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The first history of the western polymath, from the fifteenth century to the present day From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view. Identifying 500 western polymaths, Burke explores their wide-ranging successes and shows how their rise matched a rapid growth of knowledge in the age of the invention of printing, the discovery of the New World and the Scientific Revolution. It is only more recently that the further acceleration of knowledge has led to increased specialisation and to an environment that is less supportive of wide-ranging scholars and scientists. Spanning the Renaissance to the present day, Burke changes our understanding of this remarkable intellectual species.
In the 1930s a number of Irishmen came to New Zealand to seek a better life, with many carrying bitter memories of the atrocities committed by the Black and Tans and the British during WWI and the early 1920s. With the onset of WWII came the threat of conscription into the armed forces. As citizens of a neutral country, many Irishmen refused to betray their homeland to fight for New Zealand and, by default, Britain. They formed the ire National Association (ENA) to represent them in their battle against conscription, which not only opened discussions with the New Zealand government under Peter Fraser but also with the Irish prime minister, amon de Valera, thus pioneering direct diplomatic re...
Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.
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Vols. for 1837-52 include the Companion to the Almanac, or Year-book of general information.
Taking into account new developments since this book was first published, 'History and Social Theory' discusses topics including globalization, postcolonialism and social capital.
Peter Burke follows up his magisterial Social History of Knowledge, picking up where the first volume left off around 1750 at the publication of the French Encyclopédie and following the story through to Wikipedia. Like the previous volume, it offers a social history (or a retrospective sociology of knowledge) in the sense that it focuses not on individuals but on groups, institutions, collective practices and general trends. The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless - gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it - are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The second part tries to c...
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What is the history of knowledge? This engaging and accessible introduction explains what is distinctive about the new field of the history of knowledge (or, as some scholars say, ‘knowledges in the plural’) and how it differs from the history of science, intellectual history, the sociology of knowledge or from cultural history. Leading cultural historian, Peter Burke, draws upon examples of this new kind of history from different periods and from the history of India, East Asia and the Islamic world as well as from Europe and the Americas. He discusses some of the main concepts used by scholars working in the field, among them ‘order of knowledge’, ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘kn...
Vampire slayer Anita Blake helps the police find a vampire serial killer responsible for a series of child murders, but quickly realizes she needs the help of her mentor Manny and supernatural hitman Edward to solve the case.