The legendary Battle of Gettysburg still resonates in American history. Readers are guided through Gettysburg's tranquil beginnings as a Pennsylvania crossroads to the action-packed battle that is known as one of the most crucial in the country's storied past. This resource takes the reader step by step through the days leading up to the battle, with first-person accounts of experiences on and off the battlefield, original photographs, and informative maps. These primary sources tell an exciting story fraught with tension and conflict that readers are unlikely to forget.
In an innovative, pluri-disciplinary approach this volume focuses on how memory in Sacred Heart devotion is created, promulgated and transformed. The volume with contributions by historians, theologians, religious scientists and art historians links the dimension of memory to that of iconography, language, body and ritual practices and sheds light on adaptations, transfers, contestations and variations in a perspective of longue durée from the late Middle Ages to the present. The first part of the volume develops central axes of analysis, which are specifically investigated in the two following parts. The contributions of part two intertwine perspectives of cultural, social and art history focusing on the multi-layered creation, public presence and political usage, diversity and variations of Sacred Heart iconography and devotion in a long-term perspective. In-depth analyses centre on late medieval northern Italy, early modern France and 18th-century Switzerland (Eidgenossenschaft), on France from the 1950s to the 1980s, and on Indonesia in the 20th and 21st centuries. In a dynamic way, the third part combines systematic theological, philosophical and didactic reflexions on the Sacred Heart with a focus on imagination, embodiment, spirituality and memory.
From the steam-powered models introduced in World War I to today's nuclear-powered, multiweaponed technological wonders, submarines have revolutionized warfare on the world's seas. This volume follows the extraordinary development of this key component of the world's navies. Submarines: An Illustrated History of Their Impact reveals how underwater warships evolved to become major threats to battle fleets and merchant shipping, as well as primary platforms for deterrent forces and crucial symbols of military power. In a series of chronological chapters, Submarines describes key developments in diving ability, underwater endurance, and weapons capabilities in specific periods, while highlighting strategic and operational innovations; the role of technological research; famous submarine events, battles, and commanders; and the impact of submarine services on naval society. The book also includes an illustrated reference section covering every submarine class worldwide since 1900. This coverage plus additional reference features make Submarines an essential introduction to a weapons system that has long held the public's imagination.
(Amadeus). In this first of three volumes, Paul Jackson begins a rich and detailed history of the early years of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, bringing to life more than 200 recorded broadcasts.
The Gnostic revival of the Enlightenment witnessed the erection of what could be called the “Kantian Rift,” an epistemological barrier between external reality and the mind of the percipient. Arbitrarily proclaimed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, this barrier rendered the world as a terra incognita. Suddenly, the world “out there” was deemed imperceptible and unknowable. In addition to the outer world, the cherished metaphysical certainties of antiquity—the soul, a transcendent order, and God—swiftly evaporated. The way was paved for a new set of modern mythmakers who would populate the world “out there” with their own surrogates for the Divine. Collectively, these surrogates could be referred to as the Beyond because they epistemologically and ontologically overwhelm humanity. In recent years, the Beyond has been invoked by theoreticians, literary figures, intelligence circles, and deep state operatives who share some variant of a technocratic vision for the world. In turn, these mythmakers have either directly or indirectly served elitist interests that have been working toward the establishment of a global government and the creation of a New Man. Their hegemony has been legitimized through the invocation of a wrathful earth goddess, a technological Singularity, a superweapon, and extraterrestrial “gods.” All of these are merely masks for the same counterfeit divinity... the Beyond.
New York Times Bestseller: A history of the S&L scandal that caused a financial disaster for American taxpayers: “Hard to put down” (Library Journal). For most of the 20th century, savings and loans were an invaluable thread of the American economy. But in the 1970s, Congress passed sweeping financial deregulation at the insistence of industry insiders that allowed these once quaint and useful institutions to spread their taxpayer-insured assets into new and risky investments. The looser regulations and reduced federal oversight also opened the industry to an army of shady characters, white-collar criminals, and organized crime groups. Less than 10 years later, half the nation’s savings and loans were insolvent, leaving the American taxpayer on the hook for a large hunk of the nearly half a trillion dollars that had gone missing. The authors of Inside Job saw signs of danger long before the scandal hit nationwide. Decades after the savings and loan collapse, Inside Job remains a thrilling read and a sobering reminder that our financial institutions are more fragile than they appear.
The chilling true story of how the son of the most violent mobster in Chicago helped bring down the last great American crime syndicate: the one-hundred-year-old Chicago Outfit. In Operation Family Secrets, Frank Calabrese, Jr. reveals for the first time the outfit’s “made” ceremony and describes being put to work alongside his father and uncle in loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, and extortion. As members of the outfit, they plotted the slaying of a fellow gangster, committed the bombing murder of a trucking executive, the gangland execution of two mobsters—whose burial in an Indiana cornfield was reenacted in Martin Scorsese’s blockbuster film Casino—and numerous other hits. The Calabrese Crew’s colossal earnings and extreme ruthlessness made them both a dreaded criminal gang and the object of an intense FBi inquiry. When Frank Jr., his father, and Uncle Nick are convicted on racketeering violations, “Junior” and “Senior” are sent to the same federal penitentiary in Michigan. It's there that Frank Jr. makes the life-changing decision to go straight. But he needs to keep his father behind bars in order to regain control of his life and save his family. So Frank Jr. makes a secret deal with prosecutors, and for six months—unmonitored and unprotected—he wears a wire as his father recounts decades of hideous crimes. Frank Jr.’s cooperation with the FBI for virtually no monetary gain or special privileges helped create the government’s “Operation Family Secrets” campaign against the Chicago outfit, which reopened eighteen unsolved murders, implicated twelve La Cosa Nostra soldiers and two outfit bosses, and became one of the largest organized crime cases in U.S. history. Operation Family Secrets intimately portrays how organized crime rots a family from the inside out while detailing Frank Jr.’s deadly prison-yard mission, the FBI’s landmark investigation, and the U.S. attorney’s office’s daring prosecution of America’s most dangerous criminal organization.
Decorated by Giovanni Buonconsiglio, Jacopo Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane, Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo, the church of the former Benedictine female monastery Santi Cosma e Damiano occupies an outstanding position in Venice. The author of this study argues that from its foundation in 1481 to its dissolution in 1805, Santi Cosma e Damiano was a reform convent, and that its nuns employed art and architecture as a means to actively express their specific religious concerns. While on the one hand focusing, on the basis of extensive archival research, on the reconstruction of the history and construction of the convent, this study's larger concern is with the religious reform movement, its ideas concerning art and architecture, and with the convent as a space for female self-realization in early modern Venice.
The late 17th century through to the end of the 18th century saw rapid progress in the development of woodwind instruments and the composition of a vast body of music for those instruments. During this period a large amount of music for domestic consumption was written for a growing amateur market, a market which has regrown in the latter part of the 20th century. The last 30 years has also seen the standard of performance by professionals on these instruments rise enormously. This book provides a guide to the history of the four main woodwind instruments of the Baroque, the flute, oboe, recorder and bassoon, and this is complemented by a repertoire list for each instrument. It also guides those interested towards a basic technique for playing these instruments - a certain level of musical literacy is assumed - and it can be used by students, professionals and amateurs. Advice is also given on buying a suitable reproduction instrument from a market where now virtually any Baroque instrument can be obtained as a faithful copy. This is the first book of its kind and has its origins in the wind tutors of the 18th century.
Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy surveys the ways in which notions of religion and spirituality have impinged upon the cinema. Cinema is conceived as a post-Romantic form for which religion and spirituality can be unified only problematically. While inspecting many of the well-established themes and topoi of writing on religion and film (such as films about priests and 'Christ-figures') it also seeks to problematize them, focusing primarily upon the issues of religious representation foregrounded by such European directors as Kieslowski and Godard. Coates draws on theories of theologians, philosophers and cultural and literary critics including: Otto, Kant, Schiller and Girard. Addressing the relationship between religion and spirituality from a film studies specialist's perspective, this book offers all those concerned with film, media or religious studies an invaluable examination of artistic interaction with the theological and aesthetic issues of representation and representability. Paul Coates is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and author of many books including: The Gorgon's Gaze (CUP), Film at the Intersection of High and Mass Culture (CUP), The Story of the Lost Reflection (Verso).
Johann Sebastian Bach – celebrated pipe organist, court composer and master of sacred music – was also a technical pioneer. Working in Germany in the early eighteenth century, he invented new instruments and carried out experiments in tuning, the effects of which are still with us today. Two hundred years later, a number of extraordinary musicians have utilised the music of Bach to thrilling effect through the art of recording, furthering their own virtuosity and reinventing the composer for our time. In Reinventing Bach, Paul Elie brilliantly blends the stories of modern musicians with a polyphonic account of our most celebrated composer’ s life to create a spellbinding narrative of the changing place of music in our lives. We see the sainted organist Albert Schweitzer playing to a mobile recording unit set up at London’ s Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach’ s organ works to the world beyond the churches, and Pablo Casals’ s Abbey Road recordings of Bach’ s cello suites transform the middle-class sitting room into a hotbed of existentialism; we watch Leopold Stokowski persuade Walt Disney to feature his own grand orchestrations of Bach in the animated classical-music movie Fantasia – which made Bach the sound of children’ s playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike – and we witness how Glenn Gould’ s Goldberg Variations made Bach the byword for postwar cool. Through the Beatles and Switched-on Bach and Gö del, Escher, Bach – through film, rock music, the Walkman, the CD and up to Yo-Yo Ma and the iPod – Elie shows us how dozens of gifted musicians searched, experimented and collaborated with one another in the service of a composer who emerged as the prototype of the spiritualised, technically savvy artist.
In the 1930s, the Italian Fascist regime profoundly changed the landscape of Rome's historic centre, demolishing buildings and displacing thousands of Romans in order to display the ruins of the pre-Christian Roman Empire. This transformation is commonly interpreted as a failed attempt to harmonize urban planning with Fascism's ideological exaltation of the Roman Empire. Roads and Ruins argues that the chaotic Fascist cityscape, filled with traffic and crumbling ruins, was in fact a reflection of the landscape of the First World War. In the radical interwar transformation of Roman space, Paul Baxa finds the embodiment of the Fascist exaltation of speed and destruction, with both roads and ruins defining the cultural impulses at the heart of the movement. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including war diaries, memoirs, paintings, films, and government archives, Roads and Ruins is a richly textured study that offers an original perspective on a well known story.
This book is the first English-language study of motorsport and Italian Fascism, arguing that a synergy existed between motor racing and Fascism that did not exist with other sports. Motorsport was able to bring together the two dominant, and often opposed, cultural roots of Fascism, the Futurism of F. T. Marinetti, and the Decadence associated with Gabriele D’Annunzio. The book traces this cultural convergence through a topical study of motorsport in the 1920s and 1930s placing it in the context of the history of sport under Mussolini’s regime. Chapters discuss the centrality of speed and death in Fascist culture, the attempt to transform Rome into a motorsport capital, the architectural and ideological function of the Monza and Tripoli and autodromes, and two chapters on the importance of the Mille Miglia, a genuine Fascist artefact that became one of the most legendary motor races of all time.
This is a historical novel based on both fact and fiction. Facts: In October of 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen, a famous newspaper columnist and television personality, announced she was writing a book that would lay out the evidence proving the Warren Commission was wrong about President Kennedy being murdered by a lone assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald. One month later, she was found dead in her Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan. While the New York Police Department officially concluded the cause of death was suicide, credible evidence existed indicating she was murdered, which included the fact the manuscript of the book she was writing disappeared at the same time she died. Fiction. Two NYPD homicide detectives conclude there is enough evidence indicating Dorothy Kilgallen was murdered to justify an investigation into her death. Suspecting that she was murdered to prevent her from writing a book that would prove the Warren Commission was wrong, the two homicide detectives retrace the investigation of President Kennedy's murder, which takes them to Dallas, Texas to interview Jack Ruby in jail, to New Orleans to interview District Attorney Garrison, and to Washington DC to discuss the assassination with a former undercover CIA agent who knows what actually happened. The CIA attempts to thwart the NYPD detectives' investigation, which includes an attempt to murder them. In the end, the two detectives determine out who actually murdered President Kennedy and the reason he was assassinated.
