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Lost Knowledge: The Concept of Vanished Technologies and Other Human Histories examines the idea of lost knowledge, reaching back to a period between myth and history. It investigates a peculiar idea found in a number of early texts: that there were civilizations with knowledge of sophisticated technologies, and that this knowledge was obscured or destroyed over time along with the civilization that had created it. This book presents critical studies of a series of early Chinese, South Asian, and other texts that look at the idea of specific “lost” technologies, such as mechanical flight and the transmission of images. There is also an examination of why concepts of a vanished “golden age” were prevalent in so many cultures. Offering an engaging and investigative look at the propagation of history and myth in technology and culture, this book is sure to interest historians and readers from many backgrounds.
Concerns a collection of maps and associated documents claimed to be from Marco Polo's time or that of his daughters (as many of the maps have the name or one or another of the three daughters on them). Discusses provenance, authenticity, and history of the documents, known to scholars as "the Marco Polo Maps" since 1948, here discussed fully for the first time.
In Deciphering Reality: Simulations, Tests, and Designs, Benjamin B. Olshin offers a series of essays that examine the detection of computer simulations, challenge visual models of reality, explore Daoist conceptions of reality, and present possible future directions for deciphering reality.
In Deciphering Reality: Simulations, Tests, and Designs, Benjamin B. Olshin takes a problem-based approach to the question of the nature of reality. In a series of essays, the book examines the detection of computer simulations from the inside, wrestles with the problem of visual models of reality, explores Daoist conceptions of reality, and offers possible future directions for deciphering reality. The ultimate goal of the book is to provide a more accessible approach, unlike highly complex philosophical works on metaphysics, which are inaccessible to non-academic readers, and overly abstract (and at times, highly speculative) popular works that offer a mélange of physics, philosophy, and consciousness.
Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, an...
Accompanying CD-ROM contains: digital reproduction of Fra Mauro's world map with the ability to navigate within the map and extract information from it.
This book presents key conceptualizations of violence as developed by Norbert Elias. The authors explain and exemplify these concepts by analyzing Elias’s late texts, comparing his views to those of Sigmund Freud, and by analyzing the work of filmmaker Michael Haneke. The authors then discuss the strengths and shortcomings of Elias’s thoughts on violence by examining various social processes such as colonization, imperialism, and the Brazilian civilizing process—in addition to the ambivalence of state violence. The final chapters suggest how these concepts can be used to explain difficulties in implementing democracy, grappling with memories of violence, and state building after democracy.
In Theory of Religious Cycles: Tradition, Modernity and the Bahá’í Faith Mikhail Sergeev offers a new interpretation of the Soviet period of Russian history as a phase within the religious evolution of humankind by developing a theory of religious cycles, which he applies to modernity and to all the major world faiths of Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Sergeev argues that in the course of its evolution religion passes through six common phases—formative, orthodox, classical, reformist, critical, and post-critical. Modernity, which was started by the European Enlightenment, represents the critical phase of Christianity, a systemic crisis that could be overcome with the appearance of new religious movements such as the Bahá’í Faith, which offers a spiritual extension of the modern worldview.
Cartography between Christian Europe and the Arabic-Islamic World offers a timely assessment of interaction between medieval Christian European and Arabic-Islamic geographical thought, making the case for significant but limited cultural transfer across a range of map genres.
An unprecedented undertaking by academics reflecting an extraordinary vision of world history, this landmark multivolume encyclopedia focuses on specific themes of human development across cultures era by era, providing the most in-depth, expansive presentation available of the development of humanity from a global perspective. Well-known and widely respected historians worked together to create and guide the project in order to offer the most up-to-date visions available. A monumental undertaking. A stunning academic achievement. ABC-CLIO's World History Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive work to take a large-scale thematic look at the human species worldwide. Comprised of 21 volumes c...