Imagining the Past

Imagining the Past PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820318108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
How we make history--and what we then make of it--is engagingly dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American community faced with the costs of its “progress.” In the particulars of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for the future. Breen first went to East Hampton, the celebrated Long Island resort town, to write about the Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating from the 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to, invented, and reinvented the town's history. Breen's work also drew him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents, zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had come to know about the divisiveness and opportunism of East Hampton's early days. Imagining the Past is about the interplay between some of the East Hampton histories Breen encountered: the “official” histories of many generations, the myths and oral traditions, and the curious stories that Breen, as an outsider, discerned in the town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents. With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to confront our pasts in all their complexities and ironies, no matter how unsettling or inconvenient the experience.

Imagining the Past

Imagining the Past PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820318108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
How we make history--and what we then make of it--is engagingly dramatized in T. H. Breen's portrait of a 350-year-old American community faced with the costs of its “progress.” In the particulars of one town's struggle to check development and save its natural environment, Breen shows how our sense of history reflects our ever-changing self-perceptions and hopes for the future. Breen first went to East Hampton, the celebrated Long Island resort town, to write about the Mulford Farmstead, a picturesque saltbox dating from the 1680s. Through his research, he came across a fascinating cast of local characters, past and present, who contributed to, invented, and reinvented the town's history. Breen's work also drew him into contemporary local affairs: factionalism among residents, zoning disputes, and debates over resource management. Driving these heated issues, Breen found, were some dearly held notions about a harmonious, agrarian past that conflicted with what he had come to know about the divisiveness and opportunism of East Hampton's early days. Imagining the Past is about the interplay between some of the East Hampton histories Breen encountered: the “official” histories of many generations, the myths and oral traditions, and the curious stories that Breen, as an outsider, discerned in the town's rich holdings of artifacts and documents. With a warm yet wry regard for human nature, Breen obliges us to confront our pasts in all their complexities and ironies, no matter how unsettling or inconvenient the experience.

The Profile of Imagining

The Profile of Imagining PDF Author: Robert Hopkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198896174
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Imagining is a central power of the mind. When we visualize how something looks, or imagine how some combination of ingredients might taste, we picture absent things in a way that captures what it would be like to experience them. This book offers an original theory of the nature of this important mental phenomenon and its role is in our lives.

Imagining Alternative Worlds

Imagining Alternative Worlds PDF Author: Christoffer Kølvraa
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 104022279X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Imagining Alternative Worlds explores how the far right employs fictionality as a powerful political tool in the 21st century. It does so by examining the far right’s own cultural production and commentary through a large collection of its novels, novellas, short stories, and film reviews, illustrating how the ‘alternative worlds’ articulated in such cultural products convey its ideology. More specifically, the book identifies and analyses four distinct far-right cultural imaginaries – a ‘primordial’, a ‘nostalgic’, a ‘promethean’, and a ‘nihilist’ one – that each subtly conveys different yet linked ideas about space, time, ‘race’, gender, and heroic identity. By drawing attention to the cultural heterogeneity of the contemporary far right, Imagining Alternative Worlds offers key insights into the dreams, identities, and norms such actors hope will define our future. The book will be of interest to researchers of the far right, of literary, media and communication studies, and of social and cultural history.

Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy (Easyread Large Edition)

Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy (Easyread Large Edition) PDF Author: Yuval Levin
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458763544
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
From stem cell research to global warming, human cloning, evolution, and beyond, political debates about science in recent years have fallen into the familiar categories of America's culture wars. Imagining the Future explores the meaning of science and technology in American politics today. The science debates, Yuval Levin argues, expose the deepest strengths and greatest weaknesses of both the left and the right, and present serious challenges to American democratic self-government. What do arguments about embryos, climate, or the origins of man reveal about contemporary America? Why do issues involving science seem to divide us along the same fault lines as so many other issues in our political life? Is science morally neutral, or is it an endeavor filled with moral promise - and peril? Are American conservatives really waging war on science? Is the American left justified in calling itself the party of science? Most of the science debates, Levin concludes, are not about particular theories or facts or technologies. Rather, they come down to a profound dispute between liberals and conservatives about the right way to think about the future. Science is only one subject of this broader dispute; but today's science debates can illuminate the contours of our politics and clarify the rift at the heart of our polity.