This volume of essays brings together the best of recent scholarship on Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of J.S. Bach and a friend and mentor of Mozart. J.C. Bach had a cosmopolitan career, beginning in Berlin as a pupil of his half-brother, C.P.E. Bach, then a sojourn to Italy where he studied with Padre Martini in Bologna; after making his successful debut with operas for Turin and Naples he moved to London, where he became a leading composer and impresario. The articles selected for this volume represent the principal themes of scholarly research and writing over the past fifty years. The introduction provides a survey of J.C. Bach‘s career and an overview of recent literature. The collection includes English translations of two articles first published in German in the Bach-Jahrbuch, as well as one article published as recently as 2015. An appendix lists the complete contents of The Collected Works of Johann Christian Bach, using the Warburton catalogue numbers.
In this new collection of short stories, the imaginary residents of a particularly colourful region of Victoria in Australia lead lives of such sheer oddness that their stores had to be told. Most of them work without great enthusiasm for apparently harmless businesses. They ignore that, the companies are secretly involved in illegal activities run by one of the most feared criminal bosses in Melbourne. In this rollicking collection of short stories set in this eccentric little community, successful immigrants, hen-pecked husbands, terrified schoolboys, and bickering sisters have to figure out what to do when unpleasant deaths, delightful love affairs, and hungry crocodiles settle in. and whatever may happen, the secret hidden at the bottom of the lake will remain a secret--and laughter will survive! A Teaspoon of Giggles offers an example of the wicked humour of a man who likes to observe, tease, and mock the lovely people who live around him.
Are you passionate? Do you love driving? Would you like to read a story about the passion and skill it takes to drive in the Le Mans 24 Hour Race at over 200 mph down the Mulsanne Straight in a Ferrari F40 LM. (Especially at night, with slower cars in front.) This story is about two young Italian men and their young lady friends who are passionate, brave, spirited, and born with the gift of being able to drive at tremendously high speeds on the race track. They each earn the right to drive in the Le Mans 24 Hour Race; chosen by Enzo himself after driving on the Ferrari race track with him, following a very unusual wedding in the Maranello town center. If you love to read about driving with passion, and loving with passion, then you will enjoy this book!
There is no cinema with such effect as that of the hallucinatory Italian horror film. From Riccardo Freda's I Vampiri in 1956 to Il Cartaio in 2004, this work recounts the origins of the genre, celebrates at length ten of its auteurs, and discusses the noteworthy films of many others associated with the genre. The directors discussed in detail are Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Mario Bava, Ruggero Deodato, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, Antonio Margheriti, Aristide Massaccesi, Bruno Mattei, and Michele Soavi. Each chapter includes a biography, a detailed career account, discussion of influences both literary and cinematic, commentary on the films, with plots and production details, and an exhaustive filmography. A second section contains short discussions and selected filmographies of other important horror directors. The work concludes with a chapter on the future of Italian horror and an appendix of important horror films by directors other than the 50 profiled. Stills, posters, and behind-the-scenes shots illustrate the book.
Praise for A Tuscan Trilogy The Cielo: A Novel of Wartime Tuscany. "A moving debut novel of a luscious country." - Jacqueline Mitchard, best-selling author of The Deep End of the Ocean. Sparrow's Revenge: A Novel of Postwar Tuscany. "I enthusiastically recommend Sparrow's Revenge to anyone with the slightest interest in history, Italy or human nature - in short, to everyone." - BookReview.com Dino's Story: A Novel of 1960s Tuscany. "Salsini's research once again is impeccable and serves well to anchor this young man's story to an unforgettable place and time in Italian history." - Fred Gardaphe, distinguished professor English and Italian American Studies at Queens College and associate editor of Fra Noi. The Temptation of Father Lorenzo: Ten Stories of 1970s Tuscany A decade after Dino's Story, the beloved characters of the first three novels return in this engrossing collection, all set in Florence and the beautiful hills of Tuscany. Father Lorenzo, still exhausted from the flood, is tempted by a beautiful woman. Tomasso seeks his long-lost son. Father Sangretto retaliates when a rival priest produces a "miracle." Donna and Ezio open their farmhouse to tourists and an eccentric author is their first visitor. The women of Sant'Antonio join to help the stricken Annabella. Anna leaves the convent. Dino makes up his mind between Sophia and Francesca. And more.
Ruling Peacefully provides the first in-depth study of this influential and paradoxical figure. Gonzaga emerges as a complex personality whose interests as the representative of a northern Italian ruling family could just as easily lead him to support reform in the Catholic Church as to hinder it.
A New Decade, and New Stories IN PAUL SALSINIS FIRST NOVEL of this series, The Cielo: A Novel of Wartime Tuscany (first place winner, Council for Wisconsin Writers and Midwest Independent Publishers Association), terrified villagers were trapped in a farmhouse during World War II. In the second, Sparrows Revenge: A Novel of Postwar Tuscany, a partisan hunted down the collaborator of a horrific massacre. In the third, Dinos Story: A Novel of 1960s Tuscany, a boy came of age during the devastating flood of Florence in 1966. Then the characters entered a new decade in The Temptation of Father Lorenzo: Ten Stories of 1970s Tuscany (first place winner, Midwest Independent Publishers Association). NOW THESE BELOVED CHARACTERS, along with a few new friends and relatives, return in A Piazza for SantAntonio, Five Novellas of 1980s Tuscany. IN THE FIRST STORY, Donna writes a cookbook that makes her famous and threatens her marriage. In another, little Pasquale, in trying to save a cat, teaches the people of his village understanding. When SantAntonio is ridiculed because it lacks a piazza, a mysterious man who lives in an abandoned monastery comes to the rescue. Meanwhile, when Dino seeks his roots, he discovers a heroic grandfather, a loving uncle and a doomed village that may be inhabited by ghosts. And in Florence, Father Lorenzo tries to cope with the hysteria brought about by a serial killer of young lovers.
This superbly authoratitive new work provides a comprehensive A-Z guide to some 1000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a vast range of composers, as well as looking at such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Throught Griffiths skilfully blends lightly worn scholarship with personal insight, whether examining the emotional colouring that different musical keys achieve or charting the rise and development of the symphony.
The Four Seasons and the rest of the concertos in Op. 8 represent Vivaldi's remarkable innovation in the field of the Baroque concerto. This detailed guide examines the work's origin and construction in a way that enables the reader to distinguish what is extraordinary about the Seasons and what constitutes the composer's customary method of 'characterising' the solo concerto. Drawing on recent research and his own expertise in the appraisal of Vivaldi's manuscripts, the author draws interesting and sometimes startling conclusions about the conception of the Seasons, the origin of their programme, the dating of the concertos and the rationale behind the collection's ritornello-form structures and aria-like slow movements. The significance of Vivaldi's idiosyncratic art is thus revealed in some of the most popular concert music of all time.
Based on the comic book series by Frank Miller and John Romita Jr., a prose adaptation exploring the origin story of the crime-fighting vigilante. Raised by a single father and tormented by bullies, Matt Murdock thought he understood how to survive on the streets of his New York City neighborhood. Until his life was irrevocably altered when he was blinded by radioactive materials while saving a man’s life. But the accident also left Matt with a profoundly keener strength in all his other senses, a power he hones with the help of a tough mentor. Soon, Matt is transformed into a finely tuned weapon—a weapon with a purpose he does not fully understand until his father is brutally murdered. Struggling with his rage, Matt takes to the streets, exacting vengeance until destroying evil doers becomes second nature and he becomes . . . Daredevil. This thrilling novelization by Paul Crilley adapts the comic book series by Frank Miller and John Romita Jr.
This is by far the most exhaustive biography on Niels Stensen, anatomist, geologist and bishop, better known as "Nicolaus Steno". We learn about the scientist’s family and background in Lutheran Denmark, of his teachers at home and abroad, of his studies and travels in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and Germany, of his many pioneering achievements in anatomy and geology, of his encounters with Swammerdam, Malpighi and with members of the newly established Royal Society of London and the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, and with the philosopher Spinoza. It further treats Stensen’s religious conversion. The book includes the full set of Steno's anatomical and geological scientific papers in original language. The editors thoroughly translated the original Latin text to English, and included numerous footnotes on the background of this bibliographic and scientific treasure from the 17th century.
