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Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism
by Guillemette CrouzetThe “Middle East” has long been an indispensable and ubiquitous term in discussing world affairs, yet its history remains curiously underexplored. Few question the origin of the term or the boundaries of the region, commonly understood to have emerged in the twentieth century after World War I.Guillemette Crouzet offers a new account in Inventing the Middle East. The book traces the idea of the Middle East to a century-long British imperial zenith in the Indian subcontinent and its violent overspill into the Persian Gulf and its hinterlands. Encroachment into the Gulf region began under the expansionist East India Company. It was catalyzed by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and heightened by gunboat attacks conducted in the name of pacifying Arab “pirates.” Throughout the 1800s the British secured this crucial geopolitical arena, transforming it into both a crossroads of land and sea and a borderland guarding British India’s western flank. Establishing this informal imperial system involved a triangle of actors in London, the subcontinent, and the Gulf region itself. By the nineteenth century’s end, amid renewed waves of inter-imperial competition, this nexus of British interests and narratives in the Gulf region would occasion the appearance of a new name: the Middle East.Charting the spatial, political, and cultural emergence of the Middle East, Inventing the Middle East reveals the deep roots of the twentieth century’s geographic upheavals.
Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business
by Barbara Henry Joel BerkowitzCollects leading scholars' insight on the plays, production, music, audiences, and political and aesthetic concerns of modern Yiddish theater.
Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary
by Lynne A. HaneyThis ambitious, fluid, and engaging book explains the political and social transformation of the Hungarian state from 1948 to the present. Haney reconceptualizes how we might understand the momentous changes of 1989, resisting the usual categories of the socialist past and the capitalist present.
Inventing the Opera House: Theater Architecture In Renaissance And Baroque Italy
by Eugene J. JohnsonIn this book, Eugene J. Johnson traces the invention of the opera house, a building type of world wide importance. <P><P>Italy laid the foundation theater buildings in the West, in architectural spaces invented for the commedia dell'arte in the sixteenth century, and theaters built to present the new art form of opera in the seventeenth. Rulers lavished enormous funds on these structures. Often they were among the most expensive artistic undertakings of a given prince. They were part of an upsurge of theatrical invention in the performing arts. At the same time, the productions that took place within the opera house could threaten the social order, to the point where rulers would raze them. Johnson reconstructs the history of the opera house by bringing together evidence from a variety of disciplines, including music, art, theatre, and politics. Writing in an engaging manner, he sets the history of the opera house within its broader early modern social context.<P> This is the only book, since the 1930s, to cover this subject, and the only English language one to ever be produced.<P> Sets the subject into a broad context of the arts, politics, and social history of the period.<P> The book aims to reach both specialists and the general reader, making it appealing to those who know the field well and those who do not care to plow through scholarly jargon.
Inventing the PC
by Zbigniew StachniakInventing the PC details the invention and design of the MCM/70 computer and the prolonged struggle to bring it to market. Zbigniew Stachniak offers an insider's view of events on the front lines of pioneering work on personal computers. He shows what information and options PC pioneers had, how well they understood what they were doing, and how that understanding - or lack thereof - shaped both their engineering ingenuity and the indecisiveness and over-reaching ambition that would ultimately turn a very promising venture into a missed opportunity. Providing comprehensive historical background and rich photographic documentation, Inventing the PC tells the story of a Canadian company on the cutting-edge of the information age.
Inventing the PC: The MCM/70 Story
by Zbigniew StachniakInventing the PC details the invention and design of the MCM/70 computer and the prolonged struggle to bring it to market. Zbigniew Stachniak offers an insider's view of events on the front lines of pioneering work on personal computers. He shows what information and options PC pioneers had, how well they understood what they were doing, and how that understanding - or lack thereof - shaped both their engineering ingenuity and the indecisiveness and over-reaching ambition that would ultimately turn a very promising venture into a missed opportunity. Providing comprehensive historical background and rich photographic documentation, Inventing the PC tells the story of a Canadian company on the cutting-edge of the information age.
Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America
by Edmund S. Morgan"The best explanation that I have seen for our distinctive combination of faith, hope and naiveté concerning the governmental process." --Michael Kamman, Washington Post This book makes the provocative case here that America has remained politically stable because the Founding Fathers invented the idea of the American people and used it to impose a government on the new nation. His landmark analysis shows how the notion of popular sovereignty--the unexpected offspring of an older, equally fictional notion, the "divine right of kings"--has worked in our history and remains a political force today.
Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America
by Edmund Sears MorganThis book makes the provocative case here that America has remained politically stable because the Founding Fathers invented the idea of the American people and used it to impose a government on the new nation. His landmark analysis shows how the notion of popular sovereignty the unexpected offspring of an older, equally fictional notion, the "divine right of kings" has worked in our history and remains a political force today.
Inventing the Pinkertons; or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs: Being a story of the nation’s most famous (and infamous) detective agency
by S. Paul O'HaraThe fascinating story of the most notorious detective agency in US history.Between 1865 and 1937, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency was at the center of countless conflicts between capital and labor, bandits and railroads, and strikers and state power. Some believed that the detectives were protecting society from dangerous criminal conspiracies; others thought that armed Pinkertons were capital’s tool to crush worker dissent. Yet the image of the Pinkerton detective also inspired romantic and sensationalist novels, reflected shifting ideals of Victorian manhood, and embodied a particular kind of rough frontier justice. Inventing the Pinkertons examines the evolution of the agency as a pivotal institution in the cultural history of American monopoly capitalism. Historian S. Paul O’Hara intertwines political, social, and cultural history to reveal how Scottish-born founder Allan Pinkerton insinuated his way to power and influence as a purveyor of valuable (and often wildly wrong) intelligence in the Union cause. During Reconstruction, Pinkerton turned his agents into icons of law and order in the Wild West. Finally, he transformed his firm into a for-rent private army in the war of industry against labor. Having begun life as peddlers of information and guardians of mail bags, the Pinkertons became armed mercenaries, protecting scabs and corporate property from angry strikers.O’Hara argues that American capitalists used the Pinkertons to enforce new structures of economic and political order. Yet the infamy of the Pinkerton agent also gave critics and working communities a villain against which to frame their resistance to the new industrial order. Ultimately, Inventing the Pinkertons is a gripping look at how the histories of American capitalism, industrial folklore, and the nation-state converged.
Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age
by Ada PalmerAn irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe’s golden age. From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity. Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.
Inventing the Romantic Don Quixote in France: Jansenists, Rousseau, and British Quixotism (Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature)
by Clark ColahanCervantes’ now mythical character of Don Quixote began as a far different figure than the altruistic righter of wrongs we know today. The transformation from mad highway robber to secular saint took place in the Romantic Era, but how and where it began has just begun to be understood. Germany and England played major roles, but, contrary to earlier literary historians, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau and the Jansenists scooped Henry and Sarah Fielding. Jansenism, a persecuted puritanical and intellectual movement linked to Pascal, identified itself with Don Quixote’s virtues, excused his vices, and wrote a game-changing sequel mediated by the transformative powers of a sorcerer from Commedia dell’Arte. As an early Romantic, Rousseau was attracted to the hero’s fertile imagination and tender love for Dulcinea, foregrounding the would-be knight’s quest in a play and his best-selling novel, Julie. Sarah Fielding reacted similarly, basing her utopian novel David Simple on the Jansenist concept of quixotic trust in others. Colahan here reproduces and explains for the first time the extremely rare original illustrations of the French sequel to Cervantes’ novel, and documents the fortunes in French culture of the magician at the heart of the Romantic Quixote.
Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism
by Travis HayThough First Nations communities in Canada have historically lacked access to clean water, affordable food, and equitable health care, they have never lacked access to well-funded scientists seeking to study them. Inventing the Thrifty Gene examines the relationship between science and settler colonialism through the lens of “Aboriginal diabetes” and the thrifty gene hypothesis, which posits that Indigenous peoples are genetically predisposed to type 2 diabetes and obesity due to their alleged hunter-gatherer genes. Hay’s study begins with Charles Darwin’s travels and his observations on the Indigenous peoples he encountered, setting the imperial context for Canadian histories of medicine and colonialism. It continues in the mid-twentieth century with a look at nutritional experimentation during the long career of Percy Moore, the medical director of Indian Affairs (1946–1965). Hay then turns to James Neel’s invention of the thrifty gene hypothesis in 1962 and Robert Hegele’s reinvention and application of the hypothesis to Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario in the 1990s. Finally, Hay demonstrates the way in which settler colonial science was responded to and resisted by Indigenous leadership in Sandy Lake First Nation, who used monies from the thrifty gene study to fund wellness programs in their community. Inventing the Thrifty Gene exposes the exploitative nature of settler science with Indigenous subjects, the flawed scientific theories stemming from faulty assumptions of Indigenous decline and disappearance, as well as the severe inequities in Canadian health care that persist even today.
