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The writer of this book was a volunteer officer in the Union army throughout the war of the Great Rebellion, and his service was in the field. The book, having been written while the author was engaged in a somewhat active professional life, lacks that literary finish which results from much pruning and painstaking. He, however, offers no excuse for writing it, nor for its completion; he has presumed to nothing but the privilege of telling his own story in his own way. He has been at no time forgetful of the fact that he was a subordinate in a great conflict, and that other soldiers discharged their duties as faithfully as himself; and while no special favors are asked, he nevertheless hopes that what he has written may be accepted as the testimony of one who entertains a justifiable pride in having been connected with large armies and a participant in important campaigns and great battles.
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.
My Father’s Shoes is, at its core, an anthology of short stories. The book is allegoric and the shoes are metaphoric. Unlike most anthologies, however, these stories are an amalgam of themselves. They integrate and coalesce. There is a rhythm and a cadence both in substance and in form. This book was initially written as a gift to my father. I wanted to share certain memories with him that were meaningful and lasting. I wanted him to know, from my perspective, just how important he was in my life. He never really understood the profound impact that he had on the lives of other people –especially his family. Because of that humility, or perhaps in honor of it, I wanted to him know that he...
In an 1828 letter to his partner, Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.
"This study of the structure of government and society in late colonial Peru is based upon detailed examination of the operation of the viceroyalty of the system of administration by intendants, partly in response to the demands for better provincial government expressed by the Túpac Amaru rebellion. Fisher examines relations between the intendants and other groups of administrators, and brings out the revolutionary implications of their attempts to stimulate municipal life and government and assesses Peru's increasing political and administrative instability upon the application of the viceroyalty of the Constitution of Cádiz."--Bloomsbury Publishing.