The Roads to Modernity

2007-12-18
The Roads to Modernity

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  • Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN: 0307429253
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 306

In an elegant, eminently readable work, one of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history. The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about human nature, politics, society, and religion--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 America. Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Himmelfarb 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, in America perhaps even more than in Europe. The Roads to Modernity is a remarkable and illuminating contribution to the history of ideas.

Nationalism

1992
Nationalism

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  • Author: Liah Greenfeld
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • ISBN: 9780674603196
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 600

Nationalism is a movement and a state of mind that brings together national identity, consciousness, and collectivities. A five-country study that spans five hundred years, this historically oriented work in sociology bids well to replace all previous works on the subject.

One Nation, Two Cultures

2001-01-30
One Nation, Two Cultures

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  • Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN: 0375704108
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 210

From one of today's most respected historians and cultural critics comes a new book examining the gulf in American society--a division that cuts across class, racial, ethnic, political and sexual lines. One side originated in the tradition of republican virtue, the other in the counterculture of the late 1960s. Himmelfarb argues that, while the latter generated the dominant culture of today-particularly in universities, journalism, television, and film--a "dissident culture" continues to promote the values of family, a civil society, sexual morality, privacy, and patriotism. Proposing democratic remedies for our moral and cultural diseases, Himmelfarb concludes that it is a tribute to Americans that we remain "one nation" even as we are divided into "two cultures."

Between Heaven and Modernity

2006
Between Heaven and Modernity

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  • Author: Peter J. Carroll
  • Publisher: Stanford University Press
  • ISBN: 9780804753593
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 356

Combining social, political, and cultural history, this book examines the contestation over space, history, and power in the late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction of the ancient capital of Suzhou as a modern city. Located fifty miles west of Shanghai, Suzhou has been celebrated throughout Asia as a cynosure of Chinese urbanity and economic plenty for a thousand years. With the city's 1895 opening as a treaty port, businessmen and state officials began to draw on Western urban planning in order to bolster Chinese political and economic power against Japanese encroachment. As a result, both Suzhou as a whole and individual components of the cityscape developed new significance according to a calculus of commerce and nationalism. Japanese monks and travelers, Chinese officials, local people, and others competed to claim Suzhou’s streets, state institutions, historic monuments, and temples, and thereby to define the course of Suzhou’s and greater China’s modernity.

Roads to Power

2012-01-01
Roads to Power

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  • Author: Jo Guldi
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • ISBN: 0674264134
  • Category : Technology & Engineering
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 285

Roads to Power tells the story of how Britain built the first nation connected by infrastructure, how a libertarian revolution destroyed a national economy, and how technology caused strangers to stop speaking. In early eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but dirt track ran between most towns. By 1848 the primitive roads were transformed into a network of highways connecting every village and island in the nation—and also dividing them in unforeseen ways. The highway network led to contests for control over everything from road management to market access. Peripheries like the Highlands demanded that centralized government pay for roads they could not afford, while English counties wanted to be spared the cost of underwriting roads to Scotland. The new network also transformed social relationships. Although travelers moved along the same routes, they occupied increasingly isolated spheres. The roads were the product of a new form of government, the infrastructure state, marked by the unprecedented control bureaucrats wielded over decisions relating to everyday life. Does information really work to unite strangers? Do markets unite nations and peoples in common interests? There are lessons here for all who would end poverty or design their markets around the principle of participation. Guldi draws direct connections between traditional infrastructure and the contemporary collapse of the American Rust Belt, the decline of American infrastructure, the digital divide, and net neutrality. In the modern world, infrastructure is our principal tool for forging new communities, but it cannot outlast the control of governance by visionaries.