Inventing the Ties That Bind: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life
by Francesca PollettaFrom deciding to hold the door for the person behind you, to resolving for whom you will cast your vote, every day we find ourselves charged with making moral decisions. What steers our choices? And how do we weigh competing priorities and moral convictions? In Inventing the Ties That Bind, Francesca Polletta shows that we do not solve these dilemmas, whether personal or political, based on self-interest alone. Instead, relationships serve as a kind of moral compass. People consider the nature of their ties to one another to know what their obligations are, and in situations that are unfamiliar, they sometimes figure out the right thing to do by imagining themselves in relationships they do not actually have. Polletta takes up a wide range of cases, from debt settlement agencies to the southern civil rights movement, revealing that our relationships and how we imagine them are at the heart of our moral lives—guiding us as we choose whom to help and how we define what it means to treat someone as our equal. In a time of growing polarization, understanding how we make sense of our ties to one another is more urgent than ever.
Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain
by Sarah E. StollerThe first historical examination of working parenthood in the late twentieth century—and how the concepts of &“family-friendly&” work culture and &“work–life balance&” came to be.Since the 1980s, families across the developed West have lived through a revolution on a scale unprecedented since industrialization. With more mothers than ever before in paid work and the rise of the middle-class, dual-income household, we have entered a new era in the history of everyday life: the era of the working parent. In Inventing the Working Parent, Sarah E. Stoller charts the politics that shaped the creation of the phenomenon of working parenthood in Britain as it arose out of a new culture of work.Stoller begins with the first sustained efforts by feminists to mobilize politically on behalf of working parents in the late 1970s and concludes in the context of an emerging national political agenda for working families with the rise of New Labour in the 1990s. She explores how and why the notion of working parenthood emerged as a powerful new political claim and identity category and addresses how feminists used the concept of working parenthood to advocate for new organizational policies and practices. Lastly, Stoller shows how neoliberal capitalism under Margaret Thatcher and subsequent New Labour governments made a family&’s ability to survive on one income nearly impossible—with significant consequences for individual experience, the gendered division of labor, and intimate life.
Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization
by Meredith SmallAn epic cultural journey that reveals how Venetian ingenuity and inventions—from sunglasses and forks to bonds and currency—shaped modernity.How did a small, isolated city—with a population that never exceeded 100,000, even in its heyday—come to transform western civilization? Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith Small, the author of the groundbreaking Our Babies, Ourselves examines the the unique Venetian social structure that was key to their explosion of creativity and invention that ranged from the material to social. Whether it was boats or money, medicine or face cream, opera, semicolons, tiramisu or child-labor laws, these all originated in Venice and have shaped contemporary notions of institutions and conventions ever since. The foundation of how we now think about community, health care, money, consumerism, and globalization all sprung forth from the Laguna Veneta. But Venice is far from a historic relic or a life-sized museum. It is a living city that still embraces its innovative roots. As climate change effects sea-level rises, Venice is on the front lines of preserving its legacy and cultural history to inspire a new generation of innovators.
Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century
by Sarah ColeH. G. Wells played a central role in defining the intellectual, political, and literary character of the twentieth century. A prolific literary innovator, he coined such concepts as “time machine,” “war of the worlds,” and “atomic bomb,” exerting vast influence on popular ideas of time and futurity, progress and decline, and humanity’s place in the universe. Wells was a public intellectual with a worldwide readership. He met with world leaders, including Roosevelt, Lenin, Stalin, and Churchill, and his books were international best-sellers. Yet critics and scholars have largely forgotten his accomplishments or relegated them to genre fiction, overlooking their breadth and diversity.In Inventing Tomorrow, Sarah Cole provides a definitive account of Wells’s work and ideas. She contends that Wells casts new light on modernism and its values: on topics from warfare to science to time, his work resonates both thematically and aesthetically with some of the most ambitious modernists. At the same time, unlike many modernists, Wells believed that literature had a pressing place in public life, and his works reached a wide range of readers. While recognizing Wells’s limitations, Cole offers a new account of his distinctive style as well as his interventions into social and political thought. She illuminates how Wells embodies twentieth-century literature at its most expansive and engaged. An ambitious rethinking of Wells as both writer and thinker, Inventing Tomorrow suggests that he offers a timely model for literature’s moral responsibility to imagine a better global future.
Inventing Western Civilization
by Thomas C. Patterson"In this wonderful book, Thomas Patterson effectively dethrones the concept of 'civilization' as an abstract good, transcending human society. " --Martin Bernal Drawing on his extensive knowledge of early societies, Thomas C. Patterson shows how class, sexism, and racism have been integral to the appearance of "civilized" societies in Western Europe. He lays out clearly and simply how civilization, with its designs of "civilizing" and "being civilized," has been closely tied to the rise of capitalism in Western Europe and the development of social classes.
Inventing William of Norwich: Thomas of Monmouth, Antisemitism, and Literary Culture, 1150–1200 (The Middle Ages Series)
by Heather BlurtonWilliam of Norwich is the name of a young boy purported to have been killed by Jews in or about 1144, thus becoming the victim of the first recorded case of such a ritual murder in Western Europe and a seminal figure in the long history of antisemitism. His story is first told in Thomas of Monmouth's The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, a work that elaborates the bizarre allegation, invented in twelfth-century England, that Jews kidnapped Christian children and murdered them in memory and mockery of the crucifixion of Christ.In Inventing William of Norwich Heather Blurton resituates Thomas's account by offering the first full analysis of it as a specifically literary work. The second half of the twelfth century was a time of great literary innovation encompassing an efflorescence of saints' lives and historiography, as well as the emergence of vernacular romance, Blurton observes. She examines The Life and Miracles within the framework of these new textual developments and alongside innovations in liturgical and devotional practices to argue that the origin of the ritual murder accusation is imbricated as much in literary culture as it is in the realities of Christian-Jewish relations or the emergence of racially based discourses of antisemitism. Resisting the urge to interpret this first narrative of the blood libel with the hindsight knowledge of later developments, she considers only the period from about 1150-1200. In so doing, Blurton redirects critical attention away from the social and economic history of the ritual murder accusation to the textual genres and tastes that shaped its forms and themes and provided its immediate context of reception. Thomas of Monmouth's narrative in particular, and the ritual murder accusation more generally, were strongly shaped by literary convention.
Inventing Wine: A New History of One of the World's Most Ancient Pleasures
by Paul LukacsThe story of how wine, as enjoyed by millions of people today, came to be. Drinking wine can be traced back 8,000 years, yet the wines we drink today are radically different from those made in earlier eras. While its basic chemistry remains largely the same, wine's social roles have changed fundamentally, being invented and reinvented many times over many centuries. In Inventing Wine, Paul Lukacs tells the enticing story of wine's transformation from a source of spiritual and bodily nourishment to a foodstuff valued for the wide array of pleasures it can provide. He chronicles how the prototypes of contemporary wines first emerged when people began to have options of what to drink, and he demonstrates that people selected wine for dramatically different reasons than those expressed when doing so was a necessity rather than a choice. During wine's long history, men and women imbued wine with different cultural meanings and invented different cultural roles for it to play. The power of such invention belonged both to those drinking wine and to those producing it. These included tastemakers like the medieval Cistercian monks of Burgundy who first thought of place as an important aspect of wine's identity; nineteenth-century writers such as Grimod de la Reyniere and Cyrus Redding who strived to give wine a rarefied aesthetic status; scientists like Louis Pasteur and Émile Peynaud who worked to help winemakers take more control over their craft; and a host of visionary vintners who aimed to produce better, more distinctive-tasting wines, eventually bringing high-quality wine to consumers around the globe. By charting the changes in both wine's appreciation and its production, Lukacs offers a fascinating new way to look at the present as well as the past.
The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus
by Pamela GordonThe school of Greek philosopher Epicurus, which became known as the Garden, famously put great stock in happiness and pleasure. As a philosophical community, and a way of seeing the world, Epicureanism had a centuries-long life in Athens and Rome, as well as across the Mediterranean. The Invention and Gendering of Epicurusstudies how the Garden's outlook on pleasure captured Greek and Roman imaginations---particularly among non-Epicureans---for generations after its legendary founding. Unsympathetic sources from disparate eras generally focus not on historic personages but on the symbolic Epicurean. And yet the traditions of this imagined Garden, with its disreputable women and unmanly men, give us intermittent glimpses of historical Epicureans and their conceptions of the Epicurean life. Pamela Gordon suggests how a close hearing and contextualization of anti-Epicurean discourse leads us to a better understanding of the cultural history of Epicureanism. Her primary focus is on sources hostile to the Garden, but her Epicurean-friendly perspective is apparent throughout. Her engagement with ancient anti-Epicurean texts makes more palpable their impact on modern responses to the Garden. Intended both for students and for scholars of Epicureanism and its response, the volume is organized primarily according to the themes common among Epicurus' detractors. It considers the place of women in Epicurean circles, as well as the role of Epicurean philosophy in Homer and other writers.
Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure
by Vaclav SmilFrom the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts.The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most readable book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI. He reminds us that even after we go quite far along the invention-development-application trajectory, we may never get anything real to deploy. Or worse, even after we have succeeded by introducing an invention, its future may be marked by underperformance, disappointment, demise, or outright harm.Drawing on his vast breadth of scientific and historical knowledge, Smil explains the difference between invention and innovation. He then looks at three different types of inventions.Inventions that failed to dominate as promised:AirshipsNuclear fissionSupersonic flightInventions that turned disastrous:Leaded gasoline DDTChlorofluorocarbonsInventions we have long been promised (and that would be highly beneficial):Travel in vacuum (hyperloop)Nitrogen-fixing cerealsNuclear fusionFinally, he offers a &“wish list&” of inventions that we most urgently need to confront the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.Filled with engaging examples and pragmatic approaches, this book is a sobering account of the folly that so often attends human ingenuity—and how we can, and must, better align our expectations with reality.
The Invention and Reinventions of Methodism: Sect, Church and Radical Movement (Routledge Methodist Studies Series)
by Andrew J. CheatleThis book focuses on the transformative journey of Methodism and tackles a profound question: How did a radical revival movement evolve into an established mainstream Church? With a global family of around eighty million, Methodism and its Holiness offshoots have come a long way since their origins as a fervent revival within the Church of England in the late 1730s. Once perceived as controversial and charismatic, early Methodists, led by John and Charles Wesley, preached salvation to unruly crowds, often facing fierce opposition. Despite its turbulent beginnings, the Wesleys skilfully kept the movement anchored to its Anglican roots, preventing it from fracturing entirely. This allowed Methodism to evolve into an established church while maintaining its distinct identity. The volume delves into the enduring legacy of early Methodism, exploring its theological influences and developments over time. With its identity wrapped up in dual focus on mission and holiness, Methodism’s impact on global Christianity is profound. From the Holiness movement to the rise of Pentecostalism, its early radical and charismatic practices still resonate in the Church today. Featuring essays from leading Wesleyan scholars, this book is valuable for anyone interested in the dynamic history and lasting influence of the Methodist tradition.
The Invention Hunters Discover How Electricity Works (The Invention Hunters #2)
by Korwin BriggsLearn about electricity the fun way! The Magic School Bus meets The Way Things Work in this kid-friendly guide to understanding the basics of electricity, perfect for budding engineers. The Invention Hunters travel the globe in their flying museum collecting the world's greatest inventions! This time, they've landed in a kid's backyard, and these silly scientists think they've stumbled on incredible specimens, from umbrellas and lipsticks to coins and rockets. But what they really discover--with a kid as their guide--is how electricity and magnetism powers lamps, batteries, and even toasters!Using simple explanations and diagrams and a heaping helping of humor, the Invention Hunters make the perfect companions for curious kids who are ready to learn about science, physics, engineering, history, and more.
The Invention Hunters Discover How Machines Work: Discover How Machines Work (The Invention Hunters #1)
by Korwin BriggsLearn about machines the fun way! The Magic School Bus meets The Way Things Work in this kid-friendly guide to understanding the basics of simple machines, perfect for budding engineers. The Invention Hunters travel the globe in their flying museum collecting the world's greatest inventions! Today they've landed in a construction zone. These silly scientists think they've stumbled on incredible specimens of everything you'd never find at a building site, from roller skates and pogo sticks to swords and race cars. But what they really discover--with a kid as their guide--is how simple machines like pulleys, cranks, and levers are used to engineer tools ranging from jackhammers to dump trucks...and even toilets!Using simple explanations and diagrams and a heaping helping of humor, the Invention Hunters make the perfect companions for curious kids who are ready to learn about science, physics, engineering, history, and more.
The Invention of a Tradition: The Messianic Zionism of the Gaon of Vilna (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)
by Immanuel EtkesThe Gaon of Vilna was the foremost intellectual leader of non-Hasidic Jewry in eighteenth-century Europe; his legacy is claimed by religious Jews, both Zionist and not. In the mid-twentieth century, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Rivlin wrote several books advancing the myth that the Gaon was an early progenitor of Zionism. Following the 1967 War in Israel, messianic sentiments spread in some circles of the national-religious public in Israel, who embraced this myth and made it a central component of the historical narrative they advanced. For those who identified with the religious Zionist enterprise, the myth of the Gaon and his disciples as the first Zionists was seen as proof of the righteousness of their path. In this book, Israeli scholar Immanuel Etkes explores how what he calls the "Rivlinian myth" took hold, and demonstrates that it has no basis in historical reality. Etkes argues that proponents of the Rivlinian myth seek to blur the distinction between Zionism as a modern national movement or a religious one—a distinction that underlies many of the central conflicts of contemporary Israeli politics. As historian David Biale suggests in his brief foreword to this English translation, "what is at stake here is not only historical truth but also the very identity of Zionism as a nationalist movement."