Author: Morris Bishop
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455375
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 692
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Book Description
Cornell University is fortunate to have as its historian a man of Morris Bishop's talents and devotion. As an accurate record and a work of art possessing form and personality, his book at once conveys the unique character of the early university—reflected in its vigorous founder, its first scholarly president, a brilliant and eccentric faculty, the hardy student body, and, sometimes unfortunately, its early architecture—and establishes Cornell's wider significance as a case history in the development of higher education. Cornell began in rebellion against the obscurantism of college education a century ago. Its record, claims the author, makes a social and cultural history of modern America. This story will undoubtedly entrance Cornellians; it will also charm a wider public. Dr. Allan Nevins, historian, wrote: "I anticipated that this book would meet the sternest tests of scholarship, insight, and literary finish. I find that it not only does this, but that it has other high merits. It shows grasp of ideas and forces. It is graphic in its presentation of character and idiosyncrasy. It lights up its story by a delightful play of humor, felicitously expressed. Its emphasis on fundamentals, without pomposity or platitude, is refreshing. Perhaps most important of all, it achieves one goal that in the history of a living university is both extremely difficult and extremely valuable: it recreates the changing atmosphere of time and place. It is written, very plainly, by a man who has known and loved Cornell and Ithaca for a long time, who has steeped himself in the traditions and spirit of the institution, and who possesses the enthusiasm and skill to convey his understanding of these intangibles to the reader." The distinct personalities of Ezra Cornell and first president Andrew Dickson White dominate the early chapters. For a vignette of the founder, see Bishop's description of "his" first buildings (Cascadilla, Morrill, McGraw, White, Sibley): "At best," he writes, "they embody the character of Ezra Cornell, grim, gray, sturdy, and economical." To the English historian, James Anthony Froude, Mr. Cornell was "the most surprising and venerable object I have seen in America." The first faculty, chosen by President White, reflected his character: "his idealism, his faith in social emancipation by education, his dislike of dogmatism, confinement, and inherited orthodoxy"; while the "romantic upstate gothic" architecture of such buildings as the President's house (now Andrew D. White Center for the Humanities), Sage Chapel, and Franklin Hall may be said to "portray the taste and Soul of Andrew Dickson White." Other memorable characters are Louis Fuertes, the beloved naturalist; his student, Hugh Troy, who once borrowed Fuertes' rhinoceros-foot wastebasket for illicit if hilarious purposes; the more noteworthy and the more eccentric among the faculty of succeeding presidential eras; and of course Napoleon, the campus dog, whose talent for hailing streetcars brought him home safely—and alone—from the Penn game. The humor in A History of Cornell is at times kindly, at times caustic, and always illuminating.
Author: Glenn C. Altschuler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471885
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
In their history of Cornell since 1940, Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick examine the institution in the context of the emergence of the modern research university. The book examines Cornell during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, antiapartheid protests, the ups and downs of varsity athletics, the women's movement, the opening of relations with China, and the creation of Cornell NYC Tech. It relates profound, fascinating, and little-known incidents involving the faculty, administration, and student life, connecting them to the "Cornell idea" of freedom and responsibility. The authors had access to all existing papers of the presidents of Cornell, which deeply informs their respectful but unvarnished portrait of the university. Institutions, like individuals, develop narratives about themselves. Cornell constructed its sense of self, of how it was special and different, on the eve of World War II, when America defended democracy from fascist dictatorship. Cornell’s fifth president, Edmund Ezra Day, and Carl Becker, its preeminent historian, discerned what they called a Cornell "soul," a Cornell "character," a Cornell "personality," a Cornell "tradition"—and they called it "freedom." "The Cornell idea" was tested and contested in Cornell’s second seventy-five years. Cornellians used the ideals of freedom and responsibility as weapons for change—and justifications for retaining the status quo; to protect academic freedom—and to rein in radical professors; to end in loco parentis and parietal rules, to preempt panty raids, pornography, and pot parties, and to reintroduce regulations to protect and promote the physical and emotional well-being of students; to add nanofabrication, entrepreneurship, and genomics to the curriculum—and to require language courses, freshmen writing, and physical education. In the name of freedom (and responsibility), black students occupied Willard Straight Hall, the anti–Vietnam War SDS took over the Engineering Library, proponents of divestment from South Africa built campus shantytowns, and Latinos seized Day Hall. In the name of responsibility (and freedom), the university reclaimed them. The history of Cornell since World War II, Altschuler and Kramnick believe, is in large part a set of variations on the narrative of freedom and its partner, responsibility, the obligation to others and to one’s self to do what is right and useful, with a principled commitment to the Cornell community—and to the world outside the Eddy Street gate.
Author: Robert Travers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139464167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 16
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Book Description
Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the apparent anomaly of a European trading company acting as an Indian ruler. Responding to a prolonged crisis of imperial legitimacy, British officials in Bengal tried to build their authority on the basis of an 'ancient constitution', supposedly discovered among the remnants of the declining Mughal Empire. In the search for an indigenous constitution, British political concepts were redeployed and redefined on the Indian frontier of empire, while stereotypes about 'oriental despotism' were challenged by the encounter with sophisticated Indian state forms. This highly original book uncovers a forgotten style of imperial state-building based on constitutional restoration, and in the process opens up new points of connection between British, imperial and South Asian history.
Author: William Carruthers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501766465
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
Flooded Pasts examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event—UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960–80)—to show how the project, its genealogy, and its aftermath not only propelled archaeology into the postwar world but also helped to "recolonize" it. In this book, William Carruthers asks how postwar decolonization took shape and what role a colonial discipline like archaeology—forged in the crucible of imperialism—played as the "new nations" asserted themselves in the face of the global Cold War. As the Aswan High Dam became the centerpiece of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egyptian revolution, the Nubian campaign sought to salvage and preserve ancient temples and archaeological sites from the new barrage's floodwaters. Conducted in the neighboring regions of Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia, the project built on years of Nubian archaeological work conducted under British occupation and influence. During that process, the campaign drew on the scientific racism that guided those earlier surveys, helping to consign Nubians themselves to state-led resettlement and modernization programs, even as UNESCO created a picturesque archaeological landscape fit for global media and tourist consumption. Flooded Pasts describes how colonial archaeological and anthropological practices—and particularly their archival and documentary manifestations—created an ancient Nubia severed from the region's population. As a result, the Nubian campaign not only became fundamental to the creation of UNESCO's 1972 World Heritage Convention but also exposed questions about the goals of archaeology and heritage and whether the colonial origins of these fields will ever be overcome.
Author: Richard H. Penner
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 0738597961
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 130
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Book Description
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, was founded after the Civil War as a great experiment: a nonsectarian, coeducational institution where "any person can find instruction in any study." In the mid-19th century, there were only a handful of colleges that accepted women and even fewer that were nonsectarian. The university charter specifically states that "persons of every religious denomination or of no religious denomination, shall be equally eligible to all offices and appointments." Today, with colleges of hotel management and labor relations added to the more traditional majors in liberal arts, engineering, business, agriculture, and architecture, Cornell - both an Ivy League university and state land-grant college - truly offers a diverse program of study for a diverse collection of students.
Author: Barry Strauss
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982116692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
A “splendid” (The Wall Street Journal) account of one of history’s most important and yet little-known wars, the campaign culminating in the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, whose outcome determined the future of the Roman Empire. Following Caesar’s assassination and Mark Antony’s defeat of the conspirators who killed Caesar, two powerful men remained in Rome—Antony and Caesar’s chosen heir, young Octavian, the future Augustus. When Antony fell in love with the most powerful woman in the world, Egypt’s ruler Cleopatra, and thwarted Octavian’s ambition to rule the empire, another civil war broke out. In 31 BC one of the largest naval battles in the ancient world took place—more than 600 ships, almost 200,000 men, and one woman—the Battle of Actium. Octavian prevailed over Antony and Cleopatra, who subsequently killed themselves. The Battle of Actium had great consequences for the empire. Had Antony and Cleopatra won, the empire’s capital might have moved from Rome to Alexandria, Cleopatra’s capital, and Latin might have become the empire’s second language after Greek, which was spoken throughout the eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt. In this “superbly recounted” (The National Review) history, Barry Strauss, ancient history authority, describes this consequential battle with the drama and expertise that it deserves. The War That Made the Roman Empire is essential history that features three of the greatest figures of the ancient world.
Author: Phyllis Rackin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801496981
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Phyllis Rackin offers a fresh approach to Shakespeare's English history plays, rereading them in the context of a world where rapid cultural change transformed historical consciousness and gave the study of history a new urgency. Rackin situates Shakespeare's English chronicles among multiple discourses, particularly the controversies surrounding the functions of poetry, theater, and history. She focuses on areas of contention in Renaissance historiography that are also areas of concern in recent criticism-historical authority and causation, the problems of anachronism and nostalgia, and the historical construction of class and gender. She analyzes the ways in which the perfoace of history in Shakespeare's theater participated--and its representation in subsequent criticism still participates--in the contests between opposed theories of history and between the different ideological interests and historiographic practices they authorize. Celebrating the heroic struggles of the past and recording the patriarchal genealogies of kings and nobles, Tudor historians provided an implicit rationale for the hierarchical order of their own time; but the new public theater where socially heterogeneous audiences came together to watch common players enact the roles of their social superiors was widely perceived as subverting that order. Examining such sociohistorical factors as the roles of women and common men and the conditions of theatrical performance, Rackin explores what happened when elite historical discourse was trans porteto the public commercial theater. She argues that Shakespeare's chronicles transformed univocal historical writing into polyphonic theatrical scripts that expressed the contradictions of Elizabethan culture.
Author: Donald A. Downs
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801466121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
In April 1969, one of America's premier universities was celebrating parents' weekend—and the student union was an armed camp, occupied by over eighty defiant members of the campus's Afro-American Society. Marching out Sunday night, the protesters brandished rifles, their maxim: "If we die, you are going to die." Cornell '69 is an electrifying account of that weekend which probes the origins of the drama and describes how it was played out not only at Cornell but on campuses across the nation during the heyday of American liberalism.Donald Alexander Downs tells the story of how Cornell University became the battleground for the clashing forces of racial justice, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law. Eyewitness accounts and retrospective interviews depict the explosive events of the day and bring the key participants into sharp focus: the Afro-American Society, outraged at a cross-burning incident on campus and demanding amnesty for its members implicated in other protests; University President James A. Perkins, long committed to addressing the legacies of racism, seeing his policies backfire and his career collapse; the faculty, indignant at the university's surrender, rejecting the administration's concessions, then reversing itself as the crisis wore on. The weekend's traumatic turn of events is shown by Downs to be a harbinger of the debates raging today over the meaning of the university in American society. He explores the fundamental questions it posed, questions Americans on and off campus are still struggling to answer: What is the relationship between racial justice and intellectual freedom? What are the limits in teaching identity politics? And what is the proper meaning of the university in a democratic polity?
Author: Ronald Elroy Ostman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Follow the history of this remarkable university in the pages of this book.
Author: Dominick LaCapra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
"LaCapra offers an intriguing collection of essays to support both his enthusiasm for intellectual history... and his concern about the 'excesses' he finds in techniques and practices of the new social history. Admitting that the essays are...
