EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book American Nations

    Book Details:
  • Author : Colin Woodard
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2012-09-25
  • ISBN : 0143122029
  • Pages : 401 pages

Download or read book American Nations written by Colin Woodard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • A New Republic Best Book of the Year • The Globalist Top Books of the Year • Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven “nations” that continue to shape North America According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of any hotly contested election in our history.

Book Narratives of Persistence

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lee Panich
  • Publisher : University of Arizona Press
  • Release : 2021-04-13
  • ISBN : 0816543224
  • Pages : 241 pages

Download or read book Narratives of Persistence written by Lee Panich and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narratives of Persistence charts the remarkable persistence of California's Ohlone and Paipai people over the past five centuries. Lee M. Panich draws connections between the events and processes of the deeper past and the way the Ohlone and Paipai today understand their own histories and identities.

Book Persistent Traditions

    Book Details:
  • Author : Luc W.S.W. Amkreutz
  • Publisher : Sidestone Press
  • Release : 2013-12-19
  • ISBN : 9088902038
  • Pages : 550 pages

Download or read book Persistent Traditions written by Luc W.S.W. Amkreutz and published by Sidestone Press. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The adoption of agriculture is one of the major developments in human history. Archaeological studies have demonstrated that the trajectories of Neolithisation in Northwest Europe were diverse. This book presents a study into the archaeology of the communities involved in the process of Neolithisation in the Lower Rhine Area (5500-2500 cal BC). It elucidates the role played by the indigenous communities in relation to their environmental context and in view of the changes that becoming Neolithic brought about. This work brings together a comprehensive array of excavated archaeological sites in the Lower Rhine Area. Their analysis shows that the succession of Late Mesolithic, Swifterbant culture, Hazendonk group and Vlaardingen culture societies represents a continuous long-term tradition of inhabitation of the wetlands and wetland margins of this area, forming a culturally continuous record of communities in the transition to agriculture. After demonstrating the diversity of the Mesolithic, the subsequent developments regarding Neolithisation are studied from an indigenous perspective. Foregrounding the relationship between local communities and the dynamic wetland landscape, the study shows that the archaeological evidence of regional inhabitation points to long-term flexible behaviour and pragmatic decisions being made concerning livelihood, food economy and mobility. This disposition also influenced how the novel elements of Neolithisation were incorporated. Animal husbandry, crop cultivation and sedentism were an addition to the existing broad spectrum economy but were incorporated within a set of integrative strategies. For the interpretation of Neolithisation this study offers a complementary approach to existing research. Instead of arguing for a short transition based on the economic importance of domesticates and cultigens at sites, this study emphasises the persistent traditions of the communities involved. New elements, instead of bringing about radical changes, are shown to be attuned to existing hunter-gatherer practices. By documenting indications of the mentalité of the inhabitants of the wetlands, it is demonstrated that their mindset remained essentially ‘Mesolithic’ for millennia. This book is accompanied by a separate 422 page volume containing the appendices. These constitute a comprehensive inventory of 159, mostly excavated archaeological sites in the Lower Rhine Area.

Book Cultures Merging

Download or read book Cultures Merging written by Eric L. Jones and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Economists agree about many things--contrary to popular opinion--but the majority agree about culture only in the sense that they no longer give it much thought." So begins the first chapter of Cultures Merging, in which Eric Jones--one of the world's leading economic historians--takes an eloquent, pointed, and personal look at the question of whether culture determines economics or is instead determined by it. Bringing immense learning and originality to the issue of cultural change over the long-term course of global economic history, Jones questions cultural explanations of much social behavior in Europe, East Asia, the United States, Australia, and the Middle East. He also examines contemporary globalization, arguing that while centuries of economic competition have resulted in the merging of cultures into fewer and larger units, these changes have led to exciting new syntheses. Culture matters to economic outcomes, Jones argues, but cultures in turn never stop responding to market forces, even if some elements of culture stubbornly persist beyond the time when they can be explained by current economic pressures. In the longer run, however, cultures show a fluidity that will astonish some cultural determinists. Jones concludes that culture's "ghostly transit through history" is much less powerful than noneconomists often claim, yet it has a greater influence than economists usually admit. The product of a lifetime of reading and thinking on culture and economics, a work of history and an analysis of the contemporary world, Cultures Merging will be essential reading for anyone concerned about the interaction of cultures and markets around the world.

