Download or read book The Responsibility of Mind in a Civilization of Machines written by Perry Miller and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Responsibility of Mind in a Civilization of Machines written by Perry Miller and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Double edged Sword written by Zoltán Simon and published by Akademiai Kiado. This book was released on 2003 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This examination of American novels from 1900 to 1940 traces the literary treatment of the technological sublime, a simultaneous awe and fear of technology. The American technological sublime is a construct that can be useful in understanding the often conflicted and ambivalent reactions of enthusiasm and anxiety, exaltation and depression, associated with the patterns of development experienced in the US in this transitory period. The first four decades of the 20th century saw the culmination of the technological sublime in America: the loss of the innocently one-sided enthusiasm and technological republicanism of the 19th century to a fragmented, often paranoiac, and largely pessimistic vision of technology that became dominant of the literature after World War II. After an evaluation of earlier scholarship on the American technological sublime, the study examines four important decades in the development of the American technological sublime and some of the literary responses to it
Download or read book Three lectures written by Frank Stanton and published by . This book was released on with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Degradation of American History written by David Harlan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American historical writing has traditionally been one of our primary forms of moral reflection. However, David Harlan argues that in the disillusionment following the 1960s, history abandoned its redemptive potential and took up the methodology of the social sciences. In this provocative new book, Harlan describes the reasons for this turn to objectivity and professionalism, explains why it failed, and examines the emergence of a New Traditionalism in American historical writing. Part One, "The Legacy of the Sixties," describes the impact of literary theory in the 1970s and beyond, the rise of women's history, the various forms of ideological analysis developed by historians on the left, and the crippling obsession with professionalism in the 1980s. Part Two, "The Renewal of American Historical Writing," focuses on the contributions of John Patrick Diggins, Hayden White, Richard Rorty, Elaine Showalter, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and others. Harlan argues that at the end of the twentieth century American historical writing is perfectly poised to become what it once was: not one of the social sciences in historical costume, but a form of moral reflection that speaks to all Americans. "[A] wholly admirable work. This book will be talked about for years."—Library Journal
Download or read book The Society for Useful Knowledge written by Jonathan Lyons and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-06-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spellbinding, rich history of the American Enlightenment-think 1776 meets The Metaphysical Club.
Download or read book Why America Failed written by Morris Berman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why America Failed shows how, from its birth as a nation of "hustlers" to its collapse as an empire, the tools of the country's expansion proved to be the instruments of its demise Why America Failed is the third and most engaging volume of Morris Berman's trilogy on the decline of the American empire. In The Twilight of American Culture, Berman examined the internal factors of that decline, showing that they were identical to those of Rome in its late-empire phase. In Dark Ages America, he explored the external factors—e.g., the fact that both empires were ultimately attacked from the outside—and the relationship between the events of 9/11 and the history of U.S. foreign policy. In his most ambitious work to date, Berman looks at the "why" of it all Probes America's commitment to economic liberalism and free enterprise stretching back to the late sixteenth century, and shows how this ideology, along with that of technological progress, rendered any alternative marginal to American history Maintains, more than anything else, that this one-sided vision of the country's purpose finally did our nation in Why America Failed is a controversial work, one that will shock, anger, and transform its readers. The book is a stimulating and provocative explanation of how we managed to wind up in our current situation: economically weak, politically passe, socially divided, and culturally adrift. It is a tour de force, a powerful conclusion to Berman's study of American imperial decline.
Download or read book Beyond the Revolution written by William H Goetzmann and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1776, when Citizen Tom Paine declared, "The birthday of a new world is at hand," America was unique in world history. A nation suffused with the spirit of explorers, constantly replenished by immigrants, and informed by a continual influx of foreign ideas, it was the world's first truly cosmopolitan civilization. In Beyond the Revolution, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann tells the story of America's greatest thinkers and creators, from Paine and Jefferson to Melville and William James, showing how they built upon and battled one another's ideas in the critical years between 1776 and 1900. An unprecedented work of intellectual history by a master historian, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of our national culture.
Download or read book Technology written by Wayne Grady and published by Groundwood Books Ltd. This book was released on 2010 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a history of technology from the Stone Age to the Age of the Internet, examines the relationship between it and war, and shows how it has separated humans from each other and nature.
Download or read book Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience written by Nathan O. Hatch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1989-10-05 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Universally recognized as a seminal figure in American intellectual history, Jonathan Edwards has been the focus of considerable scholarly attention in a variety of academic disciplines, including religion, history, literature, and philosophy. Because these disciplines discuss him in relation to different intellectual traditions, Edwards scholarship remains segmented. This volume represents the first attempt to provide a synthetic vision of Edwards and his contributions to American culture. Its fifteen previously unpublished essays present the best contemporary literary, historical, theological, and philosophical thinking on Edwards, locating him in his full historical context and demonstrating the continuity of his influence. Together, they provide the fullest account to date of his role in the development of the American consciousness. This volume is the first attempt to provide a synthetic vision of Edwards and his contribution to the development of the American consciousness. Fifteen previously unpublished essays present the best contemporary literary, historical, theological, and philosophical thinking on Edwards, locating him in his full historical context and demonstrating the continuity of his influence.
