Cool Town

Cool Town
Author: Grace Elizabeth Hale
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2020-02-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469654881

In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.

Comic Democracies

Comic Democracies
Author: Angus Fletcher
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2016-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421419343

Drawing on new empirical research from the political and cognitive sciences, Angus Fletcher deftly analyzes the narrative elements of two dozen stage plays, novels, romances, histories, and operas written by such authors as Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, William Congreve, John Gay, Henry Fielding, and Washington Irving. He unearths five comic techniques that were used to foster democratic behaviors in antiquity and the Renaissance, then traces the role of these techniques in Tom Paine's Common Sense, Thomas Jefferson's preamble to the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's farewell address, Mercy Otis Warren's federalist history of the Revolution, Frederick Douglass's abolitionist orations, and other key documents that played a pivotal role in the development of the early American Republic. --Publisher description.

Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia

Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia
Author: Ernest C. Hynds
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2009-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820334464

Published in 1974, Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia is a chronicle of sixty years of change in Clarke County and the city of Athens. In 1801, Clarke County, newly created from Jackson County, was virtually all Georgia farmland, and Athens was a portion of land set aside for the establishment of a state university. In those first years of the century, the university began with thirty or forty students. They received instruction from Josiah Meigs--president and faculty of the university--in a twenty-by-twenty-foot log cabin. By 1846, the population of the county was over four thousand, and the area prospered. Cotton mills dotted the banks of the Oconee River, the Georgia Railroad connected Athens with Augusta, numerous schools and churches had been established, and newspapers, banks, and small businesses were all part of the Athens scene. Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia is rich with detail. This historical narrative recalls not only the growth of industry, government, and education within Clarke County, but also contains many anecdotes of the early people who lived there. The chronology of dates and events and the comprehensive listing of public officials, professional men, planters, and businessmen found in the appendixes of Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia add to the value of this work of local history.

Athens County

Athens County
Author: Ron Luce
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0738593834

Athens County, Ohio, came out of the pioneer spirit of a new nation expanding westward after the Revolutionary War into the Northwest Territory. Upon declaration of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Ohio Company of Associates bought millions of acres of land to sell to land-hungry easterners. In 1788, the first boat of new settlers arrived in Marietta, Ohio. By 1797, wars with the Native Americans had ended and more land became available. When they got here, settlers found some rich farmland, but more importantly they discovered salt, coal, clay and a need for industry to provide for the needs of the people. Opportunities abounded to make fortunes in other places from the resources readily available locally. Central to the development of Athens County was the vision people had years before the first settlers arrived; they dreamed of and made provisions for a university in the new territory. Today, more than 200 years later, Ohio University thrives in the city of Athens.

Amphoras and the Ancient Wine Trade

Amphoras and the Ancient Wine Trade
Author: Virginia Grace
Publisher: ASCSA
Total Pages: 36
Release: 1979
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780876616192

Although this booklet is based on broken pottery found during the excavation of the Agora, the author ranges far beyond the confines of Athens in her discussion of the purpose and significance of different amphora types. Amphoras were used in the ancient world to transport various different types of products, including wine and oil. The author shows how chronological variations in shape and the geographical clues offered by stamped handles make amphoras a fascinating source of economic information. The booklet illustrates many different forms of amphora, all set into context by the well-written text.

The Wages of Appeasement

The Wages of Appeasement
Author: Bruce S. Thornton
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2011
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1594035199

Wages of Appeasement explores the reasons why a powerful state gives in to aggressors. It tells the story of three historical examples of appeasement: the greek city-states of the fourth century b.c., which lost their freedom to Philip II of Macedon; England in the twenties and thirties, and the failure to stop Germany's aggression that led to World War II; and America's current war against Islamic jihad and the 30-year failure to counter Iran's attacks on the U.S. The inherent weaknesses of democracies and their bad habit of pursuing short-term interests at the expense of long-term security play a role in appeasement. But more important are the bad ideas people indulge, from idealized views of human nature to utopian notions like pacifism or disarmament. But especially important is the notion that diplomatic engagement and international institutions like the u.n. can resolve conflict and deter an aggressor––the delusion currently driving the Obama foreign policy in the middle east. Wages of Appeasement combines narrative history and cultural analysis to show how ideas can have dangerous and deadly consequences.

The Symposium in Context

The Symposium in Context
Author: Kathleen M. Lynch
Publisher: ASCSA
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 0876615469

This book presents the first well-preserved set of sympotic pottery which served a Late Archaic house in the Athenian Agora. The deposit contains household and fine-ware pottery, nearly all the figured pieces of which are forms associated with communal drinking. Since it comes from a single house, the pottery also reflects purchasing patterns and thematic preferences of the homeowner. The multifaceted approach adopted in this book shows that meaning and use are inherently related, and that through archaeology one can restore a context of use for a class of objects frequently studied in isolation. Winner of the 2013 James R. Wiseman Book Award given by the Archaeological Institute of America.

Facing Athens

Facing Athens
Author: George Sarrinikolaou
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2004-06-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0865476993

Publisher Description

The Fighting Bunch

The Fighting Bunch
Author: Chris DeRose
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1250266203

In The Fighting Bunch: The Battle of Athens and How World War II Veterans Won the Only Successful Armed Rebellion Since the Revolution, New York Times bestselling author Chris DeRose reveals the true, never-before-told story of the men who brought their overseas combat experience to wage war against a corrupt political machine in their hometown. Bill White and the young men of McMinn County answered their nation's call after Pearl Harbor. They won the freedom of the world and returned to find that they had lost it at home. A corrupt political machine was in charge, protected by violent deputies, funded by racketeering, and kept in place by stolen elections - the worst allegations of voter fraud ever reported to the Department of Justice, according to the U.S. Attorney General. To restore free government, McMinn's veterans formed the nonpartisan GI ticket to oppose the machine at the next election. On Election Day, August 1, 1946, the GIs and their supporters found themselves outgunned, assaulted, arrested, and intimidated. Deputies seized ballot boxes and brought them back to the jail. White and a group of GIs - "The Fighting Bunch" - men who fought and survived Guadalcanal, the Bulge, and Normandy, armed themselves and demanded a fair count. When they were refused the most basic rights they had fought for, the men, all of whom believed they had seen the end of war, returned to the battlefield and risked their lives one last time. For the past seven decades, the participants of the "Battle of Ballots and Bullets" and their families kept silent about that conflict. Now in The Fighting Bunch, after years of research, including exclusive interviews with the remaining witnesses, archival radio broadcast and interview tapes, scrapbooks, letters, and diaries, Chris DeRose has reconstructed one of the great untold stories in American history.

Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstitution of American Democracy

Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstitution of American Democracy
Author: J. Peter Euben
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501723995

In the contemporary United States the image and experience of Athenian democracy has been appropriated to justify a profoundly conservative political and educational agenda. Such is the conviction expressed in this provocative book, which is certain to arouse widespread comment and discussion. What does it mean to be a citizen in a democracy? Indeed, how do we educate for democracy? These questions are addressed here by thirteen historians, classicists, and political theorists, who critically examine ancient Greek history and institutions, texts, and ideas in light of today's political practices and values. They do not idealize ancient Greek democracy. Rather, they use it, with all its faults, as a basis for measuring the strengths and shortcomings of American democracy. In the hands of the authors, ancient Greek sources become partners in an educational dialogue about democracy's past, one that goads us to think about the limitations of democracy's present and to imagine enriched possibilities for its future. The authors are diverse in their opinions and in their political and moral commitments. But they share the view that insulating American democracy from radical criticism encourages a dangerous complacency that Athenian political thought can disrupt.