A Mirror For History

Author : Mark Pendergrast
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0786729902
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mirror, Mirror written by Mark Pendergrast and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all human inventions, the mirror is perhaps the one most closely connected to our own consciousness. As our first technology for contemplation of the self, the mirror is arguably as important an invention as the wheel. Mirror Mirror is the fascinating story of the mirror's invention, refinement, and use in an astonishing range of human activities -- from the fantastic mirrored rooms that wealthy Romans created for their orgies to the mirror's key role in the use and understanding of light. Pendergrast spins tales of the 2,500year mystery of whether Archimedes and his "burning mirror" really set faraway Roman ships on fire; the medieval Venetian glassmakers, who perfected the technique of making large, flat mirrors from clear glass and for whom any attempt to leave their cloistered island was punishable by death; Isaac Newton, whose experiments with sunlight on mirrors once left him blinded for three days; the artist David Hockney, who holds controversial ideas about Renaissance artists and their use of optical devices; and George Ellery Hale, the manic-depressive astronomer and telescope enthusiast who inspired (and gave his name to) the twentieth century's largest ground-based telescope. Like mirrors themselves, Mirror Mirror is a book of endless wonder and fascination.

Author : Sabine Melchoir-Bonnet
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113668753X
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mirror written by Sabine Melchoir-Bonnet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging and witty cultural history traces the evolution of the mirror from antiquity to the present day, illustrating its journey from wondrous object to ordinary trinket. With its earliest invention, the mirror allowed us to gaze upon ourselves, bestowing a power both fascinating and terrifying.

Author : Ronald Takaki
Publisher : eBookIt.com
ISBN 13 : 1456611062
Total Pages : 787 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Different Mirror written by Ronald Takaki and published by eBookIt.com. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takaki traces the economic and political history of Indians, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Jewish people in America, with considerable attention given to instances and consequences of racism. The narrative is laced with short quotations, cameos of personal experiences, and excerpts from folk music and literature. Well-known occurrences, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Trail of Tears, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Japanese internment are included. Students may be surprised by some of the revelations, but will recognize a constant thread of rampant racism. The author concludes with a summary of today's changing economic climate and offers Rodney King's challenge to all of us to try to get along. Readers will find this overview to be an accessible, cogent jumping-off place for American history and political science plus a guide to the myriad other sources identified in the notes.

Author : Julian Bell
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0500287546
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mirror of the World written by Julian Bell and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Exuberant, astute, and splendidly illustrated history of world art . . . draws fascinating parallels between artistic developments in Western and non-Western art.”—Publishers Weekly In this beautifully written story of art, Julian Bell tells a vivid and compelling history of human artistic achievements, from prehistoric stone carvings to the latest video installations. Bell, himself a painter, uses a variety of objects to reveal how art is a product of our shared experience and how, like a mirror, it can reflect the human condition. With hundreds of illustrations and a uniquely global perspective, Bell juxtaposes examples that challenge and enlighten the reader: dancing bronze figures from southern India, Romanesque sculptures, Baroque ceilings, and jewel-like Persian manuscripts are discussed side by side. With an insider’s knowledge and an unerring touch, Bell weaves these diverse strands into an invaluable introduction to the wider history of world art.

Author : Tomasz Ratajczak
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443867675
Total Pages : 115 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In the Mirror of the Past written by Tomasz Ratajczak and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-26 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These days, we are ever more often confronted by overwhelming events. Searching for a way to understand them, we turn to mythic archetypes still present in our culture. The authors of these essays pose questions about the reliability of the archetypes found in tradition, history, and scattered mythologemes. The essays in this collection deal with the presence of mythic time in modern speculative fiction, such as fantasy and alternate histories, and discuss major mythologemes and their functions in popular literature and extra-literary reality. The authors show how mythopoeic fiction becomes a (genetically) modified mythic mirror in which we hope to see answers to vexing questions, or just a reality superior to the ordinary one. In the Mirror of the Past: Of Fantasy and History is a collection of seven essays by American and Polish authors, including Brian Attebery, Terri Doughty, and Marek Oziewicz, with Mircea Eliade’s concept of “return from history to History” as their underlying theme.

Author : Arthur Dwight Culler
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780300034523
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Victorian Mirror of History written by Arthur Dwight Culler and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a pervasive belief among Victorian writers that their era was transitional in character, that they were moving from an outworn past into an unknown future and therefore needed to look to history for guidance. History was a mirror reflecting the present. On the basis of analogies and contrasts with earlier ages and cultures, the great Victorians tried to gain a sense of their own place in the continuum. In this insightful and elegantly written book, A. Dwight culler explores the Victorians' uses of history, surveying the major authors and the intellectual and cultural currents of the era. Culler begins with an introductory chapter on the Augustan Age, which was the immediately preceding example of the use of history as a mirror to reflect the present. He then charts the rise of the new attitude toward history in Scott and Macaulay and traces its use by individuals and groups who were concerned either with a particular phase of the past or with a current problem in relation to the past. Among those treated are Carlyle, Mill, and the Saint-Simonians, Thomas Arnold and the Liberal Anglican historians, Newman and the anti-Tractarians, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin and the Victorian medievalists, Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, Pater, and others preoccupied with the idea of a "Victorian Renaissance." Throughout, Culler vividly demonstrates that the Victorian debates about science, religion, art, and culture always had a historical dimension, always were concerned with the relation of the present to the past.

Author : Barbara W. Tuchman
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0345349571
Total Pages : 738 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Distant Mirror written by Barbara W. Tuchman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 1987-07-12 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary

Author : François Hartog
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520264231
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mirror of Herodotus written by François Hartog and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The best book to come out on Herodotus in years."—G. E. R. Lloyd, King's College Cambridge

Author : Pamela Kyle Crossley
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520234243
Total Pages : 423 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Translucent Mirror written by Pamela Kyle Crossley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-04-16 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Translucent Mirror explores the origins of nationalism and cultural identity in China, revealing how the Qing dynasty incorporated neighbouring but disparate political traditions into a new style of imperialism.

Author : Stephen R. Fox
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252066597
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mirror Makers written by Stephen R. Fox and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Fox explores the consistently cyclical nature of advertising from its beginning. A substantial new introduction updates this lively, anecdotal history of advertising into the mid-1990s. --Publisher.