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The New History and the Old is a marvelously written, perfectly serious, yet vastly entertaining critique of current fashions in the writing of history--social history, psychoanalytic history, quantitative history, Marxist and neo-Marxist history, mentalité history. As the "new" history is coming to dominate the profession, Gertrude Himmelfarb argues, it tends to supplant rather than supplement the "old," which centered on political, constitutional, diplomatic, and intellectual events. The effect is not only to transform the discipline of history, but also to alter profoundly our sense of the past. A mode of history that belittles politics and ideas denigrates the political institutions and intellectual traditions that have shaped our past, and severs the continuity between past and present, leaving little that is usable in their place. This provocative analysis of the "revolution in history," as it has been called, has implications that go well beyond the discipline of history itself. It raises fundamental and far-reaching questions about the nature of our postmodern society and will undoubtedly arouse a good deal of discussion and debate along broad cultural lines.
It is my sincere desire that this simple and elegant practice of the Five Warrior Syllables, which is based on the highest teachings of the Tibetan Bn Buddhist tradition of which I am a lineage holder, will benefit many beings in the West. Please receive it with my blessing, and bring it into your life. Let it support you to become kind and strong and clear and awake. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche One of the world's oldest unbroken spiritual traditions is the Bon Buddhist tradition of Tibet. This wisdom path has survived, thanks to the efforts of a handful of dedicated lamas such as Bn lineage holder Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Now, with Tibetan Sound Healing, you can connect to the ancient sacred so...
In The Moral Imagination, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one of America's most distinguished intellectual historians, explores the minds and lives of some of the most brilliant and provocative thinkers of modern times. In their distinctive ways, she argues, they exemplify what Burke two centuries ago and Trilling most recently have called the "moral imagination." Himmelfarb describes how each of these thinkers, coming from different traditions, responding to different concerns, and writing in different genres, shared a moral passion that permeated their work. It is this passion that makes their reflections--on politics and literature, religion and society, marriage and sex--sometimes unpredictable, often controversial, always exciting, and as illuminating and pertinent today as they were then. The second edition includes a revised introduction and three new essays on Adam Smith, Lord Acton, and Alfred Marshall.
In her enduring study of the impact of Darwinism on the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, Gertrude Himmelfarb brings massive documentation to bear in challenging the conventional view of Darwin's greatness. Touching on biography, history, and philosophy, she traces the origins and development of Darwin's views against the opinions of his time; assesses the influences on him; and shows what he intended his theory to mean, what his readers took it to mean, and what it has in fact meant. By such a route Ms. Himmelfarb recaptures "a sense of how a scientist, with the most innocent of intentions and the best of faith, can give birth to a theory that has an ancestry and a posterity of which he may be ignorant and a life of its own over which he has no control. "A thorough and masterly book punctuated with a delicate sense of humor.... Until he has read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested this authoritative volume, no one should presume henceforth to speak on Darwin and Darwinism." Times Literary Supplement "An illuminating contribution...a dramatic story."--Yale Review "Absorbing, well written, and splendidly organized."--I. Bernard Cohen
A study of intellectuals in crisis and of ideologies in transition, elegant in style and thought. "Few works that I know convey the excitement of the intellectual life of 19th-century England as immediately....The essays are remarkable no less for the cogency of their wit than for the range and precision of their scholarship." --Lionel Trilling.
Gertrude Himmelfarb's elegant and wonderfully readable work, The Roads to Modernity, reclaims the Enlightenment from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and in America. Himmerlfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic - humane, compassionate and realistic - that still resonates strongly today.
"Includes information on anti-Semitism, art, Bible, capitalism, Catholics, Christianity, Christian Right, communists, Declaration of Independence, Democratic Party, demography, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hasidim, Hebrew language, Adolf Hitler, Holocaust, Islam, Israel, Moses Maimonides, Marxism, Moses Mendelssohn, Walter Mondale, Moral Majority, Muslims, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nazis, Orthodox Judaism, Poland, rabbis, race relations, Ronald Reagan, Reform Judaism, Republican Party, Russia, Sabbath, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sephardim, William Shakespeare, Six-Day War, Soviet Union, Baruch Spinoza, Josef Stalin, Leo Strauss, tax policy, Torah, U.S. Constitution, Yiddish, Yom Kippur, Zionism, etc."--From source other than the Library of Congress
As the debate over values grows ever more divisive, one of the most eminent historians of the Victorian era reminds readers that values are no substitute for virtues--and that the Victorian considered hard work, thrift, respectability, and charity virtues essential to a worthwhile life
In a provocative study that bristles with contemporary relevance, Himmelfarb demonstrates that the material and moral dimensions of poverty were inseparable in the minds of late Victorians, be they radical or conservative.
First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.