The Edges of the Civilized World

The Edges of the Civilized World PDF Author: Alison Hawthorne Deming
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9780312204068
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Troubled by tensions that inevitably arise when civilization intrudes upon wild regions, Alison Hawthorne Deming visited some of our continent's most remote areas to answer questions that had long been on her mind. In the absence of vast frontiers, can we manage our ever-increasing numbers? How can we strike a balance with a natural world that we threaten by our very presence? With the language of a poet and the eye of a scientist, Alison Hawthorne Deming presents us with the difficult challenge of redefining our traditional notion of cultural progress and thinking of our future in new terms.

The Edges of the Civilized World

The Edges of the Civilized World PDF Author: Alison Hawthorne Deming
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9780312204068
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Troubled by tensions that inevitably arise when civilization intrudes upon wild regions, Alison Hawthorne Deming visited some of our continent's most remote areas to answer questions that had long been on her mind. In the absence of vast frontiers, can we manage our ever-increasing numbers? How can we strike a balance with a natural world that we threaten by our very presence? With the language of a poet and the eye of a scientist, Alison Hawthorne Deming presents us with the difficult challenge of redefining our traditional notion of cultural progress and thinking of our future in new terms.

Landscapes with Figures

Landscapes with Figures PDF Author: Robert L. Root
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803259832
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
For some, a sense of place is about travel, about plunging oneself into new settings. For others, it is about being?and knowing?home. This book is a collection of essays, memoirs, nature writing, and travel narratives that document the impact this sense of place has on writing. In locations as familiar as Cape Cod or Mesa Verde and as exotic as Krak¢w or Kyrgyzstan, thirteen accomplished writers of contemporary creative nonfiction share some of their most memorable work, disclosing how place alters our perception and influences our insight. ø Taking readers to deserts and forests, islands and mountains, Landscapes with Figures is an encounter not only with places but also with writers themselves. Each contribution is accompanied by an author's commentaryø that discusses the relationship to place in his or her writing. The authors reveal the connections they feel to the places they write about, the role that place plays in the choices they make in relating their experiences, and the strategies and work habits that produce such writing. This compilation is at once a wide-ranging anthology of the nonfiction of place for the armchair traveler and a book about writing for those who aspire to understand and practice the craft, carrying with it the invitation to reflect on one?s own special places.

The Muslim Conquest of Iberia

The Muslim Conquest of Iberia PDF Author: Nicola Clarke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136588191
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Medieval Islamic society set great store by the transmission of history: to edify, argue legal points, explain present conditions, offer political and religious legitimacy, and entertain. Modern scholars, too, have had much to say about the usefulness of early Islamic history-writing, although this debate has traditionally focused overwhelmingly on the central Islamic lands. This book looks instead at local and regional history-writing in Medieval Iberia. Drawing on numerous Arabic texts – historical, geographical and biographical – composed and transmitted in al-Andalus, North Africa and the Islamic east between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, Nicola Clarke offers a nuanced and detailed analysis of narratives about the eighth-century Muslim conquest of Iberia. Comparing how individual episodes, characters, and themes are treated in different texts, and how this treatment relates to intellectual debates, literary trends, and socio-political conditions at the time of writing, she shows how competing priorities shaped myriad variations on a single story and how the scholars and patrons of a corner of the Islamic world distant from Baghdad viewed their own history. Offering a framework in which historians of Christian Iberia (and of Christian Europe more generally) can approach and make sense of culturally-significant texts from Muslim Iberia, this book will also be relevant to broader debates about the historiography of early Islam. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of historiography, world history and Islamic studies.

The Future That Brought Her Here

The Future That Brought Her Here PDF Author: Deborah DeNicola
Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc.
ISBN: 0892545593
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A dynamic blend of history, science, psychology, dreams, and visions, Deborah DeNicola's memoir is a compelling account of self-discovery that is provocative and humble. A poet, dream analyst, and college professor DeNicola writes about her struggle to live in the ordinary world of academia while honoring the competing call of the creative and the spiritual. DeNicola's memoir shows her range of intellectual pursuits and spiritual experiences as she battles an inner war between depressive cynicism and faith and shares her lifelong search to heal the trauma of her father's tragic death when she was a teenager. Struggles between cynicism and faith, depression and hope, independence and attachment, creativity and financial security in the midst of spiritual searching, motherhood, teaching and writing are inextricably woven into the fabric of her story. Sharing the process of her awakening and how dreams and visions guide her, DeNicola stirs readers to listen courageously to their own inner voices. Her visionary quest takes her to the American West, Israel, and Southern France. Along the way she weaves together references from the Bible and the Gnostic Gospels, the story of Mary Magdalene, medieval history, the Templar Knights, the Black Madonnas, String Theory and quantum physics to find the repeated linkage between divinity and humanity.

