasive without appearing partisan ("rhetorics"). Because these processes are not unique to the law, courts' decisions cannot rest solely upon legal logic but must also depend vitally upon the underlying culture's storehouse of familiar tales of heroes and villains. But a culture's stock of stories is not changeless. Amsterdam and Bruner argue that culture itself is a dialectic constantly in progress, a conflict between the established canon and newly imagined "possible worlds." They illustrate the swings of this dialectic by a masterly analysis of the Supreme Court's race-discrimination decisions during the past century. A passionate plea for heightened consciousness about the way law is practiced and made, Minding the Law/tilte will be welcomed by a new generation concerned with renewing law's commitment to a humane justice. Table of Contents: 1. Invitation to a Journey 2. On Categories 3. Categorizing at the Supreme Court Missouri v. Jenkins and Michael H. v. Gerald D. 4. On Narrative 5. Narratives at Court Prigg v. Pennsylvania and Freeman v. Pitts 6. On Rhetorics 7. The Rhetorics of Death McCleskey v. Kemp 8. On the Dialectic of Culture 9. Race, the Court, and America's Dialectic From Plessy through Brown to Pitts and Jenkins 10. Reflections on a Voyage Appendix: Analysis of Nouns and Verbs in the Prigg, Pitts, and Brown Opinions Notes Table of Cases Index Reviews of this book: Amsterdam, a distinguished Supreme Court litigator, wanted to do more than share the fruits of his practical experience. He also wanted to...get students to think about thinking like a lawyer...To decode what he calls "law-think," he enlisted the aid of the venerable cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner...[and] the collaboration has resulted in [this] unusual book. --James Ryerson, Lingua Franca Reviews of this book: It is hard to imagine a better time for the publication of Minding the Law, a brilliant dissection of the court's work by two eminent scholars, law professor Anthony G. Amsterdam and cultural anthropologist Jerome Bruner...Issue by issue, case by case, Amsterdam and Bruner make mincemeat of the court's handling of the most important constitutional issue of the modern era: how to eradicate the American legacy of race discrimination, especially against blacks. --Edward Lazarus, Los Angeles Times Book Review Reviews of this book: This book is a gem...[Its thesis] is easily stated but remarkably unrecognized among a shockingly large number of lawyers and law professors: law is a storytelling enterprise thoroughly entrenched in culture....Whereas critical legal theorists have talked among themselves for the past two decades, Amsterdam and Bruner seek to engage all of us in a dialogue. For that, they should be applauded. --Daniel R. Williams, New York Law Journal Reviews of this book: In Minding the Law, Anthony Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner show us how the Supreme Court creates the magic of inevitability. They are angry at what they see. Their book is premised on the conviction that many of the choices made in Supreme Court opinions 'lack any justification in the text'...Their method is to analyze the text of opinions and to show how the conclusions reached do not always follow from the logic of the argument. They also show how the Court casts its rhetoric like a spell, mesmerizing its audience, and making the highly contingent shine with the light of inevitability. --Mitchell Goodman, News and Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina) Reviews of this book: What do controversial Supreme Court decisions and classic age-old tales of adultery, villainy, and combat have in common? Everything--at least in the eyes of [Amsterdam and Bruner]. In this substantial study, which is equal parts dense and entertaining, the authors use theoretical discussions of literary technique and myths to expose what they see as the secret intentions of Supreme Court opinions...Studying how lawyers and judges employ the various literary devices at their disposal and noting the similarities between legal thinking and classic tactics of storytelling and persuasion, they believe, can have 'astonishing consciousness-retrieving effects'...The agile minds of Amsterdam and Bruner, clearly storehouses of knowledge on a range of subjects, allow an approach that might sound far-fetched occasionally but pays dividends in the form of gained perspective--and amusement. --Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Washington Times Reviews of this book: Stories and the way judges-intentionally or not-categorize and spin them, are as responsible for legal rulings as logic and precedent, Mr. Amsterdam and Mr. Bruner said. Their novel attempt to reach into the psyche of...members of the Supreme Court is part of a growing interest in a long-neglected and cryptic subject: the psychology of judicial decision-making. --Patricia Cohen, New York Times Most law professors teach by the 'case method,' or say they do. In this fascinating book, Anthony Amsterdam--a lawyer--and Jerome Bruner--a psychologist--expose how limited most case 'analysis' really is, as they show how much can be learned through the close reading of the phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that constitute an opinion (or other pieces of legal writing). Reading this book will undoubtedly make one a better lawyer, and teacher of lawyers. But the book's value and interest goes far beyond the legal profession, as it analyzes the way that rhetoric--in law, politics, and beyond--creates pictures and convictions in the minds of readers and listeners. --Sanford Levinson, author of Constitutional Faith Tony Amsterdam, the leader in the legal campaign against the death penalty, and Jerome Bruner, who has struggled for equal justice in education for forty years, have written a guide to demystifying legal reasoning. With clarity, wit, and immense learning, they reveal the semantic tricks lawyers and judges sometimes use--consciously and unconsciously--to justify the results they want to reach. --Jack Greenberg, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

Download or read book Conquest and Reclamation in the Transatlantic Imagination written by Luz Elena Ramirez and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the imperial spectacles and startling reversals of fortune related in William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), and investigates how these accounts inspired fictional adaptations by George A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and George Griffith. The revision of history in the Amerindian adventure both entertained young transatlantic audiences and was a vehicle to attract tourism and investment in countries such as Mexico and Peru. Henty, Haggard, and Griffith, moreover, used their tales of adventure as a platform to impart British values to their readers. Such values compel the characters and narrators of the novels discussed to act as cultural mediators, to acquire indigenous languages and adopt native ways of being, and, in several of the romance adventures under consideration, to marry Mexican or Incan noblewomen. Part I, Conquest, examines George Henty’s By Right of Conquest: Or, With Cortez in Mexico (1891), H. Rider Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), and George Griffith’s Virgin of the Sun: A Tale of the Conquest of Peru (1898). Part II, Reclamation, argues that English re-writings of history work to eclipse the Spanish in Haggard’s Virgin the Sun (1922), Henty’s Treasure of the Incas (1902) and Griffith’s Romance of Golden Star (1897).

Download or read book Colburn s United Service Magazine and Naval and Military Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 1842 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: