Presenting a broad panorama of society and culture in the German lands and Russia from the Enlightenment to the breakthrough of modernity, this microhistory of one extraordinary family explores how the lives of individual people are entangled with the great forces of their age.
Imperial Russia, is was said, had two capital cities because it had two identities: St. Petersburg was Russia's "window to Europe," whereas Moscow preserved the nation's proud historical traditions. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this myth by exploring how the tsarist regime actually tried to turn Moscow into a bridgehead of Europe in the heartland of Russia. Moscow in the eighteenth century was widely scorned as backward and "Asiatic." The tsars thought it a benighted place that endangered their state's internal security and their effort to make Russia European. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to construct a new Moscow, with European buildings and institutions, a Westernized "middle estate", and a new cultural image as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the urban environment - buildings, institutions, streets, smells - transformed in the nine decades from Catherine's accession to the death of Nicholas I? How were the lives of the inhabitants changed? Did a "middle estate" come into being? How similar was Moscow's modernization to that of Western cities, and how was it affected by the disastrous occupation by Napoleon? Lastly, how were Moscow and its people imagined by writers, artists, and social commentators in Russia and the West from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century?
Despite the negative criticism directed at its sentiment, its heartlessness, its superficiality, the picturesque remained in both art and fiction of Victorian England a mode of seeing that even the greatest of the artists and novelists relied upon from time to time so that their viewers and readers could rejoice in the instant recognition of place and character distinctly limned and sometimes subtly enough to elicit sympathy" (Preface). After briefly tracing the development of the theory of the picturesque in the eighteenth-century writings of William Gilpin, Sir Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight and examining how nineteenth-century novelists accommodated aesthetic theory to the practice of fiction, Ross focuses on the use of the picturesque in the works of Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. The persistence of the picturesque through novels ranging from Waverley to Jude the Obscure and in writers like Dickens and Eliot, who had little respect for its conventions, attests to its strength and attraction in nineteenth-century literature.
This book examines Cold War relations between Egypt and the United States. The author argues that Nasser’s responses to security and political threats in the Middle East and North Arica conflicted with America’s postwar strategy in those regions. The author focuses on how the failure of American–Egyptian diplomacy endangered the Postwar Petroleum Order and facilitated the outbreak of the Six-Day War.
This classic book on the role of the Supreme Court in our democracy traces the history of the Court, assessing the merits of various decisions along the way. Eminent law professor Alexander Bickel begins with Marbury vs. Madison, which he says gives shaky support to judicial review, and concludes with the school desegregation cases of 1954, which he uses to show the extent and limits of the Court’s power. In this way he accomplishes his stated purpose: “to have the Supreme Court’s exercise of judicial review better understood and supported and more sagaciously used.” The book now includes new foreword by Henry Wellington.Reviews of the Earlier Edition:“Dozens of books have examined and debated the court’s role in the American system. Yet there remains great need for the scholarship and perception, the sound sense and clear view Alexander Bickel brings to the discussion.... Students of the court will find much independent and original thinking supported by wide knowledge. Many judges could read the book with profit.” -Donovan Richardson, Christian Science Monitor“The Yale professor is a law teacher who is not afraid to declare his own strong views of legal wrongs... One of the rewards of this book is that Professor Bickel skillfully knits in "ations from a host of authorities and, since these are carefully documented, the reader may look them up in their settings. Among the author’s favorites is the late Thomas Reed Powell of Harvard, whose wit flashes on a good many pages.” -Irving Dillard, Saturday ReviewAlexander M. Bickel was professor of law at Yale University.
Why are we so fascinated with the person of Jesus of Nazareth? What made him so intriguing and attractive? Why then was he executed as a heretic and rebel? This brief book seeks to imagine what might have happened in those years when Jesus lived in Israel: how did his family react to him? How did his friends and enemies respond to his teachings and actions? How are we like them in our own encounter with the person of Jesus? The Jesus that emerges in these pages is deeply spiritual and political, human and humorous, both surprising and authentic. Prepare to be surprised.
This is a comprehensive treatment of the most consequential work of art ever to be executed in Russia - the equestrian monument to Peter the Great. Schenker deals with the cultural setting that prepared the ground for the monument and provides life stories of those who were involved in its creation.
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