Download or read book Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival written by Michael Egan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-01-23 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the activist career of Barry Commoner, one of the most influential American environmental thinkers, and his role in recasting the environmental movement after World War II. For over half a century, the biologist Barry Commoner has been one of the most prominent and charismatic defenders of the American environment, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1970 as the standard-bearer of "the emerging science of survival." In Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, Michael Egan examines Commoner's social and scientific activism and charts an important shift in American environmental values since World War II.Throughout his career, Commoner believed that scientists had a social responsibility, and that one of their most important obligations was to provide citizens with accessible scientific information so they could be included in public debates that concerned them. Egan shows how Commoner moved naturally from calling attention to the hazards of nuclear fallout to raising public awareness of the environmental dangers posed by the petrochemical industry. He argues that Commoner's belief in the importance of dissent, the dissemination of scientific information, and the need for citizen empowerment were critical planks in the remaking of American environmentalism. Commoner's activist career can be defined as an attempt to weave together a larger vision of social justice. Since the 1960s, he has called attention to parallels between the environmental, civil rights, labor, and peace movements, and connected environmental decline with poverty, injustice, exploitation, and war, arguing that the root cause of environmental problems was the American economic system and its manifestations. He was instrumental in pointing out that there was a direct association between socioeconomic standing and exposure to environmental pollutants and that economics, not social responsibility, was guiding technological decision making. Egan argues that careful study of Commoner's career could help reinvigorate the contemporary environmental movement at a point when the environmental stakes have never been so high.
Download or read book Not So Fast written by Doug Hill and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There's a well-known story about an older fish who swims by two younger fish and asks, "How's the water?" The younger fish are puzzled. "What's water?" they ask. Many of us today might ask a similar question: What's technology? Technology defines the world we live in, yet we're so immersed in it, so encompassed by it, that we mostly take it for granted. Seldom, if ever, do we stop to ask what technology is. Failing to ask that question, we fail to perceive all the ways it might be shaping us. Usually when we hear the word "technology," we automatically think of digital de- vices and their myriad applications. As revolutionary as smartphones, online shop- ping, and social networks may seem, however, they t into long-standing, deeply entrenched patterns of technological thought as well as practice. Generations of skeptics have questioned how well served we are by those patterns of thought and practice, even as generations of enthusiasts have promised that the latest innovations will deliver us, soon, to Paradise. We're not there yet, but the cyber utopians of Silicon Valley keep telling us it's right around the corner. What is technology, and how is it shaping us? In search of answers to those crucial questions, Not So Fast draws on the insights of dozens of scholars and artists who have thought deeply about the meanings of machines. The book explores such dynamics as technological drift, technological momentum, technological disequilibrium, and technological autonomy to help us understand the interconnected, inter- woven, and interdependent phenomena of our technological world. In the course of that exploration, Doug Hill poses penetrating questions of his own, among them: Do we have as much control over our machines as we think? And who can we rely on to guide the technological forces that will determine the future of the planet?
Download or read book Astride Two Worlds written by Barton C. Hacker and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization and military-technological innovation were beginning to alter drastically the character and conditions of warfare as it had been conducted for centuries. Occurring in the midst of these far-reaching changes, the American Civil War can justly be labeled both the last great preindustrial war and the first major war of the industrial age. Industrial capacity attained new levels of military significance as transportation improved, but in this, as in many other respects, the Civil War was distinctly transitional. Smoothbore artillery still dominated the battlefield, horse-drawn wagons and pack mules still carried the main logistic burden, seamstresses still outnumbered sewing-machine operators. Astride Two Worlds addresses the various causes and consequences of technological change for the course and outcome of the American Civil War.
Download or read book The Technological Fix written by Lisa Rosner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term "technological fix" should mean a fix provided by technology--a solution for all of our problems, from medicine and food production to the environment and business. Instead, technological fix has come to mean a cheap, quick fix using inappropriate technology that usually creates more problems than it solves. This collection sets out the distinction between a technological fix and a true technological solution. Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines, the essays trace the technological fix as it has appeared throughout the twentieth century. Addressing such "fixes" as artificial hearts, industrial agriculture and climate engineering, these essays examine our need to turn to technology for solutions to all of our problems.
Download or read book Frontiers of Historical Imagination written by Kerwin Lee Klein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."
Download or read book Early American Technology written by Judith A. McGaw and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays documents technology's centrality to the history of early America. Unlike much previous scholarship, this volume emphasizes the quotidian rather than the exceptional: the farm household seeking to preserve food or acquire tools, the surveyor balancing economic and technical considerations while laying out a turnpike, the woman of child-bearing age employing herbal contraceptives, and the neighbors of a polluted urban stream debating issues of property, odor, and health. These cases and others drawn from brewing, mining, farming, and woodworking enable the authors to address recent historiographic concerns, including the environmental aspects of technological change and the gendered nature of technical knowledge. Brooke Hindle's classic 1966 essay on early American technology is also reprinted, and his view of the field is reassessed. A bibliographical essay and summary of Hindle's bibliographic findings conclude the volume. The contributors are Judith A. McGaw, Robert C. Post, Susan E. Klepp, Michal McMahon, Patrick W. O'Bannon, Sarah F. McMahon, Donald C. Jackson, Robert B. Gordon, Carolyn C. Cooper, and Nina E. Lerman.
Download or read book In the American Province written by David A. Hollinger and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1989-04 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American intellectual historians need to pay more attention to how elites relate to broader audiences. Hollinger's work is in the vanguard of recent intellectual history and it is a joy to observe a true intellectual in discourse with his peers. -- History: Reviews of Books.