Book Albion s Seed

    Book Details:
  • Author : David Hackett Fischer
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 1991-03-14
  • ISBN : 019974369X
  • Pages : 981 pages

Download or read book Albion s Seed written by David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-14 with total page 981 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Book Pestilence and Persistence

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kathleen Louann Hull
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2009
  • ISBN : 0520258479
  • Pages : 390 pages

Download or read book Pestilence and Persistence written by Kathleen Louann Hull and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative examination of the Yosemite Indian experience in California poses broad challenges to our understanding of the complex, destructive encounters that took place between colonists and native peoples across North America. Looking closely at archaeological data, native oral tradition, and historical accounts, Kathleen Hull focuses in particular on the timing, magnitude, and consequences of the introduction of lethal infectious diseases to Native communities. The Yosemite Indian case suggests that epidemic disease penetrated small-scale hunting and gathering groups of the interior of North America prior to face-to-face encounters with colonists. It also suggests, however, that even the catastrophic depopulation that resulted from these diseases was insufficient to undermine the culture and identity of many Native groups. Instead, engagement in colonial economic ventures often proved more destructive to traditional indigenous lifeways. Hull provides further context for these central issues by examining ten additional cases of colonial-era population decline in groups ranging from Iroquoian speakers of the Northeast to complex chiefdoms of the Southeast and Puebloan peoples of the Southwest.

Book The Persistence of Code in Game Engine Culture

Download or read book The Persistence of Code in Game Engine Culture written by Eric Freedman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its unique focus on video game engines, the data-driven architectures of game development and play, this innovative textbook examines the impact of software on everyday life and explores the rise of engine-driven culture. Through a series of case studies, Eric Freedman lays out a clear methodology for studying the game development pipeline, and uses the video game engine as a pathway for media scholars and practitioners to navigate the complex terrain of software practice. Examining several distinct software ecosystems that include the proprietary efforts of Amazon, Apple, Capcom, Epic Games and Unity Technologies, and the unique ways that game engines are used in non-game industries, Freedman illustrates why engines matter. The studies bind together designers and players, speak to the labors of the game industry, value the work of both global and regional developers, and establish critical connection points between software and society. Freedman has crafted a much-needed entry point for students new to code, and a research resource for scholars and teachers working in media industries, game development and new media.

Book The Persistence of Technology

Download or read book The Persistence of Technology written by Stefan Krebs and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Repair, reuse and disposal are closely interlinked phenomena related to the service lives and persistence of technologies. When technical artefacts become old and worn out, decisions have to be taken: is it necessary, worthwhile or even possible to maintain and repair, reuse or dismantle them - or must they be discarded? These decisions depend on factors such as the availability of second-hand markets, repair infrastructures and dismantling or disposal facilities. In telling the stories of China's power grid, Canadian telephones, German automobiles and India's shipbreaking business, among others, the contributions in this volume highlight the persistence of technologies and show that maintenance and repair are not obsolete in modern industries and consumer societies.

Book The American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies

Download or read book The American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies written by Patt Leonard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 1645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bibliography, first published in 1957, provides citations to North American academic literature on Europe, Central Europe, the Balkans, the Baltic States and the former Soviet Union. Organised by discipline, it covers the arts, humanities, social sciences, life sciences and technology.

Book The Middle Ground

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard White
  • Publisher : Cambridge University Press
  • Release : 2010-11-01
  • ISBN : 1139495682
  • Pages : 577 pages

Download or read book The Middle Ground written by Richard White and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.

Book American Character

    Book Details:
  • Author : Colin Woodard
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2016-03-15
  • ISBN : 0698181719
  • Pages : 320 pages

Download or read book American Character written by Colin Woodard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of American Nations examines the history of and solutions to the key American question: how best to reconcile individual liberty with the maintenance of a free society The struggle between individual rights and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of nearly every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and in the run up to the Civil War to the fights surrounding the agendas of the Federalists, the Progressives, the New Dealers, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party. In American Character, Colin Woodard traces these two key strands in American politics through the four centuries of the nation’s existence, from the first colonies through the Gilded Age, Great Depression and the present day, and he explores how different regions of the country have successfully or disastrously accommodated them. The independent streak found its most pernicious form in the antebellum South but was balanced in the Gilded Age by communitarian reform efforts; the New Deal was an example of a successful coalition between communitarian-minded Eastern elites and Southerners. Woodard argues that maintaining a liberal democracy, a society where mass human freedom is possible, requires finding a balance between protecting individual liberty and nurturing a free society. Going to either libertarian or collectivist extremes results in tyranny. But where does the “sweet spot” lie in the United States, a federation of disparate regional cultures that have always strongly disagreed on these issues? Woodard leads readers on a riveting and revealing journey through four centuries of struggle, experimentation, successes and failures to provide an answer. His historically informed and pragmatic suggestions on how to achieve this balance and break the nation’s political deadlock will be of interest to anyone who cares about the current American predicament—political, ideological, and sociological.