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All PDF Author: Christina Thompson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608196380
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A beautifully written, fiercely intelligent and boldly conceived book that puts the author's unlikely marriage to a Maori man into the context of the history of Western colonization of New Zealand and the South Pacific. Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man. As an American graduate student studying history in Australia, Thompson traveled to New Zealand and met a Maori known as "Seven." Their relationship is one of opposites: he is a tradesman, she is an intellectual; he comes from a background of rural poverty, she from one of middleclass privilege; he is a "native," she descends directly from "colonizers." Nevertheless, they shared a similar sense of adventure and a willingness to depart from the customs of their families and forge a life together on their own. In this book, which grows out of decades of reading and research, Thompson explores cultural displacement through the ages and the fascinating history of Europeans in the South Pacific, beginning with Abel Tasman's discovery of New Zealand in 1642 and Cook's circumnavigation of 1770. Transporting us back and forth in time and around the world, from Australia to Hawaii to tribal New Zealand and finally to a house in New England that has ghosts of its own, Come on Shore brings to life a lush variety of characters and settings. Yet at its core, it is the story of two people who meet, fall in love, and are forever changed. "A multilayered, highly informative and insightful book that blends memoir, historical and travel narrative...vivid and meticulously researched."--San Francisco Chronicle

Crusading at the Edges of Europe

Crusading at the Edges of Europe PDF Author: Kurt Villads Jensen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317156706
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This book is the first to compare Denmark and Portugal systematically in the High Middle Ages and demonstrates how the two countries became strong kingdoms and important powers internationally by their participation in the crusading movement. Communication in the Middle Ages was better developed than often assumed and institutions, ideas, and military technology was exchanged rapidly, meaning it was possible to coordinate great military expeditions across the geographical periphery of Western Europe. Both Denmark and Portugal were closely connected to the sea and developed strong fleets, at the entrance to the Baltic and in the Mediterranean Seas respectively. They also both had religious borders, to the pagan Wends and to the Muslims, that were pushed forward in almost continuous crusades throughout the centuries. Crusading at the Edges of Europe follows the major campaigns of the kings and crusaders in Denmark and Portugal and compares war-technology and crusading ideology, highlighting how the countries learned from each other and became organised for war.

Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John

Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John PDF Author: Steven J. Friesen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190285001
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
After more than a century of debate about the significance of imperial cults for the interpretation of Revelation, this is the first study to examine both the archaeological evidence and the Biblical text in depth. Friesen argues that a detailed analysis of imperial cults as they were practiced in the first century CE in the region where John was active allows us to understand John's criticism of his society's dominant values. He demonstrates the importance of imperial cults for society at the time when Revelation was written, and shows the ways in which John refuted imperial cosmology through his use of vision, myth, and eschatological expectation.

Savage Anxieties

Savage Anxieties PDF Author: Robert A. Williams
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1137116072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
From one of the world's leading experts on Native American law and indigenous peoples' human rights comes an original and striking intellectual history of the tribe and Western civilization that sheds new light on how we understand ourselves and our contemporary society. Throughout the centuries, conquest, war, and unspeakable acts of violence and dispossession have all been justified by citing civilization's opposition to these differences represented by the tribe. Robert Williams, award winning author, legal scholar, and member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, proposes a wide-ranging reexamination of the history of the Western world, told from the perspective of civilization's war on tribalism as a way of life. Williams shows us how what we thought we knew about the rise of Western civilization over the tribe is in dire need of reappraisal.

The French in the Heart of America

The French in the Heart of America PDF Author: John Huston Finley
Publisher: New York : C. Scribner's sons
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians

Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians PDF Author: George Catlin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Indians of North America
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description