Rocks, Ice and Dirty Stones PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Rocks, Ice and Dirty Stones PDF full book. Access full book title Rocks, Ice and Dirty Stones by Marcia Pointon. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Marcia Pointon
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780237987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book
Book Description
The king of stones, valued since antiquity for their unrivalled hardness, diamonds today are both desired and deplored. Once faceted and polished they glitter on the fingers of brides-to-be and in the ornaments of the super-rich, but their extraction from some of the world’s poorest countries remains contentious. Immensely valuable for their size, diamonds can be easily hidden and transported, making them perfect contraband. Diamonds have been widely used in industry since the nineteenth century and have long been valued for their pharmaceutical and prophylactic properties. This entertaining and richly illustrated book examines the history of the diamond trade through the centuries from India and Brazil to South Africa and Europe and investigates what happens to diamonds once they reach the cutters and polishers. Marcia Pointon takes the reader on a unique tour of the ways in which the quadrahedron diamond shape has inspired design, architecture, and painting, from the symbolism of medieval manuscripts to modern-day graffiti. She questions the etiquette of engagement rings, and she reminds us why and how lost, stolen, or cursed diamonds create suspense in so many classic novels and films. This compelling and fascinating account of the history of sparklers around the world will appeal to all who covet, as well as all who despise, the unparalleled brilliance and glitter of the diamond.
Author: Marcia Pointon
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780237987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book
Book Description
The king of stones, valued since antiquity for their unrivalled hardness, diamonds today are both desired and deplored. Once faceted and polished they glitter on the fingers of brides-to-be and in the ornaments of the super-rich, but their extraction from some of the world’s poorest countries remains contentious. Immensely valuable for their size, diamonds can be easily hidden and transported, making them perfect contraband. Diamonds have been widely used in industry since the nineteenth century and have long been valued for their pharmaceutical and prophylactic properties. This entertaining and richly illustrated book examines the history of the diamond trade through the centuries from India and Brazil to South Africa and Europe and investigates what happens to diamonds once they reach the cutters and polishers. Marcia Pointon takes the reader on a unique tour of the ways in which the quadrahedron diamond shape has inspired design, architecture, and painting, from the symbolism of medieval manuscripts to modern-day graffiti. She questions the etiquette of engagement rings, and she reminds us why and how lost, stolen, or cursed diamonds create suspense in so many classic novels and films. This compelling and fascinating account of the history of sparklers around the world will appeal to all who covet, as well as all who despise, the unparalleled brilliance and glitter of the diamond.
Author: Robert Thorson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802719201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Get Book
Book Description
There once may have been 250,000 miles of stone walls in America's Northeast, stretching farther than the distance to the moon. They took three billion man-hours to build. And even though most are crumbling today, they contain a magnificent scientific and cultural story-about the geothermal forces that formed their stones, the tectonic movements that brought them to the surface, the glacial tide that broke them apart, the earth that held them for so long, and about the humans who built them. Stone walls layer time like Russian dolls, their smallest elements reflecting the longest spans, and Thorson urges us to study them, for each stone has its own story. Linking geological history to the early American experience, Stone by Stone presents a fascinating picture of the land the Pilgrims settled, allowing us to see and understand it with new eyes.
Author: Tijl Vanneste
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
Get Book
Book Description
A sweeping history of our enduring passion for diamonds—and the exploitative industry that fuels it. Blood, Sweat and Earth is a hard-hitting historical exposé of the diamond industry, focusing on the exploitation of workers and the environment, the monopolization of uncut diamonds, and how little this has changed over time. It describes the use of forced labor and political oppression by Indian sultans, Portuguese colonizers in Brazil, and Western industrialists in many parts of Africa—as well as the hoarding of diamonds to maintain high prices, from the English East India Company to De Beers. While recent discoveries of diamond deposits in Siberia, Canada, and Australia have brought an end to monopolization, the book shows that advances in the production of synthetic diamonds have not yet been able to eradicate the exploitation caused by the world’s unquenchable thirst for sparkle.
Author: Ronald Turnbull
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
ISBN: 190614897X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188
Get Book
Book Description
Grand to look at, grand to look from, and grand to climb' - so Great Gable was described over a hundred years ago. Probably the Lake District's best loved hill, it receives twenty thousand ascents each year and has seen the birth of two separate sorts of hill sport. In The Riddle of Sphinx Rock, award-winning outdoor writer Ronald Turnbull asks why we find Great Gable so irresistibly attractive. His answer suggests that the greatness of Gable is far more than just a matter of getting to the top. As he walks, scrambles and climbs, he explores the subtleties of its terrain and its geology, history and myths. You'll meet characters and locations that are an integral part of its story: Wordsworth and his Wheel of Fells, Fanny Mercer and her bad alpenstock technique, the Wadd Holes and Pillar Rock, Moses Rigg and Geoffrey Winthrop Young. By turns intriguing and funny, erudite and provocative, The Riddle of Sphinx Rock was chosen by Trail magazine as one of six top titles in its How To Be Mountain Literate section: 'A boutique history of one the UK's most fascinating mountains, filled with memorable characters, classic routes and derring-do. Puts you in the historic thick of one of our most atmospheric and iconic mountains.'