This book analyses two features of the traditional circus that have come under increasing attack since the mid-20th century: the use of wild animals in performance and the act of clowning. Positioning this socio-cultural change within the broader perspective of evolutionary semiotics, renowned circus expert Paul Bouissac examines the decline of the traditional circus and its transformation into a purely acrobatic spectacle. The End of the Circus draws on Bouissac's extensive ethnographic research, including previously unpublished material on the training of wild animals and clown make-up, to chart the origins of the circus in Gypsy culture and the drastic change in contemporary Western attitudes on ethical grounds. It scrutinizes the emergence of the new form of circus, with its focus on acrobatics and the meaning of the body, showing how acrobatic techniques have been appropriated from traditional Gypsy heritage and brought into the fold of mainstream popular entertainment. Questioning the survival of the new circus and the likely resurgence of its traditional forms, this book showcases Bouissac's innovative approach to semiotics and marks the culmination of his ground-breaking work on the circus.
A TUSCAN SERIES CONCLUDED IN PAUL SALSINIS FIRST NOVEL OF THIS SERIES, The Cielo: A Novel of Wartime Tuscany (first place winner, Council for Wisconsin Writers and Midwest Independent Publishers Association), terrified villagers were trapped in a farmhouse during World War II. In the second, Sparrows Revenge: A Novel of Postwar Tuscany, a partisan hunted down a collaborator of a horrific massacre. In the third, Dinos Story: A Novel of 1960s Tuscany, a boy came of age during the devastating flood of Florence in 1966. Then the characters entered a new decade in The Temptation of Father Lorenzo: Ten Stories of 1970s Tuscany (first place winner, Midwest Independent Publishers Association). In the next, these beloved characters, along with a few new friends and relatives, returned in A Piazza for SantAntonio, Five Novellas of 1980s Tuscany. NOW, IN THIS, THE FINAL VOLUME of the series, Father Lorenzo has a surprise reunion, Lucia and Paolo celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Anna and a television priest become friends, a supermarket threatens SantAntonios shops, a new book celebrates Cortona, Ezios novel becomes a movie, and a shipload of Albanian refugees brings a new life to Dino and Sofia. In the title story, a long tradition in the art of flag throwing is shattered at a festival in Lucca.
This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Formed in 1966 and flourishing until 2010, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself by its unique performance practices—members played hundreds of instruments on stage, recited poetry, performed theatrical sketches, and wore face paint, masks, lab coats, and traditional African and Asian dress. The group, which built a global audience and toured across six continents, presented their work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry’s traditionalist aesthetics. In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck combines musical analysis and historical inquiry to give us the definitive study of the Art Ensemble. In the book, he proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the band members were able to improvise together in so many different styles while also drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. Steinbeck examines the multimedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble’s performances and the ways in which their distinctive model of social relations kept the group performing together for four decades. Message to Our Folks is a striking and valuable contribution to our understanding of one of the world’s premier musical groups.
This is a comprehensive guide to single-stranded RNA phages (family Leviviridae), first discovered in 1961. These phages played a unique role in early studies of molecular biology, the genetic code, translation, replication, suppression of mutations. Special attention is devoted to modern applications of the RNA phages and their products in nanotechnology, vaccinology, gene discovery, evolutionary and environmental studies. Included is an overview of the generation of novel vaccines, gene therapy vectors, drug delivery, and diagnostic tools exploring the role of RNA phage-derived products in the revolutionary progress of the protein tethering and bioimaging protocols. Key Features Presents the first full guide to single-stranded RNA phages Reviews the history of molecular biology summarizing the role RNA phages in the development of the life sciences Demonstrates how RNA phage-derived products have resulted in nanotechnological applications Presents an up-to-date account of the role played by RNA phages in evolutionary and environmental studies
The Republic of Venice was the first great economic, cultural, and naval power of the modern Western world. After winning the struggle for ascendency in the late 13th century, the Republic enjoyed centuries of unprecedented glory and built a trading empire which at its apogee reached as far afield as China, Syria, and West Africa. This golden period only drew to an end with the Republic’s eventual surrender to Napoleon. The Venetians illuminates the character of the Republic during these illustrious years by shining a light on some of the most celebrated personalities of European history—Petrarch, Marco Polo, Galileo, Titian, Vivaldi, Casanova... Frequently, though, these emblems of the city found themselves at odds with the Venetian authorities, who prized stability above all else and were notoriously suspicious of any "cult of personality." Was this very tension perhaps the engine for the Republic’s unprecedented rise? Rich with biographies of some of the most exalted characters who have ever lived, The Venetians is a refreshing and authoritative new look at the history of the most evocative of city-states.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.