Book European Multiplicity

Download or read book European Multiplicity written by Didem Buhari-Gulmez and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European Multiplicity does not conform to the expectations of a narrow EU studies agenda wherein European integration is seen as the destiny for the continent, each country (including non-members) being compelled to seek a place in an unfolding order “united in diversity”. Rather, the book demonstrates the benefits of an agenda shift, away from an overriding concern with integration towards a consideration of the possibility that a singular ‘Europe’ may not exist and that the multiplicity of Europe is all around us. As the chapters in this volume highlight, multiplicity reveals itself across the range of EU studies as a key dimension in Europe’s transformation. Multiplicity is evident both in cases where official EU policy exists (labour migration, citizenship, regional policy) and in areas which are central to European life more generally (multiculturalism, multilingualism, the public sphere, Euroscepticism). The idea of “European multiplicity” also challenges the established notion that plurality can be accounted for in terms of identity politics. Moreover, it confronts the tendency to see Europe in terms of binaries, such as East/West, old/new, North/South, core/periphery, Christian/Muslim, EU members/non-members, and top-down/bottom-up. A core feature of this book is the establishment of the viability of an approach to studying Europe which does not rely on the binaries upon which thinking about identity is all-too-often based. “Many Europes” is one of the growing issues in EU scholarship, no longer confined to the margins of European Studies. The book makes a compelling case for the idea that Europe is best understood in terms of its inherent multiplicity.

Book Regional Cultures and Mortality in America

Download or read book Regional Cultures and Mortality in America written by Stephen J. Kunitz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how state government policies and their historic beginnings have present-day effects on their residents' political lives and on population health, especially for marginalized groups.

Book Anthropology Beyond Culture

Download or read book Anthropology Beyond Culture written by Richard G. Fox and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture is a vexed concept within anthropology. From their earliest studies, anthropologists have often noted the emotional attachment of people to their customs, even in cases where this loyalty can make for problems. Do anthropologists now suffer the same kind of disability with respect to their continuing emotional attachment to the concept of culture? This book considers the state of the culture concept in anthropology and finds fault with a ‘love it or leave it' attitude. Rather than pledging undying allegiance or summarily dismissing it, the volume argues that anthropology can continue with or without a concept of culture, depending on the research questions being asked, and, furthermore, that when culture is retained, no single definition of it is practical or necessary. Offering sensible solutions to a topic of hot debate, this book will be essential reading for anyone seeking to learn what a concept of culture can offer anthropology, and what anthropology can offer the concept of culture.

Book Architectural Regionalism

Download or read book Architectural Regionalism written by Vincent B. Canizaro and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this rapidly globalizing world, any investigation of architecture inevitably leads to considerations of regionalism. But despite its omnipresence in contemporary practice and theory, architectural regionalism remains a fluid concept, its historical development and current influence largely undocumented. This comprehensive reader brings together over 40 key essays illustrating the full range of ideas embodied by the term. Authored by important critics, historians, and architects such as Kenneth Frampton, Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion, and Alan Colquhoun, Architectural Regionalism represents the history of regionalist thinking in architecture from the early twentieth century to today.

Book Geographies of Entrepreneurship

Download or read book Geographies of Entrepreneurship written by Elizabeth A. Mack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a gap in the present literature on the role that geography plays in the distribution of entrepreneurial activity. Emerging work on entrepreneurial ecosystems suggests it is important entrepreneurship studies move beyond the mere identification of factors that impact entrepreneurial activity to consider the unique geographic contexts in which entrepreneurs operate. These contexts include a variety of interactive elements including regional characteristics, institutions, actors, and connectors. As such, this collection analyses entrepreneurial activity in regions around the globe. The contributions explore a series of diverse regions in terms of their geographic, historical, industrial, and institutional contexts. The book also explores a range of topics, such as patterns of regional/subnational variations in entrepreneurial activity, geographically mediated determinants of entrepreneurship, inter-temporal dynamics, evolution of regional systems of entrepreneurship, and the impact of entrepreneurship on regional development and regional entrepreneurship policy. This book enhances our policy and practical knowledge about the unique regional context in which entrepreneurs operate and demonstrates the important role that geography plays in the spatial distribution of entrepreneurial activity.

Book Immigration and Faith

Download or read book Immigration and Faith written by Hoover, Brett C. and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immigration and Faith is a comprehensive textbook for theology and religious studies courses that addresses migration to and within the United States and beyond.