Re-imagining Social Work

Re-imagining Social Work PDF Author: Jim Ife
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108530486
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Social workers are increasingly faced with contemporary global challenges such as inequality, climate change and displacement of people. As a field committed to supporting the world's most vulnerable populations and communities, social work must adapt to meet the needs of this changing global landscape. Re-imagining Social Work broadens the imaginative horizons for social workers and acquaints readers with their potential to creatively contribute to global change. Written in an accessible style, this book motivates readers to think outside the box when it comes to linking theory to their social work practice, in order to construct innovative solutions to prominent social problems. Re-imagining Social Work provides a unique perspective on how social work can evolve for the future. Through theory and critical perspective, this book provides the skills required to be an innovative creative social worker.

Imagining the Penitentiary

Imagining the Penitentiary PDF Author: John Bender
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226042299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This brilliant and insightful contribution to cultural studies investigates the role of literature—particularly the novel—and visual arts in the development of institutions. Arguing the attitudes expressed in narrative literature and art between 1719 and 1779 helped bring about the change from traditional prisons to penitentiaries, John Bender offers studies of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, The Beggar's Opera, Hogarth's Progresses, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia as well as illustrations from prison literature, art, and architecture in support of his thesis.

Imagining Collective Futures

Imagining Collective Futures PDF Author: Constance de Saint-Laurent
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319760513
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
It is a commonly held assumption among cultural, social, and political psychologists that imagining the future of societies we live in has the potential to change how we think and act in the world. However little research has been devoted to whether this effect exists in collective imaginations, of social groups, communities and nations, for instance. This book explores the part that imagination and creativity play in the construction of collective futures, and the diversity of outlets in which these are presented, from fiction and cultural symbols to science and technology. The authors discuss this effect in social phenomena such as in intergroup conflict and social change, and focus on several cases studies to illustrate how the imagination of collective futures can guide social and political action. This book brings together theoretical and empirical contributions from cultural, social, and political psychology to offer insight into our constant (re)imagination of the societies in which we live.

Religion and Innovation

Religion and Innovation PDF Author: Donald A. Yerxa
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472591003
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
It is often assumed that religion is the backward-looking servant of tradition and the status quo, utterly opposed to the new. This refrain in so much of recent polemical writing has permeated the public mind and can even be found in academic publications. But recent scholarship increasingly shows that this view is a gross simplification - that, in fact, religious beliefs and practices have contributed to significant changes in human affairs: political and legal, social and artistic, scientific and commercial. This is certainly not to say that religion is always innovative. But the relationship between religion and innovation is much more complex and instructive than is generally assumed. Religion and Innovation includes contributions from leading historians, archaeologists, and social scientists, who offer findings about the relationship between religion and innovation. The essays collected in this volume range from discussions of the transformative power of religion in early societies; to re-examinations of our notions of naturalism, secularization, and progress; to explorations of cutting-edge contemporary issues. Combining scholarly rigor with clear, accessible writing, Religion and Innovation: Antagonists or Partners? is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of religion and the ongoing debates about its role in the modern world and into the future.

Toward an Anthropology of the Will

Toward an Anthropology of the Will PDF Author: Keith M. Murphy
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804773777
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Toward an Anthropology of the Will is the first book that systematically explores volition from an ethnographically informed anthropological point of view. While philosophers have for centuries puzzled over the degree to which individuals are "free" to choose how to act in the world, anthropologists have either assumed that the will is a stable, constant fact of the human condition or simply ignored it. Although they are usually quite comfortable discussing the relationship between culture and cognition or culture and emotion, anthropologists have not yet focused on how culture and volition are interconnected. The contributors to this book draw upon their unique insights and research experience to address fundamental questions, including: What forms does the will take in culture? How is willing experienced? How does it relate to emotion and cognition? What does imagination have to do with willing? What is the connection between morality, virtue, and willing? Exploring such questions, the book moves beyond old debates about "freedom" and "determinacy" to demonstrate how a richly nuanced anthropological approach to the cultural experience of willing can help shape theories of social action in the human sciences.

Saigon's Edge

Saigon's Edge PDF Author: Erik Harms
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816656053
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Exploring the places where the rural and urban intersect, where many of the world’s people live.