Author: Joachim WhaleyPublisher:
ISBN: 0198731019
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 747
Book Description
Germany and the Holy Roman Empire
Author: Joachim WhaleyPublisher:
ISBN: 0198731019
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 747
Book Description
The Conquest Of Nature
Author: David BlackbournPublisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448114217
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530
Book Description
The modern idea of 'mastery' over nature always had its critics, whether their motives were aesthetic, religious or environmentalist. By investigating how the most fundamental element - water - was 'conquered' by draining fens and marshes, straightening the courses of rivers, building high dams and exploiting hydro-electric power, The Conquest of Nature explores how over the last 250 years, the German people have shaped their natural environment and how the landscapes they created took a powerful hold on the German imagination. From Frederick the Great of Prussia to Johann Gottfried Tulla, 'the man who tamed the wild Rhine' in the nineteenth century to Otto Intze, 'master dambuilder' of the years around 1900, to the Nazis who set out to colonise 'living space' in the East, this groundbreaking study shows that while mastery over nature delivers undoubted benefits, it has often come at a tremendous cost to both the natural environment and human life.
Identities
Author: Heidrun FriesePublisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571814746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
"Identity" has become a core concept of the social and cultural sciences. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary criticism, this book offers a comprehensive and critical overview on how this concept is currently used and how it relates to memory and constructions of historical meaning.
The Origins of the Modern Jew
Author: Michael A. MeyerPublisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814337546
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
An excellent overview of the intellectual history of important figures in German Jewry. Until the 18th century Jews lived in Christian Europe, spiritually and often physically removed form the stream of European culture. During the Enlightenment intellectual Europe accepted a philosophy which, by the universality of its ideals, reached out to embrace the Jew within the greater community of man. The Jew began to feel European, and his traditional identity became a problem for the first time. the response of the Jewish intellectual leadership in Germany to this crisis is the subject of this book. Chief among those men who struggled with the problems of Jewish consciousness were Moses Mendelssohn, David Friedlander, Leopold Zunz, Eduard Gans, and Heinrich Heine. By 1824, liberal Judaism had not yet produced a vision of it future as a separate entity within European society, but it had been exposed to and grappled with all the significant problems that still confront the Jew in the West.
Gay Berlin
Author: Robert BeachyPublisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307473139
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Winner of Randy Shilts Award In the half century before the Nazis rose to power, Berlin became the undisputed gay capital of the world. Activists and medical professionals made it a city of firsts—the first gay journal, the first homosexual rights organization, the first Institute for Sexual Science, the first sex reassignment surgeries—exploring and educating themselves and the rest of the world about new ways of understanding the human condition. In this fascinating examination of how the uninhibited urban culture of Berlin helped create our categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, Robert Beachy guides readers through the past events and developments that continue to shape and influence our thinking about sex and gender to this day.
Sources of the Self
Author: Charles TaylorPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674257049
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 628
Book Description
In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality. The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor’s goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.
Mobilizing Black Germany
Author: Tiffany N. FlorvilPublisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052390
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427
Book Description
In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora. Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde’s role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists’ politics, intellectualism, and internationalism.
Belonging
Author: Nora KrugPublisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1476796637
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).
A Peculiar Mixture
Author: Jan StievermannPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271063009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Book Description
Through innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and fresh avenues of inquiry, the nine essays collected in A Peculiar Mixture endeavor to transform how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity that characterized the experience of German-speaking people in the middle colonies. They explore how the various cultural expressions of German speakers helped them bridge regional, religious, and denominational divides and eventually find a way to partake in America’s emerging national identity. Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as evolving continuously as a singular entity, the contributions to this volume conceive of it as an ever-shifting and tangled “web of contact zones.” They present a society with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies, in a “peculiar mixture” of Old World practices and New World influences. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Rosalind J. Beiler, Patrick M. Erben, Cynthia G. Falk, Marie Basile McDaniel, Philip Otterness, Liam Riordan, Matthias Schönhofer, and Marianne S. Wokeck.
The Creation of National Identities
Author: Anne-Marie ThiessePublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004498834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Book Description
From the barbarian epics to the ethnographic museums, from the national languages to emblematic landscapes or typical costumes, this book retraces the cultural fabrication of the European nations. National identities are not facts of nature, but constructions.
