Download or read book How Writing Made Us Human 3000 BCE to Now written by Walter Stephens and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of how writing has preserved cultural practices, traditions, and knowledge throughout human history. In How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now, Walter Stephens condenses the massive history of the written word into an accessible, engaging narrative. The history of writing is not merely a record of technical innovations—from hieroglyphics to computers—but something far richer: a chronicle of emotional engagement with written culture whose long arc intimates why the humanities are crucial to society. For five millennia, myths and legends provided fascinating explanations for the origins and uses of writing. These stories overflowed with enthusiasm about fabled personalities (both human and divine) and their adventures with capturing speech and preserving memory. Stories recounted how and why an ancient Sumerian king, a contemporary of Gilgamesh, invented the cuneiform writing system—or alternatively, how the earliest Mesopotamians learned everything from a hybrid man-fish. For centuries, Jews and Christians debated whether Moses or God first wrote the Ten Commandments. Throughout history, some myths of writing were literary fictions. Plato's tale of Atlantis supposedly emerged from a vast Egyptian archive of world history. Dante's vision of God as one infinite book inspired Borges's fantasy of the cosmos as a limitless library, while the nineteenth century bequeathed Mary Shelley's apocalyptic tale of a world left with innumerable books but only one surviving reader. Stephens presents a comprehensive history of the written word and demonstrates how writing has preserved and shaped human life since the Bronze Age. These stories, their creators, and their preservation have inspired wonder and an endless appetite for historical revelation.
Download or read book Studies in Intellectual History written by George Boas and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1953. In this collection of essays, prominent midcentury intellectual historians provide critical essays on their field of specialty. Studies in Intellectual History gathers work by Harold Cherniss, George Boas, Ludwig Edelstein, Leo Spitzer, and others.
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Download or read book The Epic of Gilgamish written by R. Campbell Thompson and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Making of the West Volume I To 1750 written by Lynn Hunt and published by Macmillan Higher Education. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 707 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students of Western civilization need more than facts. They need to understand the cross-cultural, global exchanges that shaped Western history; to be able to draw connections between the social, cultural, political, economic, and intellectual happenings in a given era; and to see the West not as a fixed region, but a living, evolving construct. These needs have long been central to The Making of the West. The book’s chronological narrative emphasizes the wide variety of peoples and cultures that created Western civilization and places them together in a common context, enabling students to witness the unfolding of Western history, understand change over time, and recognize fundamental relationships.
Download or read book The Making of the West Volume A To 1500 written by Lynn Hunt and published by Macmillan Higher Education. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students of Western civilization need more than facts. They need to understand the cross-cultural, global exchanges that shaped Western history; to be able to draw connections between the social, cultural, political, economic, and intellectual happenings in a given era; and to see the West not as a fixed region, but a living, evolving construct. These needs have long been central to The Making of the West. The book’s chronological narrative emphasizes the wide variety of peoples and cultures that created Western civilization and places them together in a common context, enabling students to witness the unfolding of Western history, understand change over time, and recognize fundamental relationships.
Download or read book Traced written by Nathaniel Jeanson and published by New Leaf Publishing Group. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happened to the ancient Egyptians? The Persians? The Romans? The Mayans? ARE WE THEIR DESCENDANTS? Recent genetic discoveries are uncovering surprising links between us and the peoples of old—links that rewrite race, ethnicity, and human history. Today’s Native Americans descend from Central Asians who arrived in the early A.D. era. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still have clearly identifiable descendants, albeit rare ones. Every people group on earth can genetically trace their origins to Noah and his three sons.
Download or read book The Dawn of Everything written by David Graeber and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
Download or read book Water written by Steven Solomon and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Far more than oil, the control of water wealth throughout history has been pivotal to the rise and fall of great powers, the achievements of civilization, the transformations of society's vital habitats, and the quality of ordinary daily lives. Today, freshwater scarcity is one of the twenty-first century's decisive, looming challenges, driving new political, economic, and environmental realities across the globe. In Water, Steven Solomon offers the first-ever narrative portrait of the power struggles, personalities, and breakthroughs that have shaped humanity from antiquity's earliest civilizations through the steam-powered Industrial Revolution and America's century. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Water is a groundbreaking account of man's most critical resource in shaping human destinies, from ancient times to our dawning age of water scarcity.
Download or read book The Making of the West Combined Volume written by Lynn Hunt and published by Macmillan Higher Education. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 1174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students of Western civilization need more than facts. They need to understand the cross-cultural, global exchanges that shaped Western history; to be able to draw connections between the social, cultural, political, economic, and intellectual happenings in a given era; and to see the West not as a fixed region, but a living, evolving construct. These needs have long been central to The Making of the West. The book’s chronological narrative emphasizes the wide variety of peoples and cultures that created Western civilization and places them together in a common context, enabling students to witness the unfolding of Western history, understand change over time, and recognize fundamental relationships. Read the preface.
Download or read book Weavers Scribes and Kings written by Amanda H. Podany and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This sweeping history of the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, Iran) takes readers on a journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquest of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to bricklayers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that they faced over time are explored through their written words and the archaeological remains of the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived. Rather than chronicling three thousand years of kingdoms, the book instead creates a tapestry of life stories through which readers come to know specific individuals from many walks of life, and to understand their places within the broad history of events and institutions in the ancient Near East. These life stories are preserved on ancient cuneiform tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to became a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving young couple who were driven to sell all four of their young children into slavery during a famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to us many of our institutions and beliefs, a truly fascinating place to visit"--
Download or read book The Black President written by Claude A. Clegg III and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With lively prose and sensitivity to context, this book offers a sweeping, authoritative history of the Obama presidency, focusing particularly on its impact and meaning vis-áa-vis African Americans. This interpretative account captures the America that made Obama's White House years possible, while at the same time rendering the America that resolutely resisted the idea of a Black chief executive, thus making conceivable the ascent of his most unlikely of successors"--
Download or read book Writing and Script A Very Short Introduction written by Andrew Robinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Starting with the origins of writing five thousand years ago, with cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Andrew Robinson explains how these early forms of writing developed into hundreds of scripts including the Roman alphabet and the Chinese characters. He reveals how the modern writing system we take for granted - including airport signage and electronic text messaging - resemble ancient scripts much more closely than we think." --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Segregation written by Carl H. Nightingale and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow—two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows us in this magisterial history, segregation is everywhere, deforming cities and societies worldwide. Starting with segregation’s ancient roots, and what the archaeological evidence reveals about humanity’s long-standing use of urban divisions to reinforce political and economic inequality, Nightingale then moves to the world of European colonialism. It was there, he shows, segregation based on color—and eventually on race—took hold; the British East India Company, for example, split Calcutta into “White Town” and “Black Town.” As we follow Nightingale’s story around the globe, we see that division replicated from Hong Kong to Nairobi, Baltimore to San Francisco, and more. The turn of the twentieth century saw the most aggressive segregation movements yet, as white communities almost everywhere set to rearranging whole cities along racial lines. Nightingale focuses closely on two striking examples: Johannesburg, with its state-sponsored separation, and Chicago, in which the goal of segregation was advanced by the more subtle methods of real estate markets and housing policy. For the first time ever, the majority of humans live in cities, and nearly all those cities bear the scars of segregation. This unprecedented, ambitious history lays bare our troubled past, and sets us on the path to imagining the better, more equal cities of the future.
Download or read book Brotherhood of Kings written by Amanda H. Podany and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amanda Podany here takes readers on a vivid tour through a thousand years of ancient Near Eastern history, from 2300 to 1300 BCE, paying particular attention to the lively interactions that took place between the great kings of the day. Allowing them to speak in their own words, Podany reveals how these leaders and their ambassadors devised a remarkably sophisticated system of diplomacy and trade. What the kings forged, as they saw it, was a relationship of friends-brothers-across hundreds of miles. Over centuries they worked out ways for their ambassadors to travel safely to one another's capitals, they created formal rules of interaction and ways to work out disagreements, they agreed to treaties and abided by them, and their efforts had paid off with the exchange of luxury goods that each country wanted from the other. Tied to one another through peace treaties and powerful obligations, they were also often bound together as in-laws, as a result of marrying one another's daughters. These rulers had almost never met one another in person, but they felt a strong connection--a real brotherhood--which gradually made wars between them less common. Indeed, any one of the great powers of the time could have tried to take over the others through warfare, but diplomacy usually prevailed and provided a respite from bloodshed. Instead of fighting, the kings learned from one another, and cooperated in peace. A remarkable account of a pivotal moment in world history--the establishment of international diplomacy thousands of years before the United Nations--Brotherhood of Kings offers a vibrantly written history of the region often known as the "cradle of civilization."
Download or read book After the Ice written by Steven J. Mithen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing on the latest research in archaeology, human genetics, and environmental science, After The Life takes the reader on a sweeping tour of 15,000 years of human history."--Cover.
Download or read book Man Made God written by Barbara G. Walker and published by Stellar House Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extraordinary independent scholar of comparative religion and mythology Walker examines a time when the Goddess and her consort/son ruled supreme and forward into the era when the patriarchy usurped Her worship.
