Engine of modernity

Engine of modernity PDF Author: Masha Belenky
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526138603
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Engine of modernity examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus - a horse-drawn vehicle of urban transport. The omnibus generated innovations in social practices by compelling passengers of diverse backgrounds to interact within the vehicle’s close confines. The arrival of the omnibus in the streets of Paris and in the pages of popular literature acted as a motor for a fundamental cultural shift in how people thought about the city, its social life, and its artistic representations. At the intersection of literary criticism and cultural history, Engine of modernity argues that the omnibus was a metaphor through which writers and artists explored evolving social dynamics of class and gender, meditated on the meaning of progress and change, and reflected on one’s own literary and artistic practices.

Engine of modernity

Engine of modernity PDF Author: Masha Belenky
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526138603
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book Here

Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Engine of modernity examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus - a horse-drawn vehicle of urban transport. The omnibus generated innovations in social practices by compelling passengers of diverse backgrounds to interact within the vehicle’s close confines. The arrival of the omnibus in the streets of Paris and in the pages of popular literature acted as a motor for a fundamental cultural shift in how people thought about the city, its social life, and its artistic representations. At the intersection of literary criticism and cultural history, Engine of modernity argues that the omnibus was a metaphor through which writers and artists explored evolving social dynamics of class and gender, meditated on the meaning of progress and change, and reflected on one’s own literary and artistic practices.

Engine of Modernity

Engine of Modernity PDF Author: Masha Belenky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526160218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Engine of modernity examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in nineteenth-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus - a horse-drawn vehicle of urban transport. The omnibus generated innovations in social practices by compelling passengers of diverse backgrounds to interact within the vehicle's close confines. The arrival of the omnibus in the streets of Paris and in the pages of popular literature acted as a motor for a fundamental cultural shift in how people thought about the city, its social life, and its artistic representations. At the intersection of literary criticism and cultural history, Engine of modernity argues that the omnibus was a metaphor through which writers and artists explored evolving social dynamics of class and gender, meditated on the meaning of progress and change, and reflected on one's own literary and artistic practices.

The Human Motor

The Human Motor PDF Author: Anson Rabinbach
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520078277
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
"Masterfully integrating Europe-wide debates in science, philosophy, technology, economics, and social policy, Rabinbach has provided us with a profoundly original understanding of the productivist obsessions from which we are still painfully freeing ourselves. . . . A splendid example of the mutual enrichment of intellectual and social history. It goes well beyond its central concern with the 'science of work' to illuminate everything it discusses, from Marxism to the social uses of photography, from cultural decadence to the impact of the First World War."—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Engines of Change

Engines of Change PDF Author: Paul Ingrassia
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145164065X
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
A narrative like no other: a cultural history that explores how cars have both propelled and reflected the American experience— from the Model T to the Prius. From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the open roads of Route 66, from the lore of Jack Kerouac to the sex appeal of the Hot Rod, America’s history is a vehicular history—an idea brought brilliantly to life in this major work by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Ingrassia. Ingrassia offers a wondrous epic in fifteen automobiles, including the Corvette, the Beetle, and the Chevy Corvair, as well as the personalities and tales behind them: Robert McNamara’s unlikely role in Lee Iacocca’s Mustang, John Z. DeLorean’s Pontiac GTO , Henry Ford’s Model T, as well as Honda’s Accord, the BMW 3 Series, and the Jeep, among others. Through these cars and these characters, Ingrassia shows how the car has expressed the particularly American tension between the lure of freedom and the obligations of utility. He also takes us through the rise of American manufacturing, the suburbanization of the country, the birth of the hippie and the yuppie, the emancipation of women, and many more fateful episodes and eras, including the car’s unintended consequences: trial lawyers, energy crises, and urban sprawl. Narrative history of the highest caliber, Engines of Change is an entirely edifying new way to look at the American story.

Forging Modernity

Forging Modernity PDF Author: Martin Hutchinson
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 0718896866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
The Industrial Revolution provided the greatest increase in living standards the world has ever known while propelling Britain to dominance on the global stage. In Forging Modernity, Martin Hutchinson looks at how and why Britain gained this prize ahead of its European competitors. After comparing their endowments and political structures as far back as 1600, he then traces how Britain, through better policies primarily from the political Tory party, diverged from other European countries. Hutchinson’s Harvard MBA allows a unique perspective on the early industrial enterprises - many successes resulted from marketing, control systems and logistics rather than from production technology alone, while on a national scale the scientific method and commercial competition were as important as physical infrastructure. By 1830, through ever-improving policies, Britain had built a staggering industrial lead, half a century ahead of its rivals. Then the Tories lost power and policy changed forever. In his conclusion, Hutchinson shows how changes welcomed by conventional historians caused the decline of Industrial Britain. Nevertheless, the policies that drove growth, ingenuity and rising living standards are still available for those bold enough to adopt them.

The Theological Basis of Liberal Modernity in Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws"

The Theological Basis of Liberal Modernity in Montesquieu's Author: Thomas L. Pangle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226645525
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The Spirit of the Laws—Montesquieu’s huge, complex, and enormously influential work—is considered one of the central texts of the Enlightenment, laying the foundation for the liberally democratic political regimes that were to embody its values. In his penetrating analysis, Thomas L. Pangle brilliantly argues that the inherently theological project of Enlightenment liberalism is made more clearly—and more consequentially— in Spirit than in any other work. In a probing and careful reading, Pangle shows how Montesquieu believed that rationalism, through the influence of liberal institutions and the spread of commercial culture, would secularize human affairs. At the same time, Pangle uncovers Montesquieu’s views about the origins of humanity’s religious impulse and his confidence that political and economic security would make people less likely to sacrifice worldly well-being for otherworldly hopes. With the interest in the theological aspects of political theory and practice showing no signs of diminishing, this book is a timely and insightful contribution to one of the key achievements of Enlightenment thought.

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War PDF Author: Howard W. French
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631495836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

The End of Illusions

The End of Illusions PDF Author: Andreas Reckwitz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509545719
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.

The Ecology of Modernism

The Ecology of Modernism PDF Author: Joshua Schuster
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817358293
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The Ecology of Modernism explores the unexpected absence of an environmental ethic in American modernist and avant-garde poetics, given its keen concern with an environmental aesthetic, and explains why American modernism was never green. Examining the relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution, Joshua Schuster posits that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethnic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission.

The Sacred Santa

The Sacred Santa PDF Author: Dell deChant
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1556358393
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Sacred Santa is an inquiry into the religious dimension of postmodern culture, seriously considering the widespread perception that contemporary culture witnesses a profound struggle between two antithetical systems -- a collision of two worlds, both religious, yet each with vivid visions of the sacred that differ radically with regard to what the sacred is and what it means to human life and social endeavor.