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Iconic urbanist Lewis Mumford stressed the role of a well-constructed city in the development of the good life, championing pedestrian-scaled, sustainable cities. In Portland's Good Life, R. Bruce Stephenson examines how Portland, the one city in America that adopted Mumford’s vision, became a model city for living the good life. Stephenson traces Portland’s success to its grass roots governing system, its housing and climate protection initiatives, and most of all, its citizens devoted to the public good; all of which have resulted in the construction of a city that honors the humanity of its people.
Neighbourhood open space ranks highly as a key component in suburban liveability assessments, originating from the development of urban planning as a profession and the proliferation of the garden suburb. Community Green uniquely connects the past, present and future of planning for small open spaces around the narrative of internal reserves. The distinctive planned spaces are typically enclosed on every side, hidden within residential blocks, serving as local pocket parks and reflecting the evolving values of community life from the garden city movement to contemporary new urbanism. This book resuscitates the enclosed, almost secretive reserve from history as a distinctive form of local ope...
Valued today for its development of the third law of planetary motion, Harmonice mundi (1619) was intended by Kepler to expand on ancient efforts to discern a Creator's plan for the planetary system--an arrangement thought to be based on harmonic relationships. Challenging critics who characterize Kepler's theories of harmonic astronomy as "mystical," Bruce Stephenson offers the first thorough technical analysis of the music the astronomer thought the heavens made, and the logic that led him to find musical patterns in his data. In so doing, Stephenson illuminates crucial aspects of Kepler's intellectual development, particularly his ways of classifying and drawing inferences. Beginning with...
The Journey to Wisdom addresses a broad array of topics in education, the natural world, and medieval intellectual history. The book examines a philosophy of education that originated with the ancient Greeks and that reached its culmination in the late-medieval and early-Renaissance periods. That philosophy of education promotes a journey to wisdom, involving an escape from pure subjectivity and ?the seductions of rhetoric? and leading to a profound awareness of the natural world and ?nature?s God.? It grants us a renewed sense of education as a self-directed, transforming journey to knowledge and insight?rather than (as is so often the case now) as an impersonal, bureaucratized trek that re...
This book tells the story of the early modern astronomer Johannes Kepler’s Somnium, which has been regarded by science historians and literary critics alike as the first true example of science fiction. Kepler began writing his complex and heavily-footnoted tale of a fictional Icelandic astronomer as an undergraduate and added to it throughout his life. The Somnium fuses supernatural and scientific models of the cosmos through a satirical defense of Copernicanism that features witches, lunar inhabitants, and a daemon who speaks in the empirical language of modern science. Swinford’s looks at the ways that Kepler’s Somnium is influenced by the cosmic dream, a literary genre that enjoyed...
In Knowledge and Cosmos: Development and Decline of the Medieval Perspective, 2nd Edition, Robert K. DeKosky focuses on issues in astronomy, cosmology, physics, matter theory, philosophy, and theology vital to the “Copernican Revolution.” This book describes efforts among individuals advocating different world views to fit new ideas compatibly into broad perspectives reflecting four traditional patterns of interpretation: teleological, mechanical, occultist, and mathematico-descriptive. These four modes had guided medieval accounts of heavenly phenomena, material process, and motion. The teleological explanation, prevalent in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, posited “final causes” (...
Your ancestors come back to life when family history becomes a novel! Do you have mountains of genealogical information which, for all your time and energy, are little more than lists of names, dates and indecipherable family trees? Read Rabbit George and Me and find a blueprint of how to turn your history into an absorbing and compelling tale. A tale which will be sure to be read by present and future generations of your family. Your ancestry research will not have been in vain! Opening in the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire of the mid 1800’s, and deftly weaving through to the present day, the story of “Rabbit George’, his three wives and twelve children is guaranteed to be devoured by the...
An extensively illustrated account of the development and achievements of astronomical observations from space since WWII.
In Saving Florida, Leslie Kemp Poole casts new light on the women at the forefront of Florida’s environmental movement. From creating parks to protesting air pollution, fighting dredge-and-fill operations, and exposing the health dangers of pesticides, these women caused unprecedented changes in how the Sunshine State values its many and marvelous natural resources. At the beginning of the twentieth century women didn’t have the vote, but by the end of the century they were founding issue-specific groups, like Friends of the Everglades, and running state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They set the foundation for the next century’s environmental agenda, which came to include the idea of sustainable development, which meshes ecology and economy to enhance energy efficiency and the function of natural systems. This is an indispensable history that not only underscores the importance of women in the environmental movement but also shows how as a collective force they forever altered how others saw women’s roles in society.