Author: Victoria De Grazia
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674031180
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 620
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Book Description
The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today. De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it--first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.
Author: Dexter Hoyos
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786725398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Rome – Urbs Roma: city of patricians and plebeians, emperors and gladiators, slaves and concubines – was the epicentre of a far-flung imperium whose cultural legacy is incalculable. How a tiny settlement, founded by desperate adventurers beside the banks of the River Tiber, came to rule vast tracts of territory across the face of the known world is one of the more improbable stories of antiquity. The epic scale of the Colosseum; majestically columned temples; formidable legionaries marching in burnished steel breastplates; and capricious Caesars clad in purple robes who thought themselves gods: all these images speak of a grandeur that continues to be associated with this most celebrated of ancient capitals. The glory of Rome is further underlined by enduring monuments like Hadrian's Wall, holding the line as it did against ferocious Pictish barbarians thought to be from Hyperborea: the mythic Land Beyond the North Wind. This book vividly recounts the rags-to-riches story of Rome's unlikely triumph. Perhaps the most famous example in history of modest beginnings rising to greatness, Rome's empire was never static or uniform. Over the centuries, under the 'boundless grandeur of the Roman peace' (as the Elder Pliny put it), imperial law, civilisation and language vigorously interacted with and influenced local cultures across western and central Europe and North Africa. Provincial subjects were made Roman citizens, generals and senators. In AD 98 Trajan became the first of many Romans from outside Italy to assume supreme power as Emperor. Poets, philosophers, historians and legalists – and many others besides – all participated in the brilliant intellectual constellation secured by the pax Romana. However, as Dexter Hoyos reveals, the empire was not won cheaply or fast, and did not always succeed. The Carthaginian general Hannibal came close to destroying it. Arminius freed Germania by brutally annihilating three irreplaceable legions in the Teutoburg Forest – a disaster that broke Augustus' heart. And the Romans themselves, in expanding their empire, were often ruthless. Caesar boasted of killing a million enemy fighters in his Gallic Wars, while the accusation of a Caledonian lord became proverbial: they make a desert and call it peace. Yet at the same time the Romans strove to impose moral and legal principles for directing their subjects as much as themselves, and laid down standards of government that are still valid today. Rome Victorious is a masterful new treatment of the rise of Rome – from the viewpoints both of the city itself and the people it came to rule and make its own.
Author: David Todd
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691205337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
How France's elites used soft power to pursue their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century After Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military conquest. A Velvet Empire is a global history of French imperialism in the nineteenth century, providing new insights into the mechanisms of imperial collaboration that extended France's power from the Middle East to Latin America and ushered in the modern age of globalization. David Todd shows how French elites pursued a cunning strategy of imperial expansion in which conspicuous commodities such as champagne and silk textiles, together with loans to client states, contributed to a global campaign of seduction. French imperialism was no less brutal than that of the British. But while Britain widened its imperial reach through settler colonialism and the acquisition of far-flung territories, France built a "velvet" empire backed by frequent military interventions and a broadening extraterritorial jurisdiction. Todd demonstrates how France drew vast benefits from these asymmetric, imperial-like relations until a succession of setbacks around the world brought about their unravelling in the 1870s. A Velvet Empire sheds light on France's neglected contribution to the conservative reinvention of modernity and offers a new interpretation of the resurgence of French colonialism on a global scale after 1880. This panoramic book also highlights the crucial role of collaboration among European empires during this period—including archrivals Britain and France—and cooperation with indigenous elites in facilitating imperial expansion and the globalization of capitalism.
Author: Gary Cross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231502532
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
The unqualified victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been the home of the most aggressive and often thoughtful criticism of consumption, including Puritanism, Prohibition, the simplicity movement, the '60s hippies, and the consumer rights movement. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, not only has American consumerism triumphed, there isn't even an "ism" left to challenge it. An All-Consuming Century is a rich history of how market goods came to dominate American life over that remarkable hundred years between 1900 and 2000 and why for the first time in history there are no practical limits to consumerism. By 1930 a distinct consumer society had emerged in the United States in which the taste, speed, control, and comfort of goods offered new meanings of freedom, thus laying the groundwork for a full-scale ideology of consumer's democracy after World War II. From the introduction of Henry Ford's Model T ("so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one") and the innovations in selling that arrived with the department store (window displays, self service, the installment plan) to the development of new arenas for spending (amusement parks, penny arcades, baseball parks, and dance halls), Americans embraced the new culture of commercialism—with reservations. However, Gary Cross shows that even the Depression, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the inflation of the 1970s made Americans more materialistic, opening new channels of desire and offering opportunities for more innovative and aggressive marketing. The conservative upsurge of the 1980s and '90s indulged in its own brand of self-aggrandizement by promoting unrestricted markets. The consumerism of today, thriving and largely unchecked, no longer brings families and communities together; instead, it increasingly divides and isolates Americans. Consumer culture has provided affluent societies with peaceful alternatives to tribalism and class war, Cross writes, and it has fueled extraordinary economic growth. The challenge for the future is to find ways to revive the still valid portion of the culture of constraint and control the overpowering success of the all-consuming twentieth century.
Author: Arthur I. Miller
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618341511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
A history of the idea of "black holes" explores the tumultuous debate over the existence of this now well-accepted phenomenon, focusing particular attention on Indian scientist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
Author: David C. Atkinson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469630281
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
From 1896 to 1924, motivated by fears of an irresistible wave of Asian migration and the possibility that whites might be ousted from their position of global domination, British colonists and white Americans instituted stringent legislative controls on Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian immigration. Historians of these efforts typically stress similarity and collaboration between these movements, but in this compelling study, David C. Atkinson highlights the differences in these campaigns and argues that the main factor unifying these otherwise distinctive drives was the constant tensions they caused. Drawing on documentary evidence from the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand, Atkinson traces how these exclusionary regimes drew inspiration from similar racial, economic, and strategic anxieties, but nevertheless developed idiosyncratically in the first decades of the twentieth century. Arguing that the so-called white man's burden was often white supremacy itself, Atkinson demonstrates how the tenets of absolute exclusion--meant to foster white racial, political, and economic supremacy--only inflamed dangerous tensions that threatened to undermine the British Empire, American foreign relations, and the new framework of international cooperation that followed the First World War.
Author: James P. Woodard
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146965637X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 543
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Book Description
James P. Woodard's history of consumer capitalism in Brazil, today the world's fifth most populous country, is at once magisterial, intimate, and penetrating enough to serve as a history of modern Brazil itself. It tells how a new economic outlook took hold over the course of the twentieth century, a time when the United States became Brazil's most important trading partner and the tastemaker of its better-heeled citizens. In a cultural entangling with the United States, Brazilians saw Chevrolets and Fords replace horse-drawn carriages, railroads lose to a mania for cheap automobile roads, and the fabric of everyday existence rewoven as commerce reached into the deepest spheres of family life. The United States loomed large in this economic transformation, but American consumer culture was not merely imposed on Brazilians. By the seventies, many elements once thought of as American had slipped their exotic traces and become Brazilian, and this process illuminates how the culture of consumer capitalism became a more genuinely transnational and globalized phenomenon. This commercial and cultural turn is the great untold story of Brazil's twentieth century, and one key to its twenty-first.
Author: Marie Forleo
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN: 0071597824
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Unleash Your Irresistibility! "Make Every Man Want You gives every woman the tools she needs to unlock her inner magnet." --Kelly Ripa Let's make one thing clear: this book is like no other dating book you've read. There are no rules, no list of things to do to land a husband in thirty days, and no reason to blame yourself if “he's just not that into you.” Please. Throw those books away. Instead, let's focus on you--and how you can make yourself more appealing to others in almost every situation--whether you have a man or not. Think of it as a crash course in desirability, a life-changing lesson in loving yourself inside and out. Once you embrace your unique qualities and dissolve your bad relationship habits, you'll be amazed to find how irresistible you are to others! This girl-friendly guide reveals: Five Truths Every Irresistible Woman Needs to Know: Live in the moment, Men do not want to be changed or improved Seven Habits of Highly Unattractive Women:Boring in bed, Being needy Eight Secrets of Attracting the Right Man for You: Get rid of your "perfect man" checklist, Have your own life
Author: Andy Stanley
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310536995
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
A fresh look at the earliest Christian movement reveals what made the new faith so compelling...and what we need to change today to make it so again. Once upon a time there was a version of the Christian faith that was practically irresistible. After all, what could be more so than the gospel that Jesus ushered in? Why, then, isn't it the same with Christianity today? Author and pastor Andy Stanley is deeply concerned with the present-day church and its future. He believes that many of the solutions to our issues can be found by investigating our roots. In Irresistible, Andy chronicles what made the early Jesus Movement so compelling, resilient, and irresistible by answering these questions: What did first-century Christians know that we don't—about God's Word, about their lives, about love? What did they do that we're not doing? What makes Christianity so resistible in today's culture? What needs to change in order to repeat the growth our faith had at its beginning? Many people who leave or disparage the faith cite reasons that have less to do with Jesus than with the conduct of his followers. It's time to hit pause and consider the faith modeled by our first-century brothers and sisters who had no official Bible, no status, and little chance of survival. It's time to embrace the version of faith that initiated—against all human odds—a chain of events resulting in the most significant and extensive cultural transformation the world has ever seen. This is a version of Christianity we must remember and re-embrace if we want to be salt and light in an increasingly savorless and dark world.
Author: Jia Lynn Yang
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize Shortlisted for the Arthur Ross Book Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A "powerful and cogent" (Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post) account of the twentieth-century battle for immigration reform that set the stage for today’s roiling debates. The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia. In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, from the indefatigable congressman Emanuel Celler and senator Herbert Lehman to the bull-headed Nevada senator Pat McCarran, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law. Through a world war, a refugee crisis after the Holocaust, and a McCarthyist fever, a coalition of lawmakers and activists descended from Jewish, Irish, and Japanese immigrants fought to establish a new principle of equality in the American immigration system. Their crowning achievement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, proved to be one of the most transformative laws in the country’s history, opening the door to nonwhite migration at levels never seen before—and changing America in ways that those who debated it could hardly have imagined. Framed movingly by her own family’s story of immigration to America, Yang’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is a deeply researched and illuminating work of history, one that shows how Americans have strived and struggled to live up to the ideal of a home for the “huddled masses,” as promised in Emma Lazarus’s famous poem.