The People of the Book

2011
The People of the Book

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  • Author: Gertrude Himmelfarb
  • Publisher: Encounter Books
  • ISBN: 1594035709
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 193

The history of Judaism has for too long been dominated by the theme of antisemitism, reducing Judaism to the recurrent saga of persecution and the struggle for survival. The history of philosemitism provides a corrective to that abysmal view, a reminder of the venerable religion and people that have been an inspiration for non-Jews as well as Jews. There is a poetic justice – or historic justice – in the fact that England, the first country to expel the Jews in medieval times, has produced the richest literature of philosemitism in modern times. From Cromwell supporting the readmission of the Jews in the 17th century, to Macaulay arguing for the admission of Jews as Members of Parliament in the 19th century, to Churchill urging the recognition of the state of Israel in the 20th, some of England's most eminent writers and statesmen have paid tribute to Jews and Judaism. Their speeches and writing are powerfully resonant today. As are novels by Walter Scott, Disraeli, and George Eliot, which anticipate Zionism well before the emergence of that movement and look forward to the state of Israel, not as a refuge for the persecuted, but as a "homeland" rooted in Jewish history. A recent history of antisemitism in England regretfully observes that English philosemitism is "a past glory." This book may recall England – and not only England – to that past glory and inspire other countries to emulate it. It may also reaffirm Jews in their own faith and aspirations.

The Appian Way

2012-04-23
The Appian Way

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  • Author: Robert A. Kaster
  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press
  • ISBN: 0226425711
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 138

Describes travel down the Appian Way while analyzing the meaning of the road in modern and ancient context.

On the Road with Saint Augustine

2019-10-01
On the Road with Saint Augustine

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  • Author: James K. A. Smith
  • Publisher: Brazos Press
  • ISBN: 149341996X
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 295

★ Publishers Weekly starred review One of the Top 100 Books and One of the 5 Best Books in Religion for 2019, Publishers Weekly Christianity Today 2020 Book Award Winner (Spiritual Formation) Outreach 2020 Resource of the Year (Spiritual Growth) Foreword INDIES 2019 Honorable Mention for Religion This is not a book about Saint Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about each of us. Popular speaker and award-winning author James K. A. Smith has spent time on the road with Augustine, and he invites us to take this journey too, for this ancient African thinker knows far more about us than we might expect. Following Smith's successful You Are What You Love, this book shows how Augustine can be a pilgrim guide to a spirituality that meets the complicated world we live in. Augustine, says Smith, is the patron saint of restless hearts--a guide who has been there, asked our questions, and knows our frustrations and failed pursuits. Augustine spent a lifetime searching for his heart's true home and he can help us find our way. "What makes Augustine a guide worth considering," says Smith, "is that he knows where home is, where rest can be found, what peace feels like, even if it is sometimes ephemeral and elusive along the way." Addressing believers and skeptics alike, this book shows how Augustine's timeless wisdom speaks to the worries and struggles of contemporary life, covering topics such as ambition, sex, friendship, freedom, parenthood, and death. As Smith vividly and colorfully brings Augustine to life for 21st-century readers, he also offers a fresh articulation of Christianity that speaks to our deepest hungers, fears, and hopes.

Driving Modernity

2017-04
Driving Modernity

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  • Author: Massimo Moraglio
  • Publisher: Berghahn Books
  • ISBN: 1785334492
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 208

On March 26th, 1923, in a formal ceremony, construction of the Milan–Alpine Lakes autostrada officially began, the preliminary step toward what would become the first European motorway. That Benito Mussolini himself participated in the festivities indicates just how important the project was to Italian Fascism. Driving Modernity recounts the twisting fortunes of the autostrada, which—alongside railways, aviation, and other forms of mobility—Italian authorities hoped would spread an ideology of technological nationalism. It explains how Italy ultimately failed to realize its mammoth infrastructural vision, addressing the political and social conditions that made a coherent plan of development impossible.

On the Roads to Modernity

2011-12
On the Roads to Modernity

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  • Author: Toby E. Huff
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780739172940
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

This book contains highly original essays on the sweep of Western civilization from the middle ages to the present, including such topics as conscience and usury, "probabilism" in science and theology, systems of spiritual direction, Max Weber and economic development. The author and editor explore issues in the comparative history of science and the riveting question of why modern science arose only in the West and not in China or the Muslim world. It is a continuation of the challenging civilizational agenda set out by Max Weber's writings on the world religions, including the fate and vicissitudes of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Nelson had much to say about processes of universalization, now studied as globalization.