Author: Michael Bycroft
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319963791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Get Book
Book Description
This edited collection is an interdisciplinary study of gems in the early modern world. It examines the relations between the art, science, and technology of gems, and it does so against the backdrop of an expanding global trade in gems. The eleven chapters are organised into three parts. The first part sets the scene by describing how gems moved around the early modern world, how they were set in motion, and how they were pulled together in the course of their travels. The second part is about value. It asks why people valued gems, how they determined the value of a given gem, and how the value of a gem was connected to its perceived place of origin. The third part deals with the skills involved in cutting, polishing, and mounting gems, and how these skills were transmitted and articulated by artisans. The common themes of all these chapters are materials, knowledge and global trade. The contributors to this volume focus on the material properties of gems such as their weight and hardness, on the knowledge involved in exchanging them and valuing them, and on the cultural consequences of the expanding trade in gems in Eurasia and the Americas.
Author: Saskia Coenen Snyder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197610471
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Get Book
Book Description
Following diamonds from African mines to the necklines of high society women, this international history shows why Jews were central to the transatlantic gem trade and its growth into a global industry. During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of diamonds from South Africa to London. The primary supplier to the world, South Africa's diamond fields became one of the formative sites of modern capitalist production. At each stage of the diamond's route through the British empire and beyond-from Cape Town to London, from Amsterdam to New York City-carbon gems were primarily mined, processed, appraised, and sold by Jews. In A Brilliant Commodity, historian Saskia Coenen Snyder traces how once-peripheral Jewish populations became the central architects of a new, global exchange of diamonds that connected African sites of supply, European manufacturing centers, American retailers, and western consumers. Centuries of restrictions had limited Jews to trade and finance, businesses that often heavily relied on internal networks. Jews were well-positioned to become key players in the earliest stage of the diamond trade and its growth into a global industry, a development fueled by technological advancements, a dramatic rise in the demand of luxury goods, and an abundance of rough stones. Relying on mercantile and familial ties across continents, Jews created a highly successful commodity chain that included buyers, brokers, cutters, factory owners, financiers, and retailers. Working within a diasporic ethnic community that bridged city and countryside, metropole and colony, Jews helped build a flourishing diamond industry, notably Hatton Garden in London and the Diamond District of New York City, and a place for themselves in the modern world.
Author: Antje Krause-Wahl
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350192910
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Get Book
Book Description
Shine allures and awakens desire. As a phenomenon of perception shiny things and materials fascinate and tantalize. They are a formative element of material culture, promising luxury, social distinction and the hope of limitless experience and excess. Since the early twentieth century the mass production, dissemination and popularization of synthetic materials that produce heretofore-unknown effects of shine have increased. At the same time, shine is subjectified as “glamor” and made into a token of performative self-empowerment. The volume illuminates genealogical as well as systematic relationships between material phenomena of shine and cultural-philosophical concepts of appearance, illusion, distraction and glare in bringing together renowned scholars from various disciplines.
Author: Sally Morgan
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN: 9781435828650
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34
Get Book
Book Description
Describes the different kinds of rock found in the Earth and discusses the processes that form and change these rocks.
Author: Thomas Spencer Baynes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Encyclopedias and dictionaries
Languages : en
Pages : 888
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Jill Rappoport
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192692860
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Get Book
Book Description
Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction reframes how we think about Victorian women's changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels. The reform of married women's property law between 1856 and 1882 constituted one of the largest economic transformations England had ever seen, as well as one of its most significant challenges to family traditions. By the end of this period, women who had once lost their common-law property rights to their husbands reclaimed their own assets, regained economic agency, and forever altered the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock by doing so. Yet in literary accounts, reforms were neither as decisive as the law implied nor limited to marriage. Legal rights frequently clashed with other family claims, and the reallocation of wealth affected far more than spouses or the marital state. Competition between wives and children is just one of many ways in which Victorian fiction suggests the perceived benefits and threats of property reform. In nineteenth-century fiction, portrayals of women's claims to ownership provide insight into the social networks forged through property transactions and also offer a lens to examine a wide range of other social matters, including testamentary practices, wills, and copyright law; economic and evolutionary models of mutuality; the twin dangers of greed and generosity; inheritance and custody rights; the economic ramifications of loyalty and family obligation; and the legacy of nineteenth-century economic practices for women today. Understanding the reform of married women's property as both an ideologically and materially substantial redistribution of the nation's wealth as well as one complicated by competing cultural traditions, this book explores the widespread ways in which women's financial agency was imagined by fiction that engages with but also diverges from the law in accounts of economic choices and transactions. Repeatedly, narratives by Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, and Oliphant suggest both that the law is inadequate to account for the way that property enables and disrupts relationships, and that the form of the Victorian novel - in its ability to track intimate and intricate exchanges across generations - is better suited to such tasks.
