You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Public libraries have strangely never been the subject of an extensive design history. Consequently, this important and comprehensive book represents a ground-breaking socio-architectural study of pre-1939 public library buildings. A surprisingly high proportion of these urban civic buildings remain intact and present an increasingly difficult architectural problem for many communities. The book thus includes a study of what is happening to these historic libraries now and proposes that knowledge of their origins and early development can help build an understanding of how best to handle their future.
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating...
Sociable Knowledge reconstructs the collaborations of seventeenth-century naturalists who, dispersed across city and country, worked through writing, conversation, and print to convert fragmented knowledge of the hyper-local and curious into an understanding and representation of Britain as a unified historical and geographical space.
British literature underwent profound changes in the period 1900-1940. What role did audiences and channels of book distribution play in this? In this wide-ranging collection, the influence of publishers, distributors, librarians and readers come to the foreground to open up new perspectives on literature and print culture. Rooted in original archival research, chapters include studies of the engagement of canonical writers and bestsellers with the literary marketplace; the influence of international and mobile audiences; publishing practices involving genre, promotion, and censorship; and the significance of spaces of reading including bookshops, circulating libraries and on-board passenger ships. Through a series of detailed case-studies that focus on under-explored aspects of distribution and readership, the contributors open up new perspectives on literature and the British book trade.
"Information technology shapes nearly every part of modern life, and debates about information--its meaning, effects, and applications--are central to a range of fields, from economics, technology, and politics to library science, media studies, and cultural studies. This rich, unique resource traces the history of information with an approach designed to draw connections across fields and perspectives, and provide essential context for our current age of information. Clear, accessible, and authoritative, the book opens with a series of articles that provide a narrative history of information from premodern practices to twenty-first-century information culture. This section focuses on major ...
These papers examine how occult and esoteric themes appear in visual and verbal media, connecting to intellectual history, literature, the arts, present day pop culture, and religious practices. The topics range from the witchcraft motives in the love poetry of the 15th-century Humanist poet, Conrad Celtis; through the activities of Polish and Russian theosophists; Croatian, Greek, Polish painters of the spiritual; the philosophy of wine by the Hungarian esoteric philosopher Béla Hamvas; to contemporary Serbian magic and neo-shamanism. Two studies touch upon the influence of Freemasonry and the Kabbalah in Western esotericism, and, although these are not specifically Central European topics, they provide parallel perspectives to what the other papers of the collection are investigating.
In the decades following World War Two, and in part in response to the Cold War, governments across Western Europe set out ambitious programmes for social welfare and the redistribution of wealth that aimed to improve the everyday lives of their citizens. Many of these welfare state programmes - housing, schools, new towns, cultural and leisure centres – involved not just construction but a new approach to architectural design, in which the welfare objectives of these state-funded programmes were delineated and debated. The impact on architects and architectural design was profound and far-reaching, with welfare state projects moving centre-stage in architectural discourse not just in Euro...
The only history of Gresham College based upon original archival research that illustrates both the substantial impact of the College on many aspects of seventeenth-century history and the fatal flaws that limited its development.
A Financial Times most anticipated read for 2024 'A fascinating, erudite and entertaining journey through the gut-brain connection' TIFFANY WATT SMITH, author of The Book of Human Emotions 'A thrilling and surprising journey into the science and culture of an organ that refuses to be civilised' PAUL CRADDOCK, author of Spare Parts Have you ever had a gut feeling? Found something hard to stomach? Have you gone belly up under pressure? Did you pull yourself together and show some guts? The growls and gurgles of our digestive system are a constant reminder of the physical work it does to keep our bodies running. But throughout history, humans have puzzled over how this rowdy organ might influen...
Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials.