Robert DARNTON's Books

The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789

By: Robert Darnton

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The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789

By: Robert Darnton

A brilliant account of the coming of the French Revolution, and the culminating work of this most distinguished historian. When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered the overthrow of the monarchy and the birth of a new society. In retrospect we understand the French Revolution as the outcome of such factors as a faltering economy and Enlightenment thought. But what did the Parisians themselves think they were doing—how did they understand their world? In this dazzling history, Robert Darnton draws on decades of study to conjure a past as vivid as today’s news. He explores eighteenth-century Paris as an information society like our own, its news circuits centered in cafés, on park benches, and under the Palais-Royal’s Tree of Cracow. Through pamphlets, gossip, and public performances, the events of some forty years—from disastrous treaties and royal debauchery to thrilling hot-air balloon ascents—entered the churning collective consciousness of ordinary Parisians. With public trust eroding as new aspirations soared, Parisians prepared themselves for revolution.

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454

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W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

1324035595

ISBN 13

9781324035596

Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature

By: Robert Darnton

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Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature

By: Robert Darnton

Splendid…[Darnton gives] us vivid, hard-won detail, illuminating narrative, and subtle, original insight." —Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways. In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself incubated Diderot’s great Encyclopedie by hiding the banned project’s papers in his Paris townhouse. Relationships at court trumped principle in the Old Regime. Shaken by the Sepoy uprising in 1857, the British Raj undertook a vast surveillance of every aspect of Indian life, including its literary output. Years later the outrage stirred by the British partition of Bengal led the Raj to put this knowledge to use. Seeking to suppress Indian publications that it deemed seditious, the British held hearings in which literary criticism led to prison sentences. Their efforts to meld imperial power and liberal principle fed a growing Indian opposition. In Communist East Germany, censorship was a component of the party program to engineer society. Behind the unmarked office doors of Ninety Clara-Zetkin Street in East Berlin, censors developed annual plans for literature in negotiation with high party officials and prominent writers. A system so pervasive that it lodged inside the authors’ heads as self-censorship, it left visible scars in the nation’s literature. By rooting censorship in the particulars of history, Darnton's revealing study enables us to think more clearly about efforts to control expression past and present.

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282

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W. W. Norton & Company

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ISBN 10

0393242307

ISBN 13

9780393242300

The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon

By: Robert Darnton

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The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon

By: Robert Darnton

Slander has always been a nasty business, Robert Darnton notes, but that is no reason to consider it a topic unworthy of inquiry. By destroying reputations, it has often helped to delegitimize regimes and bring down governments. Nowhere has this been more the case than in eighteenth-century France, when a ragtag group of literary libelers flooded the market with works that purported to expose the wicked behavior of the great. Salacious or seditious, outrageous or hilarious, their books and pamphlets claimed to reveal the secret doings of kings and their mistresses, the lewd and extravagant activities of an unpopular foreign-born queen, and the affairs of aristocrats and men-about-town as they consorted with servants, monks, and dancing masters. These libels often mixed scandal with detailed accounts of contemporary history and current politics. And though they are now largely forgotten, many sold as well as or better than some of the most famous works of the Enlightenment. In The Devil in the Holy Water, Darnton—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France and author of his own best-sellers, The Great Cat Massacre and George Washington's False Teeth—offers a startling new perspective on the origins of the French Revolution and the development of a revolutionary political culture in the years after 1789. He opens with an account of the colony of French refugees in London who churned out slanderous attacks on public figures in Versailles and of the secret agents sent over from Paris to squelch them. The libelers were not above extorting money for pretending to destroy the print runs of books they had duped the government agents into believing existed; the agents were not above recognizing the lucrative nature of such activities—and changing sides. As the Revolution gave way to the Terror, Darnton demonstrates, the substance of libels changed while the form remained much the same. With the wit and erudition that has made him one of the world's most eminent historians of eighteenth-century France, he here weaves a tale so full of intrigue that it may seem too extravagant to be true, although all its details can be confirmed in the archives of the French police and diplomatic service. Part detective story, part revolutionary history, The Devil in the Holy Water has much to tell us about the nature of authorship and the book trade, about Grub Street journalism and the shaping of public opinion, and about the important work that scurrilous words have done in many times and places.

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548

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812241835

ISBN 13

9780812241839

The Great Cat Massacre

And Other Episodes in French Cultural History

By: Robert Darnton

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The Great Cat Massacre

And Other Episodes in French Cultural History

By: Robert Darnton

The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.

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324

Publisher

Basic Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0465010482

ISBN 13

9780465010486

George Washington's False Teeth

An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century

By: Robert Darnton

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George Washington's False Teeth

An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century

By: Robert Darnton

A collection of articles concentrated on the Enlightenment in France argues for a scaled-down interpretation of the significance of the movement.

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232

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W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393057607

ISBN 13

9780393057607

The Case for Books

Past, Present, and Future

By: Robert Darnton

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The Case for Books

Past, Present, and Future

By: Robert Darnton

The era of the printed book is at a crossroad. E-readers are flooding the market, books are available to read on cell phones, and companies such as Google, Amazon, and Apple are competing to command near monopolistic positions as sellers and dispensers of digital information. Already, more books have been scanned and digitized than were housed in the great library in Alexandria. Is the printed book resilient enough to survive the digital revolution, or will it become obsolete? In this lasting collection of essays, Robert Darnton—an intellectual pioneer in the field of this history of the book—lends unique authority to the life, role, and legacy of the book in society.

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290

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ReadHowYouWant.com

Published Date

ISBN 10

1458758338

ISBN 13

9781458758330

Berlin Journal, 1989-1990

By: Robert Darnton

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Berlin Journal, 1989-1990

By: Robert Darnton

Index. Includes declaration of German guilt: p.283.

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340

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W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393310183

ISBN 13

9780393310184

Pirating and Publishing

The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment

By: Robert Darnton

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Pirating and Publishing

The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment

By: Robert Darnton

In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of "copyright" very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged tacitly or openly that these pirated editions of works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, among other luminaries, supplied a growing readership within France, one whose needs could not be met by the monopolistic and tightly controlled Paris Guild. Darnton's book focuses principally on a publisher in Switzerland, one of the largest and whose archives are the most complete. Through the lens of this concern, he offers a sweeping view of the world of writing, publishing, and especially bookselling in pre-Revolutionary France--a vibrantly detailed inside look at a cut-throat industry that was struggling to keep up with the times and, if possible, make a profit off them. Featuring a fascinating cast of characters lofty idealists and down-and-dirty opportunists this new book expands upon on Darnton's celebrated work on book-publishing in France, most recently found in Literary Tour de France. Pirating and Publishing reveals how and why piracy brought the Enlightenment to every corner of France, feeding the ideas that would explode into revolution.

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401

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0197529739

ISBN 13

9780197529737

The Case for Books

Past, Present, and Future

By: Robert Darnton

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The Case for Books

Past, Present, and Future

By: Robert Darnton

The invention of writing was one of the most important technological, cultural, and sociological breakthroughs in human history. With the printed book, information and ideas could disseminate more widely and effectively than ever before -- and in some cases, affect and redirect the sway of history. Today, nearly one million books are published each year. But is the era of the book as we know it -- a codex of bound pages -- coming to an end? And if it is, should we celebrate its demise and the creation of a democratic digital future, or mourn an irreplaceable loss? The digital age is revolutionizing the information landscape. Already, more books have been scanned and digitized than were housed in the great library in Alexandria, making available millions of texts for a curious reader at the click of a button, and electronic book sales are growing exponentially. Will this revolution in the delivery of information and entertainment make for more transparent and far-reaching dissemination or create a monopolistic stranglehold? In The Case for Books, Robert Darnton, an intellectual pioneer in the field of the history of the book and director of Harvard University's Library, offers an in-depth examination of the book from its earliest beginnings to its shifting role today in popular culture, commerce, and the academy. As an author, editorial advisor, and publishing entrepreneur, Darnton is a unique authority on the life and role of the book in society. This book is a wise work of scholarship -- one that requires readers to carefully consider how the digital revolution will broadly affect the marketplace of ideas.

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257

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PublicAffairs

Published Date

ISBN 10

1586488368

ISBN 13

9781586488369

The Kiss of Lamourette

Reflections in Cultural History

By: Robert Darnton

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The Kiss of Lamourette

Reflections in Cultural History

By: Robert Darnton

This is a book about history, the media, and the history of the media.In four parts this book will go through how the past operates as an undercurrent in the present, analyze the operation of the media by specific case studies, outline a particular discipline; the history of the book, which provides a historical dimension to media studies, and lastly, to move outward from those considerations to a broad discussion of history itself and of history's neighbors within the human sciences.

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418

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

0393307522

ISBN 13

9780393307528

The Literary Underground of the Old Regime

By: Robert Darnton

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The Literary Underground of the Old Regime

By: Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment. By drawing on an ingenious selection of previously hidden sources, he reveals for the first time the fascinating story of this eighteenth-century counterculture that has virtually disappeared from history.

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278

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674536576

ISBN 13

9780674536579

The Business of Enlightenment

A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800

By: Robert Darnton

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The Business of Enlightenment

A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800

By: Robert Darnton

A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Robert Darnton’s history of the Encyclopédie is such an occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of histoire du livre, and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. This is cultural history on a broad scale, a history of the process of civilization. In tracing the publishing story of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Darnton uses new sources—the papers of eighteenth-century publishers—that allow him to respond firmly to a set of problems long vexing historians. He shows how the material basis of literature and the technology of its production affected the substance and diffusion of ideas. He fully explores the workings of the literary market place, including the roles of publishers, book dealers, traveling salesmen, and other intermediaries in cultural communication. How publishing functioned as a business, and how it fit into the political as well as the economic systems of prerevolutionary Europe are set forth. The making of books touched on this vast range of activities because books were products of artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas, and elements in political and religious conflict. The ways ideas traveled in early modern Europe, the level of penetration of Enlightenment ideas in the society of the Old Regime, and the connections between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are brilliantly treated by Darnton. In doing so he unearths a double paradox. It was the upper orders in society rather than the industrial bourgeoisie or the lower classes that first shook off archaic beliefs and took up Enlightenment ideas. And the state, which initially had suppressed those ideas, ultimately came to favor them. Yet at this high point in the diffusion and legitimation of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution erupted, destroying the social and political order in which the Enlightenment had flourished. Never again will the contours of the Enlightenment be drawn without reference to this work. Darnton has written an indispensable book for historians of modern Europe.

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642

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674253590

ISBN 13

9780674253599

The Age of Distraction

Reading, Writing, and Politics in a High-Speed Networked Economy

By: Robert Hassan

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The Age of Distraction

Reading, Writing, and Politics in a High-Speed Networked Economy

By: Robert Hassan

Connections between time, technology, and the processes of reading and writing make clear the links between experiences of what appear to be quite different phenomena. Reading and writing have functioned together in a particular way to build the world as we have known it for three thousand years. These interacting processes have now been transformed at their core and are building a different world, one where certainties of the previous era are disappearing and being displaced by what the author sees as a chronic and pervasive mode of cognitive distraction. Robert Hassan offers a perspective permeated by a sense of history, beginning with the invention of writing and the development of the skill of reading. Together with technological developments, these provide a unique view of the trajectory of modernity into late-modernity, and illustrate how the arc of progress has transformed. New modes of time, technology, and reading and writing are helping create a faster world where we know less about more-and forget what we know evermore quickly. What is the "time" of a thought? Is it possible to measure thinking? Can we consider knowledge or information, or reading and writing, as having temporal "rhythms"? These are questions Hassan tries to answer. So unfamiliar are we to thinking in such terms that they sound impossible. To a significant degree, time, thinking, and many forms of knowledge are the fruits of subjective experience. We connect experiences at superficial levels, where people have different experiences that may be objectively the same, but our interpretations will always diverge in respect of the "reality" we confront. This intersection of philosophy and communication takes the reader into new realms of analysis.

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323

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351486241

ISBN 13

9781351486248

The Book Publishing Industry

By: Albert N. Greco,Jim Milliot,Robert M. Wharton

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The Book Publishing Industry

By: Albert N. Greco,Jim Milliot,Robert M. Wharton

This volume provides an innovative and detailed overview of the book publishing industry, including details about the business processes in editorial, marketing and production. The work explores the complex issues that occur every day in the publishing industry.

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502

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Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

113685035X

ISBN 13

9781136850356

Mark Twain's Audience

A Critical Analysis of Reader Responses to the Writings of Mark Twain

By: Robert McParland

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Mark Twain's Audience

A Critical Analysis of Reader Responses to the Writings of Mark Twain

By: Robert McParland

Mark Twain has been one of the most popular American writers since 1868. This book shifts the focus of Twain studies from the writer to the reader. This study of Twain’s readership and lecture audiences makes use of statistics, literary biography, twentieth-century newspapers, memoirs, diaries, travel journals, letters, literature, interviews, and reading circle reports. The book allows the audience of Mark Twain to speak for themselves in defining their relationship to his work. Twain collected letters from his readers but there are also many other sources of which critics should be aware. The voices of these readers present their views, their likes—and sometimes dislikes, their emotional reactions and identification, and their deep attachment and love for Twain’s characters, stories, themes, and sensibilities. Bringing together contemporary reactions to Twain and his works and those of later audiences, this book paints a portrait of the American people and of American society and culture. While the book is about Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens, it presents a larger cultural study of twentieth-century America and the early years of the twentieth century. The book includes Twain’s international audience but makes its majorly scholarly contribution in the analysis of Twain’s audience in America. It analyzes the people and their values, their reading habits and cultural views, their everyday experiences in the face of the drastic changes of the emerging nation coping with cataclysmic events, such as the Industrial Revolution and the consequences of the Civil War. This book serves as a model for using the audience of a prominent writer to analyze American history, American culture, and the American psyche. This book examines a historical time and an emerging national consciousness that defined the American identity after the Civil War.

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239

Publisher

Lexington Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0739190520

ISBN 13

9780739190524

Seymour Hersh

Scoop Artist

By: Robert Miraldi

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Seymour Hersh

Scoop Artist

By: Robert Miraldi

Seymour Hersh has been the most important, famous, and controversial journalist in the United States for the last forty years. From his exposé of the My Lai massacre in 1969 to his revelations about torture at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, Hersh has consistently captured the public imagination, spurred policymakers to reform, and drawn the ire of presidents. From the streets of Chicago to the newsrooms of the most powerful newspapers and magazines in the United States, Seymour Hersh tells the story of this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. Robert Miraldi scrutinizes the scandals and n.

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561

Publisher

Potomac Books, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612344763

ISBN 13

9781612344768

Proper Words in Proper Places

Dialectical Explication and English Literature

By: Robert James Merrett

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Proper Words in Proper Places

Dialectical Explication and English Literature

By: Robert James Merrett

Proper Words in Proper Places: Dialectical Explication and English Literary History explores how literary history intertwines cultural, political, philosophical, religious, and commercial influences with literary production to create new ways of reading, meaning, and understanding. The text provides a delightful and surprising mix of canonical and non-canonical texts that merge many genres and literary allusions to highlight the complexities of literary historiography. Simultaneously, Proper Words in Proper Places digests the challenges of literary history and prepares readers to formulate for themselves the multiplicity of its nature and function. Drawing from texts published between 1670 and 1920, Robert J. Merrett demonstrates how the mixing and involvement of literary forms with such influences as painting, music, theatre, natural history, and notions of civility and spirituality erode simplistic ideas about the nature of narrative. His keen analysis of the traditional and experimental rhetoric of the texts serves to illustrate the double vision of the humanities and shows how the liberal arts enlighten contemporary moral issues. Additionally, the chapters probe, through their diverse models of reading, how mixed literary genres oblige us to create textual memories as our readings unfold. Merrett’s linguistic and contextual analyses heighten cognitive, psychological, and aesthetic processes, thereby demonstrating that poems, plays, novels, and other literary forms mix lexical registers and interdisciplinary discourses to counter literal-mindedness. Proper Words in Proper Places is a unique work, unsettling notions of periodicity, promoting interdisciplinarity, and countering educational indifference toward literary and aesthetic cultures. Its explanations of the diversity of literary historiography could easily inform new design models for survey courses and help prepare those about to enter teaching professions, who are expected to be familiar with the philosophical and contextual problems that motivate literary texts. It promises stimulating and thought-provoking study and invites readers to develop a sense of how literature operates as a system based on philosophical contraries and logical paradoxes.

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299

Publisher

FriesenPress

ISBN 10

1039187536

ISBN 13

9781039187535

Scotland's Cruel Sea

Heroism and Disaster off the Scottish Coast

By: Robert Jeffrey

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Scotland's Cruel Sea

Heroism and Disaster off the Scottish Coast

By: Robert Jeffrey

High cliffs jutting out into the Atlantic and the North Sea, many hundreds of rocky skerries, deep sea lochs, dangerous unseen reefs, powerful tides and gales that batter the land fiercely from all points of the compass...Scotland has a coastline of immense beauty and danger, and its cruel sea has claimed many lives down the years. Disaster at sea is a poignant part of Scotland's history, and in this chilling and awe-inspiring book, bestselling author Robert Jeffrey tells the compelling stories of the victims of the ocean deeps. Car ferries, fishing boats, troopers, pleasure yachts and Navy vessels of all sorts, including submarines, have gone to the bottom. And in brave attempts to save those in danger with lifeboats, many have died. Including the famous tales of the Princess Victoria, the ill-fated Kl3 submarines, the Longhope lifeboat and the Iolaire, Scotland's Cruel Sea remembers the maritime tragedies that made headlines and became part of the folk memory of a seagoing nation.

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175

Publisher

Black & White Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1845028872

ISBN 13

9781845028879

Meaning and Moral Order

Explorations in Cultural Analysis

By: Robert Wuthnow

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Meaning and Moral Order

Explorations in Cultural Analysis

By: Robert Wuthnow

Meaning and Moral Order goes beyond classical, neoclassical, and poststructural theories of culture in its attempt to move away from problems of meaning to a more objective concept of culture. Innovative, controversial, challenging, it will compel scholars to rethink many of the assumptions on which the study of ideology, ritual, religion, science, and culture have been based.

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450

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Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520909259

ISBN 13

9780520909250

Outbreak!

The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior

By: Hilary Evans,Robert E. Bartholomew

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Outbreak!

The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior

By: Hilary Evans,Robert E. Bartholomew

From fads, crazes, and manias to collective delusions, scares, panics, and mass hysterias, history is replete with examples of remarkable social behavior. Many are fueled by fear and uncertainty; others are driven by hope and expectation. For others still, the causes are more obscure. This massive collection of extraordinary social behaviors spans more than two millennia, and attempts to place many of the episodes within their greater historical and cultural context. Perhaps the most well known example of unusual collective behavior occurred in 1938, when a million or more Americans were frightened or panicked after listening to a realistic radio drama about a Martian invasion of New Jersey, based on an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel "War of the Worlds." Less known but equally remarkable scares based on Wells' book occurred in Chile in 1944 (when Army units were mobilized), in Ecuador in 1949 (when riots broke out, leaving more than a dozen dead), as well as in Buffalo in 1968, Rhode Island in 1974, and Europe in 1988 and 1998. The modern civilized world is by no means immune to such peculiar episodes. In the late 20th century, scores of people in the U.S. and Europe were wrongly incarcerated following claims of Satanic ritual abuse by authorities untutored in False Memory Syndrome. This episode recalls the European witch terror of the late Middle Ages, when innocent people were tortured and executed for consorting with the Devil based on the flimsiest of evidence. OUTBREAK! THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EXTRAORDINARY SOCIAL BEHAVIOR is an authoritative reference on a broad range of topics: collective behavior, deviance, social and perceptual psychology, sociology, history, folklore, religious studies, political science, social anthropology, gender studies, critical thinking, and mental health. Never before have so many sources been brought together on the mesmerizing topic of collective behavior.

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785

Publisher

Anomalist Books, LLC

Published Date

ISBN 10

1933665254

ISBN 13

9781933665252

Mrs Stone & Dr Smellie

Eighteenth-century Midwives and Their Patients

By: Robert Woods,Chris Galley

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Mrs Stone & Dr Smellie

Eighteenth-century Midwives and Their Patients

By: Robert Woods,Chris Galley

A remarkable history of midwifery in the eighteenth century.

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560

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Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1781381410

ISBN 13

9781781381410

A Literary Tour de France

The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution

By: Robert Darnton

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A Literary Tour de France

The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution

By: Robert Darnton

The publishing industry in France in the years before the Revolution was a lively and sometimes rough-and-tumble affair, as publishers and printers scrambled to deal with (and if possible evade) shifting censorship laws and tax regulations, in order to cater to a reading public's appetite for books of all kinds, from the famous Encyclopédie, repository of reason and knowledge, to scandal-mongering libel and pornography. Historian and librarian Robert Darnton uses his exclusive access to a trove of documents-letters and documents from authors, publishers, printers, paper millers, type founders, ink manufacturers, smugglers, wagon drivers, warehousemen, and accountants-involving a publishing house in the Swiss town of Neuchatel to bring this world to life. Like other places on the periphery of France, Switzerland was a hotbed of piracy, carefully monitoring the demand for certain kinds of books and finding ways of fulfilling it. Focusing in particular on the diary of Jean-François Favarger, a traveling sales rep for a Swiss firm whose 1778 voyage, on horseback and on foot, around France to visit bookstores and renew accounts forms the spine of this story, Darnton reveals not only how the industry worked and which titles were in greatest demand, but the human scale of its operations. A Literary Tour de France is literally that. Darnton captures the hustle, picaresque comedy, and occasional risk of Favarger's travels in the service of books, and in the process offers an engaging, immersive, and unforgettable narrative of book culture at a critical moment in France's history.

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377

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Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190678003

ISBN 13

9780190678005

The Transcendentalists and Their World

By: Robert A. Gross

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The Transcendentalists and Their World

By: Robert A. Gross

One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021 One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021 Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today. The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

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493

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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ISBN 10

0374711887

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9780374711887

The Soul of Commerce: Credit, Property, and Politics in Leipzig, 1750-1840

By: Robert Beachy

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The Soul of Commerce: Credit, Property, and Politics in Leipzig, 1750-1840

By: Robert Beachy

This volume offers a detailed account of Leipzig’s social and political history from 1750-1840 and then argues persuasively that the city played a catalytic role in the introduction of a Saxon constitutional monarchy after 1830.

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262

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BRILL

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ISBN 10

9047416015

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9789047416012

The Philosophers' Quarrel

Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

By: Robert Zaretsky,John T. Scott

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The Philosophers' Quarrel

Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

By: Robert Zaretsky,John T. Scott

The rise and spectacular fall of the friendship between the two great philosophers of the eighteenth century, barely six months after they first met, reverberated on both sides of the Channel. As the relationship between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume unraveled, a volley of rancorous letters was fired off, then quickly published and devoured by aristocrats, intellectuals, and common readers alike. Everyone took sides in this momentous dispute between the greatest of Enlightenment thinkers. In this lively and revealing book, Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott explore the unfolding rift between Rousseau and Hume. The authors are particularly fascinated by the connection between the thinkers lives and thought, especially the way that the failure of each to understand the otherand himselfilluminates the limits of human understanding. In addition, they situate the philosophers quarrel in the social, political, and intellectual milieu that informed their actions, as well as the actions of the other participants in the dispute, such as James Boswell, Adam Smith, and Voltaire. By examining the conflict through the prism of each philosophers contribution to Western thought, Zaretsky and Scott reveal the implications for the two men as individuals and philosophers as well as for the contemporary world.

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260

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Yale University Press

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ISBN 10

0300156243

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9780300156249

Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading

By: Robert DeMaria Jr.

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Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading

By: Robert DeMaria Jr.

The surprising influence of one of the greatest readers in English literature. If readers of the twentieth century feel overwhelmed by the proliferation of writing and information, they can find in Samuel Johnson a sympathetic companion. Johnson's career coincided with the rapid expansion of publishing in England—not only in English, but in Latin and Greek; not only in books, but in reviews, journals, broadsides, pamphlets, and books about books. In 1753 Johnson imagined a time when "writers will, perhaps, be multiplied, till no readers will be found." Three years later, he wrote that England had become "a nation of authors" in which "every man must be content to read his book to himself." In Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading, Robert DeMaria considers the surprising influence of one of the greatest readers in English literature. Johnson's relationship to books not only reveals much about his life and times, DeMaria contends, but also provides a dramatic counterpoint to modern reading habits. As a superior practitioner of the craft, Johnson provides a compelling model for how to read—indeed, he provides different models for different kinds of reading. DeMaria shows how Johnson recognized early that not all reading was alike—some requiring intense concentration, some suited for cursory glances, some requiring silence, some best appreciated amid the chatter of a coffeehouse. Considering the remarkable range of Johnson's reading, DeMaria discovers in one extraordinary career a synoptic view of the subject of reading.

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289

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JHU Press

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0801896525

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9780801896521

The New Princeton Companion

By: Robert K. Durkee

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The New Princeton Companion

By: Robert K. Durkee

The definitive single-volume compendium of all things Princeton The New Princeton Companion is the ultimate reference book on Princeton University’s history and traditions, personalities and key events, and defining characteristics and idiosyncrasies. Robert Durkee brings a unique insider’s perspective to the school’s dramatic transformation over the past five decades, showing how it has become more multicultural, multiracial, and multinational, all the while advancing its distinctive academic mission. Featuring more than 400 entries presented alphabetically, this wide-ranging collection covers topics from academic departments, cultural resources, and student organizations, hoaxes, and pranks to athletic teams, the town of Princeton, and university presidents. There are entries on coeducation, women, people of color, traditionally underrepresented groups, the diversification of campus iconography, and the protest activity that helped to usher in many of these changes. This marvelous compendium also includes annotated maps tracing the growth of the campus over more than two and a half centuries, lists ranging from prizewinners of many kinds to Olympic medalists, and an illustrated calendar that highlights something that happened in Princeton’s history on every day of the year. Now completely updated, revised, and expanded from the classic 1978 edition, The New Princeton Companion tells you virtually everything there is to know about this remarkable institution of higher learning, revealing what it stands for, what it aspires to, and how it evolved from a tiny colonial college to one of the most acclaimed research universities in the world.

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584

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Princeton University Press

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ISBN 10

0691210446

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9780691210445

Charles Dickens and 'Boz'

The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author

By: Robert L. Patten

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Charles Dickens and 'Boz'

The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author

By: Robert L. Patten

An original study of Dickens' early career and the way he constructed his literary reputation.

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427

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Cambridge University Press

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1107023513

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9781107023512

Instruments and the Imagination

By: Thomas L. Hankins,Robert J. Silverman

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Instruments and the Imagination

By: Thomas L. Hankins,Robert J. Silverman

Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman investigate an array of instruments from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century that seem at first to be marginal to science--magnetic clocks that were said to operate by the movements of sunflower seeds, magic lanterns, ocular harpsichords (machines that played different colored lights in harmonious mixtures), Aeolian harps (a form of wind chime), and other instruments of "natural magic" designed to produce wondrous effects. By looking at these and the first recording instruments, the stereoscope, and speaking machines, the authors show that "scientific instruments" first made their appearance as devices used to evoke wonder in the beholder, as in works of magic and the theater. The authors also demonstrate that these instruments, even though they were often "tricks," were seen by their inventors as more than trickery. In the view of Athanasius Kircher, for instance, the sunflower clock was not merely a hoax, but an effort to demonstrate, however fraudulently, his truly held belief that the ability of a flower to follow the sun was due to the same cosmic magnetic influence as that which moved the planets and caused the rotation of the earth. The marvels revealed in this work raise and answer questions about the connections between natural science and natural magic, the meaning of demonstration, the role of language and the senses in science, and the connections among art, music, literature, and natural science. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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352

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Princeton University Press

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ISBN 10

1400864119

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9781400864119

Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity

Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture

By: Mark S. Micale,Robert L. Dietle,Peter Gay

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Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity

Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture

By: Mark S. Micale,Robert L. Dietle,Peter Gay

Enriched by the methods and insights of social history, the history of mentalites, linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and art history, intellectual and cultural history are experiencing a renewed vitality. The far-ranging essays in this volume, by an internationally distinguished group of scholars, represent a generous sampling of these new studies.

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554

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Stanford University Press

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ISBN 10

0804731160

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9780804731164

Conspiracy and Romance

Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville

By: Robert S. Levine,Robert Steven Levine

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Conspiracy and Romance

Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville

By: Robert S. Levine,Robert Steven Levine

Robert Levine examines the American romance in a new historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the Republic and the Civil War. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about foreign elements--French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves--are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance dramatized the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American Republic. Americans conceived "America" as a historical romance, and their romances dramatize the historical conditions of the culture. The fear that reputed conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine illuminates the influence of such fears on the works of major romance writers during this period.

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328

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Cambridge University Press

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ISBN 10

0521366542

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9780521366540

Fast Forward

Work, Gender, and Protest in a Changing World

By: Torry D. Dickinson,Robert K. Schaeffer

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Fast Forward

Work, Gender, and Protest in a Changing World

By: Torry D. Dickinson,Robert K. Schaeffer

This innovative, global feminist analysis of work and politics examines the diverse problems and related protests of women and men who labor to make ends meet in a rapidly-changing world. Using vivid examples from around the world, it reveals how "globalization" is reshaping social institutions and lives. Fast Forward explores how businesses and states reshaped and redistributed work around the world during the last 30 years of "globalization," often with adverse consequences. Within this fast-moving context, laboring people today engage in work outside of formal employment, try to obtain survival resources, mount a diverse array of often women-centered protests against firms and states, and try--on their own terms--to reinvent work and democratic political practices. Portraying the human face of global change, Fast Forward shows how overlapping social movements wrestle with economic and political marginalization, and initiate highly diverse, but related attempts to change the way the world works.

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326

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Rowman & Littlefield

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ISBN 10

0742508951

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9780742508958

Our Jungle Road to Tokyo

By: Robert L. Eichelberger

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Our Jungle Road to Tokyo

By: Robert L. Eichelberger

Our Jungle Road to Tokyo is the dazzling account of how US and Allied forces overcame incredible odds to rout invading Japanese from entrenched positions deep in the mountain jungles of Papua New Guinea. Battles take place in swamps, impassable vegetation, coconut plantations with invisible snipers buried in tree roots, hillsides riddled with pill-boxes and maze-like underground bunkers impervious to artillery and mortar. It is a detailed, autobiographical report from a leading architect of the Southwest Pacific Campaign, General Robert Eichelberger, who took his orders directly from Big Chief himself, General Douglas MacArthur. The action begins in earnest with MacArthur's chilling directive to Eichelberger regarding the recapturing of Buna, on Papua's north coast: "Take Buna, Bob, or don't come back alive.

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276

Publisher

Lulu.com

Published Date

ISBN 10

1387367072

ISBN 13

9781387367078

Boswell’s Enlightenment

By: Robert Zaretsky

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Boswell’s Enlightenment

By: Robert Zaretsky

Throughout his life James Boswell struggled to fashion a clear account of himself, but try as he might he could not reconcile the truths of his era with those of his religious upbringing. Few periods better crystallize this turmoil than 1763–1765, the years of his Grand Tour and the focus of Robert Zaretsky’s thrilling intellectual adventure.

