History

Robert Darnton: Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1985-)

in Art, eBooks, File Sharing, Games, News

When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century [...]

Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8192

Richard Sennett: The Craftsman (2008)

Craftsmanship, says Richard Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman’s work. In this thought-provoking book, [...]

Read the full article →

Meta F. Janowitz, Diane Dallal (eds.): Tales of Gotham, Historical Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Microhistory of New York City (2013)

Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory of New York City: Tales and Microhistory of Gotham is a collection of narratives about people who lived in New York City during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, people whose lives archaeologists have encountered during excavations at sites where these people lived or worked. The stories are ethnohistorical or microhistorical [...]

Read the full article →

Susan Buck-Morss: Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2000-) [English, Spanish]

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [...]

Read the full article →

Susan Buck-Morss: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989-) [English, Spanish]

Walter Benjamin’s magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin’s vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn [...]

Read the full article →

Raoul Vaneigem: The Movement of the Free Spirit (1986/1994)

This book by the legendary Situationist activist and author of The Revolution of Everyday Life examines the heretical and millenarian movements that challenged social and ecclesiastical authority in Europe from the 1200s into the 1500s. Although Vaneigem discusses a number of different movements such as the Cathars and Joachimite millenarians, his main emphasis is on [...]

Read the full article →

Slavs and Tatars: Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (2013)

Beginning as an investigation into the apparently disparate events that bookend the twentieth and twenty-first century – the collapse of Communism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran – Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz traces unlikely points of convergence in Iran and Poland’s economic, social, political, religious and cultural histories. Drawing on Slavs and Tatars’ [...]

Read the full article →

Julia Kursell (ed.): Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor (1800–1930) (2008) [English, German]

The following collection of papers documents the workshop Sounds of Science – Schall im Labor, 1800 to 1930, carried out at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, in October 2006. The workshop asked about the role sound plays in the configurations among science, technology and the arts, focusing on the years [...]

Read the full article →

Paul Ricœur: Memory, History, Forgetting (2000/2004)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France’s role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history “overly remembers” some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, [...]

Read the full article →

Clinton Heylin: Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry (1995)

In Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, Clinton Heylin examines the entire modern history of this underground culture: from what defines a bootleg and its complex and protean legal status, to a full history of bootlegs’ production and distribution, to what’s contained on some of the most notorious bootlegs and how to [...]

Read the full article →

The Hula Hoop Theory of History

The Founding Document of Catastrophism by MORRIS BERMAN Above all, no zeal. – Talleyrand There is a curious rhythm to human affairs, or perhaps more specifically, to Western history.  Some movement or idea comes along, and everyone gets swept up in its wake.  This is it, then; this is the Answer we’ve been looking for.  [...]

Read the full article →

Giving Voice to Novel eBook Experience, The Silent History

The silent epidemic began in the year 2011. Children around the world were born without the ability to learn language. They didn’t babble as babies. They didn’t speak as they grew older. They couldn’t understand what their parents were saying. They seemed to show no interest in using language at all. Parents became frustrated, trying [...]

Read the full article →

The Secret History Of Hacking

‘Invasion of the data snatchers,’ screamed a New York Times headline in 1989, reflecting rising panic over insecure computer systems. A hacker is a brilliantly devious criminal mind breaking the world’s most secret IT systems for money or political espionage, if you believe many similarly hysterical press reports. In fact, the truth is a lot [...]

Read the full article →

Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin: Wittgenstein’s Vienna (1973) [English/Spanish]

The central figure in this portrait of a crumbling society giving birth to the modern world without realizing it was Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker whose great book remains the key to modern thought and who went on to influence a whole generation of English thinkers, artists and scientists. As a portrait of [...]

Read the full article →

The Guerrilla Myth

Unconventional wars are our most pressing national security concern. They’re also the most ancient form of war in the world. Max Boot on the lessons of insurgency we seem unable to learn. Author Max Boot discusses his new book, “Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present,” with WSJ [...]

Read the full article →

The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History

books

Mircea Eliade This founding work of the history of religions, first published in English in 1954, secured the North American reputation of the Romanian emigre-scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures and drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade’s “The Myth of the [...]

Read the full article →

‘Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States’: Facts through a new lens

‘Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States’: Facts through a new lens

It’s somehow appropriate that Oliver Stone has chosen a hotel just a few blocks from the Agriculture Department to talk about his new project. “Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States,” a documentary series that debuts Monday on Showtime, focuses on Henry A. Wallace — former agriculture and commerce secretary, as well as Franklin [...]

Read the full article →

Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project (1982/1999) [German/English]

“To great writers,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.” Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years—“the theater,” as Benjamin [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries