John Glassie's Books

A Man of Misconceptions

The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change

By: John Glassie

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A Man of Misconceptions

The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change

By: John Glassie

A Scientific American Best Science Book of 2012 An Atlantic Wire Best Book of 2012 A New York Times Book Review “Editor's Choice” The “fascinating” (The New Yorker) story of Athanasius Kircher, the eccentric scholar-inventor who was either a great genius or a crackpot . . . or a bit of both. The interests of Athanasius Kircher, the legendary seventeenth-century priest-scientist, knew no bounds. From optics to music to magnetism to medicine, he offered up inventions and theories for everything, and they made him famous across Europe. His celebrated museum in Rome featured magic lanterns, speaking statues, the tail of a mermaid, and a brick from the Tower of Babel. Holy Roman Emperors were his patrons, popes were his friends, and in his spare time he collaborated with the Baroque master Bernini. But Kircher lived during an era of radical transformation, in which the old approach to knowledge—what he called the “art of knowing”— was giving way to the scientific method and modern thought. A Man of Misconceptions traces the rise, success, and eventual fall of this fascinating character as he attempted to come to terms with a changing world. With humor and insight, John Glassie returns Kircher to his rightful place as one of history’s most unforgettable figures.

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Page Count

353

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1594631891

ISBN 13

9781594631894

Barns

By: John Michael Vlach

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Barns

By: John Michael Vlach

A comprehensive and unique visual resource, Barns will be invaluable to students; teachers; researchers; historians of art, architecture, design, and technology; architects; engineers; designers of all kinds; and those who love barns."--BOOK JACKET.

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Page Count

410

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393730867

ISBN 13

9780393730869

Eavesdropping

An Intimate History

By: John L. Locke

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Eavesdropping

An Intimate History

By: John L. Locke

Why we can't resist listening in on our neighbours Eavesdropping has a bad name. It is a form of human communication in which the information gained is stolen, and where such words as cheating and spying come into play. But eavesdropping may also be an attempt to understand what goes on in the lives of others so as to know better how to live one's own. John Locke's entertaining and disturbing account explores everything from sixteenth-century voyeurism to Hitchcock's 'Rear Window'; from chimpanzee behaviour to Parisian café society; from private eyes to Facebook and Twitter. He uncovers the biological drive behind the behaviour, and its consequences across history and cultures. In the age of CCTV, phone tapping, and computer hacking, this is uncomfortably important reading.

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Page Count

278

Publisher

OUP Oxford

Published Date

ISBN 10

0191613665

ISBN 13

9780191613661

The Amazing Crawfish Boat

By: John Laudun

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The Amazing Crawfish Boat

By: John Laudun

In any given year, the Louisiana crawfish harvest tops 50,000 tons. The Amazing Crawfish Boat chronicles the development of an amphibious boat that transformed the Louisiana prairies into alternating fields of aquaculture and agriculture. In seeking to understand how such a machine came into being, John Laudun describes the ideas and traditions that have long been a part of the Louisiana landscape and how they converged at a particular moment in time to create a new economic opportunity for both the rice farmers who used them and the fabricators who made them. Walking fields with farmers and working in shops with fabricators, Laudun gives readers a rich portrait of the Louisiana prairies and the people who live and work on them. The Amazing Crawfish Boat seeks to unearth the complex mix of folk cultures that underlie a variety of traditions that are now seen as native to an area populated not just by Cajuns but also by Germans and other groups. Over the years, this diverse mix of cultures has produced an astonishing set of artifacts that demonstrate not only their ability to adapt, but their ability to innovate, and the crawfish boat is a great example of such creativity produced by individuals deeply embedded in their culture and place. While the lives of artists and scientists have been examined for what they tell us about innovation, The Amazing Crawfish Boat seeks to address creativity as part of a larger cultural complex of ideas and behaviors. To ascertain this inventiveness, Laudun examines the historical and cultural trends that led to this creation, drawing from archives, oral histories, and ethnographic accounts. He investigates the shops and sheds where farmers and fabricators work, revealing the immense imagination and intelligence that lie behind the bolts, welds, and hydraulic lines that hold the boats together and, in so doing, hold a way of life together.

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Page Count

343

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

149680421X

ISBN 13

9781496804211

Common Houses in America's Small Towns

The Atlantic Seaboard to the Mississippi Valley

By: John A. Jakle

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Common Houses in America's Small Towns

The Atlantic Seaboard to the Mississippi Valley

By: John A. Jakle

Surveys the types of homes found in twenty American small towns, and discusses house plans, features, and structural forms

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Page Count

260

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820310743

ISBN 13

9780820310749

By the Work of Their Hands

Studies in Afro-American Folklife

By: John Michael Vlach

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By the Work of Their Hands

Studies in Afro-American Folklife

By: John Michael Vlach

A stunning piece of scholarship, rich in both theory and evidence, that takes the reader to a new plateau of understanding" (Charles Joyner, University of South Carolina) of the African-American folklife.

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264

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813913667

ISBN 13

9780813913667

Children of Peace

By: William John McIntyre

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Children of Peace

By: William John McIntyre

Taking its title from the religious sect examined, Children of Peace is a history of one of the most significant and least-studied religious sects in English-speaking Canada. John McIntyre paints a colourful picture of a group of individuals who tried to

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288

Publisher

McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published Date

ISBN 10

0773511954

ISBN 13

9780773511958

Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845

By: John R. Stilgoe

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Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845

By: John R. Stilgoe

Looks at the ways Americans have altered the landscape from the arrival of early Spanish settlers to the beginning of the country's rapid urbanization

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Page Count

454

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300030460

ISBN 13

9780300030464

A Worlde of Wordes

By: John Florio

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A Worlde of Wordes

By: John Florio

A Worlde of Wordes, the first-ever comprehensive Italian-English dictionary, was published in 1598 by John Florio. One of the most prominent linguists and educators in Elizabethan England, Florio was greatly responsible for the spreading of Italian letters and culture throughout educated English society. Especially important was Florio's dictionary, which thanks to its exuberant wealth of English definitions made it initially possible for English readers to access Italy's rich Renaissance literary and scientific culture. Award-winning author Hermann W. Haller has prepared the first critical edition of A Worlde of Wordes, which features 46,000 Italian entries among them dialect forms, erotic terminology, colloquial phrases, and proverbs of the Italian language. Haller reveals Florio as a brilliant English translator and creative writer, as well as a grammarian and language teacher. His helpful critical commentary highlights Florio's love of words and his life-long dedication to promoting Italian language and culture abroad.

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Page Count

857

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1442645806

ISBN 13

9781442645806

Tennessee Log Buildings

A Folk Tradition

By: John B. Rehder

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Tennessee Log Buildings

A Folk Tradition

By: John B. Rehder

Drawing on more than four decades of research, Tennessee Log Buildings examines one of the Volunteer State’s most precious—and fast-disappearing—traditions. From the pioneer era through the mid–twentieth century, folk builders in Tennessee used logs to construct cabins, barns, other outbuildings, schools, and churches. In warm, accessible prose that often makes this deeply researched work read like guidebook, John Rehder explores the varied styles and architectural characteristics of these fascinating structures, including their floor plans, the types of timber used, and the different notches that were cut into the logs to secure the structures. Profusely illustrated with over one hundred images, Tennessee Log Houses traces the evolution of log houses from one-room (or single-pen) dwellings to more elaborate homes of various types, such as saddlebags, Cumberland houses, dogtrots, and two-story I-houses. Rehder discusses the historic settlement patterns and building traditions that led to this variety of house types and identifies their particular occurrences throughout the state by drawing on surveys conducted in forty-two counties by teams working for the Tennessee Historical Commission (THC). Similarly, he explores disparate barn and outbuilding types, including the distinctive cantilever barns that are found predominantly in East Tennessee. Sprinkled throughout the book are engaging anecdotes that convey just what it is like to conduct field research in remote rural areas. Rehder also describes in detail a number of the state’s exceptional log places, among them Wynnewood, an enormous structure in Middle Tennessee which dates back to the early nineteenth century and which suffered severe tornado damage in 2008. As the author notes, many of the buildings originally identified in the THC investigations have now vanished completely while others are in serious disrepair. Thus, this book not only offers an instructive and delightful look at a key part of Tennessee’s heritage but also makes an eloquent plea for its preservation. Until his death in 2011, JOHN B. REHDER was a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He first joined the UT faculty in 1967. He was the author of Appalachian Folkways, which won the Pioneer America Society’s Fred B. Kniffen Book Award in 2004, and Delta Sugar: Louisiana’s Vanishing Plantation Landscape, which won the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s 2000 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award.

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177

Publisher

Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1572339314

ISBN 13

9781572339316

Sugar Creek

Life on the Illinois Prairie

By: John Mack Faragher

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Sugar Creek

Life on the Illinois Prairie

By: John Mack Faragher

The fascinating story of the birth and development of a rural American community from its origins at the turn of the nineteenth century to the years that followed the Civil War. Drawing on newspapers, account books, and reminiscences, the author of the prize-winning Women and Men on the Overland Trail vividly portrays the lives of the prairie’s inhabitants—Indians, pioneers, farming men and women—and adds a compelling new chapter to American social history. "This is a book for anyone who has ridden down a country road and, hearing the wind whistle through the cornstalks, wondered about the Indians and pioneers who listened to that sound before him."—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune "Every chapter, almost every page, contains new ideas or throws new light on old ones, by means of a wealth of detail and clarity of though which brings the past alive again."—Hugh Brogan, The Times Literary Supplement "A notably successful example of the new work being done on the social history of rural America…. Faragher has constructed a vivid portrait of everyday life as well as an analysis of how the community developed and changed."—George M. Fredrickson, New York Review of Books "Here, succinctly set out, is the American prairie experience."—Publishers Weekly "Sugar Creek is a major new interpretation of America’s rural past."—Howard R. Lamar, Yale University Winner of the 1986 Society for the History of the Early American Republic Award John Mack Faragher is associate professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

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Page Count

300

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300229674

ISBN 13

9780300229677

Homo Narrans

The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature

By: John D. Niles

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Homo Narrans

The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature

By: John D. Niles

It would be difficult to imagine what human life would be like without stories—from myths recited by Pueblo Indian healers in the kiva, ballads sung in Slovenian market squares, folktales and legends told by the fireside in Italy, to jokes told at a dinner table in Des Moines—for it is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past. In Homo Narrans John D. Niles explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. The book vividly weaves together the study of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture with the author's own engagements in the field with some of the greatest twentieth-century singers and storytellers in the Scottish tradition. Niles ponders the nature of the storytelling impulse, the social function of narrative, and the role of individual talent in oral tradition. His investigation of the poetics of oral narrative encompasses literary works, such as the epic poems and hymns of early Greece and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, texts that we know only through written versions but that are grounded in oral technique. That all forms of narrative, even the most sophisticated genres of contemporary fiction, have their ultimate origin in storytelling is a point that scarcely needs to be argued. Niles's claims here are more ambitious: that oral narrative is and has long been the chief basis of culture itself, that the need to tell stories is what distinguishes humans from all other living creatures.

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Page Count

291

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812202953

ISBN 13

9780812202953

Roots of a Region

Southern Folk Culture

By: John A. Burrison

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Roots of a Region

Southern Folk Culture

By: John A. Burrison

Roots of a Region reveals the importance of folk traditions in shaping and expressing the American South. This overview covers the entire region and all forms of ex-pression-oral, musical, customary, and material. The author establishes how folklore pervades and reflects the region\'s economics, history (espe-cially the Civil War), race rela-tions, religion, and politics. He follows with a catalog of those folk-cultural traits-from food and crafts to music and story-that are distinctly southern. The book then explores the Native American and Old World sources of southern folk culture. Two case studies serve as examples to stu-dents and as evidence of the author\'s larger points. The first traces the origins and develop-ment of an artifact type, the clay jug; the second examines a place, Georgia, and the relationship of its folklore to the region as a whole. The author concludes by looking to the future of folklife in a region that has lost much of its agrarian base as it modernizes, a future dependent on recent immigration and appreciation of older southern traditions by a largely urban audience. Supporting these explorations are 115 illustrations-sixteen in color-and an extensive bibliography of books on southern folk culture. John A. Burrison is Regents Professor of English and director of the folklore curriculum at Georgia State University. He also serves as curator of the Goizueta Folklife Gallery at the Atlanta History Museum and of the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia at Sautee Nacoochee Center. His previous books are Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery, Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South, and Shaping Traditions: Folk Arts in a Changing South.

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Page Count

246

Publisher

Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published Date

ISBN 10

1604733071

ISBN 13

9781604733075

Exiled Among Nations

German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age

By: John P. R. Eicher

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Exiled Among Nations

German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age

By: John P. R. Eicher

Explores how religious migrants engage with the phenomenon of nationalism, through two groups of German-speaking Mennonites.

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Page Count

361

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1108486118

ISBN 13

9781108486118

The Scientific Counter-Revolution

The Jesuits and the Invention of Modern Science

By: Michael John Gorman

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The Scientific Counter-Revolution

The Jesuits and the Invention of Modern Science

By: Michael John Gorman

Jesuit engagement with natural philosophy during the late 16th and early 17th centuries transformed the status of the mathematical disciplines and propelled members of the Order into key areas of controversy in relation to Aristotelianism. Through close investigation of the activities of the Jesuit 'school' of mathematics founded by Christoph Clavius, The Scientific Counter-Revolution examines the Jesuit connections to the rise of experimental natural philosophy and the emergence of the early scientific societies. Arguing for a re-evaluation of the role of Jesuits in shaping early modern science, this book traces the evolution of the Collegio Romano as a hub of knowledge. Starting with an examination of Clavius's Counter-Reformation agenda for mathematics, Michael John Gorman traces the development of a collective Jesuit approach to experimentation and observation under Christopher Grienberger and analyses the Jesuit role in the Galileo Affair and the vacuum debate. Ending with a discussion of the transformation of the Collegio Romano under Athanasius Kircher into a place of curiosity and wonder and the centre of a global information gathering network, this book reveals how the Counter-Reformation goals of the Jesuits contributed to the shaping of modern experimental science.

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Page Count

297

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1350091979

ISBN 13

9781350091979

Faithful Labourers

A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970

By: John Leonard

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Faithful Labourers

A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970

By: John Leonard

A two-volume history of the criticism of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, tracing the major debates as they have unfolded over the past three centuries.

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Page Count

879

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199666555

ISBN 13

9780199666553

Appalachian Folkways

By: John B. Rehder

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Appalachian Folkways

By: John B. Rehder

Winner of the Kniffen Award and an Honorable Mention from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Awards in Sociology and Anthropology Appalachia may be the most mythologized and misunderstood place in America, its way of life and inhabitants both caricatured and celebrated in the mainstream media. Over generations, though, the families living in the mountainous region stretching from West Virginia to northeastern Alabama have forged one of the country's richest and most distinctive cultures, encompassing music, food, architecture, customs, and language. In Appalachian Folkways, geographer John Rehder offers an engaging and enlightening account of southern Appalachia and its cultural milieu that is at once sweeping and intimate. From architecture and traditional livelihoods to beliefs and art, Rehder, who has spent thirty years studying the region, offers a nuanced depiction of southern Appalachia's social and cultural identity. The book opens with an expert consideration of the southern Appalachian landscape, defined by mountains, rocky soil, thick forests, and plentiful streams. While these features have shaped the inhabitants of the region, Rehder notes, Appalachians have also shaped their environment, and he goes on to explore the human influence on the landscape. From physical geography, the book moves to settlement patterns, describing the Indian tribes that flourished before European settlement and the successive waves of migration that brought Melungeon, Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers to the region, along with the cultural contributions each made to what became a distinct Appalachian culture. Next focusing on the folk culture of Appalachia, Rehder details such cultural expressions as architecture and landscape design; traditional and more recent ways of making a living, both legal and illegal; foodstuffs and cooking techniques; folk remedies and belief systems; music, art, and the folk festivals that today attract visitors from around the world; and the region's dialect. With its broad scope and deep research, Appalachian Folkways accurately and evocatively chronicles a way of life that is fast disappearing.

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Page Count

382

Publisher

JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0801878799

ISBN 13

9780801878794

Shaping Traditions

Folk Arts in a Changing South : a Catalog of the Goizueta Folklife Gallery at the Atlanta History Center

By: Goizueta Folklife Gallery (Atlanta History Museum),John A. Burrison

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Shaping Traditions

Folk Arts in a Changing South : a Catalog of the Goizueta Folklife Gallery at the Atlanta History Center

By: Goizueta Folklife Gallery (Atlanta History Museum),John A. Burrison

A complete catalog of the Atlanta History Center’s permanent folk art exhibition, this richly illustrated volume defines and documents the folk arts of the lower southeastern United States. The objects, crafting processes, and performances represented here illustrate the unique qualities of the community-learned traditional arts of the South. John A. Burrison examines a multitude of traditional art forms, many of which still thrive today. Intricately constructed miniatures of covered wagons, sorghum-syrup mills, and pottery workshops speak of a life of subsistence farming. Decorated baskets represent the cultural exchanges of Native Americans, European Americans, and African Americans. Intricate wrought-iron gates, musical instruments, quilts, and such curiosities as face jugs combine beauty and utility--the dual nature of most folk art--with southern flair. An illuminating introduction by Burrison, the curator of the exhibit and an expert folk art collector, presents highlights of his thirty years of research and collecting experience, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the exhibition. A concluding section looks at the adaptations and innovations shaping the future of southern folk arts.

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Page Count

188

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820321508

ISBN 13

9780820321509

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