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289

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Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

0674368231

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9780674368231

Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates

The Depont Family in Eighteenth-Century France

By: Robert Forster

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Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates

The Depont Family in Eighteenth-Century France

By: Robert Forster

Originally published in 1980. A social historian of modern France, Robert Forster discovered a series of father-to-son letters that presented an unusual opportunity to trace in human terms the impact of institutions and cultural norms on eighteenth-century French society. From these letters and other family papers, Forster reconstructed a family biography of the Deponts of La Rochelle over four generations. Their story affords new insights into the workings of institutions—economic, religious, legal, administrative—the mentality of provincial notables, the world of Parisian high finance and salon society, and the response of a socially mobile family to the challenges of the century, climaxing in the French Revolution of 1789. Forster demonstrates how real people in an upwardly mobile family coped with their changing society, moved from overseas trade to local and then national office, managed their wealth, treated their children, and then parried the psychological shocks accompanying their ascent to status and power. It is the story not of a "class" response to abstract trends or forces identified by the historian in retrospect but of flesh-and-blood human beings grappling with day-to-day decisions and revealing a full range of human ambiguity and inconsistency. This study offers perspective on the emergence by 1800 of a new elite in France—a social amalgam of landlords, administrators, and professional men, inculcated with a national awareness and a cautious political liberalism. These were the notables who would govern France in the next century. Forster's approach, uncommon among social historians, combines narrative and analytical modes of historiography. Based on archival materials in La Rochelle and Paris, the book blends economic, social, cultural, and political history.

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358

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JHU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1421430819

ISBN 13

9781421430812

Missionary Encounters

By: Robert A. Bickers,Rosemary Seton

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Missionary Encounters

By: Robert A. Bickers,Rosemary Seton

Describes the exceptional wealth of missionary archives and the major contributions they can make not only to the study of the processes of Christian evangelism and Western imperialism but also their value in documenting and analysing the nature of Western encounters with indigenous societies.

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268

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Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1136786163

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9781136786167

Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism

Culture as Migration

By: Robert Fraser

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Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism

Culture as Migration

By: Robert Fraser

This book focuses on the twin arts of literature and music, supporting the notion that cosmopolitanism is the natural condition of all the arts, and that all culture - without exception - is migrant culture. It draws on examples ranging from the first to the twenty-first centuries AD, on locations as remote as Alexandria and Australia, on writers as different as Virgil and V.S.Naipaul, Arnold and Achebe, and on musicians as diverse as Bach and Bartok, Purcell and Steve Reich. Across thirteen chapters, the study explores the interpenetration of all forms of human expression, the fallacy of 'national' traditions and limiting conceptions of regional character. The result is an exploration of artistic and intellectual endeavour that is particularly welcome in the current political climate, encouraging us to view history in ways informed by our contemporary demographic and cultural concerns. Taken either as a series of interrelated case studies, or else as an evolving and sequential argument, this book is vital reading for scholars of music, literature, and cultural and social history.

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215

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Springer

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ISBN 10

3319684809

ISBN 13

9783319684802

Bestseller

A Century of America's Favorite Books

By: Robert McParland

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Bestseller

A Century of America's Favorite Books

By: Robert McParland

Whether curled up on a sofa with a good mystery, lounging by the pool with a steamy romance, or brooding over a classic novel, Americans love to read. Despite the distractions of modern living, nothing quite satisfies many individuals more than a really good book. And regardless of how one accesses that book—through a tablet, a smart phone, or a good, old-fashioned hardcover—those choices have been tallied for decades. In Bestseller: A Century of America’s Favorite Books, Robert McParland looks at the reading tastes of a nation—from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. Through extensive research, McParland provides context for the literature that appealed to the masses, from low-brow potboilers like Forever Amber to Pulitzer-Prize winners such as To Kill a Mockingbird. Decade by decade, McParland discusses the books that resonated with the American public and shows how current events and popular culture shaped the reading habits of millions. Profiles of authors with frequent appearances—from Ernest Hemingway to Danielle Steel—are included, along with standout titles that readers return to year after year. A snapshot of America and its love of reading through the decades, this volume informs and entertains while also providing a handy reference of the country’s most popular books. For those wanting to learn more about the history of American culture through its reading habits, Bestseller: A Century of America’s Favorite Books is a must-read.

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335

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Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1538110008

ISBN 13

9781538110003

Book's by Robert DARNTON

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