The Black Hole Of Calcutta

Author : Noel Barber
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781585790074
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Black Hole of Calcutta written by Noel Barber and published by . This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a bare, low-ceilinged dungeon, stench-ridden and stifling in the murderous summer heat of India. Measuring only abouteighteen feet long and fourteen feet wide, with twosmall barred air-holes, the cell known as the Black Hole prison, in the British East India Company's seemingly impregnable Fort William on the Hoogly River of Calcutta, was intended to hold at most a couple of prisoners. But on the terrible night of June 20, 1756, at the end of a four-day battle of astonishing ferocity which saw a vast Indian horde overwhelm the Fort's great outnumbered defenders, one hundred and forty-five men, and one woman, were cruelly herded into the Black Hole, and what they suffered during the ten horrific hours of their confinement - well, suffice it to say that only twenty-three survived till their release at dawn. The siege of Calcutta (for the British, an incredible saga of blundering and bad luck, poisoned by egregious instances of cowardice and treachery), and the night of the Black Hole, together comprise one of the most dramatic episodes of British Imperial history.

Author : Partha Chatterjee
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400842603
Total Pages : 440 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Black Hole of Empire written by Partha Chatterjee and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-08 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of "the black hole of Calcutta" was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects. The Black Hole of Empire follows the ever-changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the "civilizing" force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India. Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire's entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Author : Noel Barber
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Black Hole of Calcutta written by Noel Barber and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Clifford A. Pickover
Publisher : Courier Corporation
ISBN 13 : 1606600494
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Book of Black written by Clifford A. Pickover and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores topics related to "black," examining aspects of fashion, philosophy, politics, and popular culture.

Author : Marcia Bartusiak
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300213638
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Hole written by Marcia Bartusiak and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning science writer “packs a lot of learning into a deceptively light and enjoyable read” exploring the contentious history of the black hole (New Scientist). For more than half a century, physicists and astronomers engaged in heated dispute over the possibility of black holes in the universe. The strange notion of a space-time abyss from which not even light escapes seemed to confound all logic. Now Marcia Bartusiak, author of Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony and The Day We Found the Universe, recounts the frustrating, exhilarating, and at times humorous battles over one of history’s most dazzling ideas. Bartusiak shows how the black hole helped revive Einstein’s greatest achievement, the general theory of relativity, after decades of languishing in obscurity. Not until astronomers discovered such surprising new phenomena as neutron stars and black holes did the once-sedate universe transform into an Einsteinian cosmos, filled with sources of titanic energy that can be understood only in the light of relativity. Black Hole explains how Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and other leading thinkers completely changed the way we see the universe.

Author : Priyamvada Natarajan
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300221126
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mapping the Heavens written by Priyamvada Natarajan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A theoretical astrophysicist explores the ideas that transformed our knowledge of the universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is someone at the forefront of the research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe. She not only explains for a wide audience the science behind these essential ideas but also provides an understanding of how radical scientific theories gain acceptance. The formation and growth of black holes, dark matter halos, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the echo of the big bang, the discovery of exoplanets, and the possibility of other universes—these are some of the puzzling cosmological topics of the early twenty-first century. Natarajan discusses why the acceptance of new ideas about the universe and our place in it has never been linear and always contested even within the scientific community. And she affirms that, shifting and incomplete as science always must be, it offers the best path we have toward making sense of our wondrous, mysterious universe. “Part history, part science, all illuminating. If you want to understand the greatest ideas that shaped our current cosmic cartography, read this book.”—Adam G. Riess, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2011 “A highly readable, insider’s view of recent discoveries in astronomy with unusual attention to the instruments used and the human drama of the scientists.”—Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe and Einstein's Dream

Author : Henry Elmsley Busteed
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 522 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Echoes from Old Calcutta written by Henry Elmsley Busteed and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Christopher Hitchens
Publisher : Verso
ISBN 13 : 9781859840542
Total Pages : 132 pages
Book Rating : 4.4X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Missionary Position written by Christopher Hitchens and published by Verso. This book was released on 1995 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by politicians, the Church and the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta appears to be on the fast track to sainthood. But what, asks Christopher Hitchens, makes Mother Teresa so divine?

Author : Kathleen Blechynden
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Calcutta, Past and Present written by Kathleen Blechynden and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Krishna Dutta
Publisher : Signal Books
ISBN 13 : 9781902669595
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Calcutta written by Krishna Dutta and published by Signal Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the popular imagination, Calcutta is a packed and pestilential sprawl, made notorious by the Black Hole and the works of Mother Teresa. Kipling called it a City of Dreadful Night, and a century later V.S. Naipaul, Gunter Grass and Louis Malle revived its hellish image. This is the place where the West first truly encountered the East. Founded in the 1690s by East India Company merchants beside the Hugli River, Calcutta grew into India's capital during the Raj and the second city of the British Empire. Named the City of Palaces for its neoclassical mansions, Calcutta was the city of Clive, Hastings, Macaulay and Curzon. It was also home to extraordinary Bengalis such as Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, and Satyajit Ray, among the geniuses of world cinema. Above all, Calcutta (renamed Kolkata in 2001) is a city of extremes, where exquisite refinement rubs shoulders with coarse commercialism and political violence. Krishna Dutta explores these multiple paradoxes, giving personal insight into Calcutta's unique history and modern identity as reflected in its architecture, literature, cinema and music. CITY OF ARTISTS: Modern India's cultural capital; home city of