What Nostalgia Was

What Nostalgia Was
Author: Thomas Dodman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 022649294X

In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.

Napoleon's Egypt

Napoleon's Egypt
Author: Juan Cole
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2007-08-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230607411

In this vivid and timely history, Juan Cole tells the story of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. Revealing the young general's reasons for leading the expedition against Egypt in 1798 and showcasing his fascinating views of the Orient, Cole delves into the psychology of the military titan and his entourage. He paints a multi-faceted portrait of the daily travails of the soldiers in Napoleon's army, including how they imagined Egypt, how their expectations differed from what they found, and how they grappled with military challenges in a foreign land. Cole ultimately reveals how Napoleon's invasion, the first modern attempt to invade the Arab world, invented and crystallized the rhetoric of liberal imperialism.

Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art

Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art
Author: Darius A. Spieth
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 535
Release: 2017-11-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9004276750

Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings were aesthetic, intellectual, and economic touchstones in the Parisian art world of the Revolutionary era, but their importance within this framework, while frequently acknowledged, never attracted much subsequent attention. Darius A. Spieth’s inquiry into Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art reveals the dominance of “Golden Age” pictures in the artistic discourse and sales transactions before, during, and after the French Revolution. A broadly based statistical investigation, undertaken as part of this study, shows that the upheaval reduced prices for Netherlandish paintings by about 55% compared to the Old Regime, and that it took until after the July Revolution of 1830 for art prices to return where they stood before 1789.

European Clocks in the J. Paul Getty Museum

European Clocks in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Author: Gillian Wilson
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2013-08-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892362545

Among the finest examples of European craftsmanship are the clocks produced for the luxury trade in the eighteenth century. The J. Paul Getty Museum is fortunate to have in its decorative arts collection twenty clocks dating from around 1680 to 1798: eighteen produced in France and two in Germany. They demonstrate the extraordinary workmanship that went into both the design and execution of the cases and the intricate movements by which the clocks operated. In this handsome volume, each clock is pictured and discussed in detail, and each movement diagrammed and described. In addition, biographies of the clockmakers and enamelers are included, as are indexes of the names of the makers, previous owners, and locations.

The Mathematical Writings of Évariste Galois

The Mathematical Writings of Évariste Galois
Author: Évariste Galois
Publisher: European Mathematical Society
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2011
Genre: Galois theory
ISBN: 9783037191040

Before he died at the age of twenty, shot in a mysterious early-morning duel at the end of May 1832, Evariste Galois created mathematics that changed the direction of algebra. This book contains English translations of almost all the Galois material. The translations are presented alongside a new transcription of the original French and are enhanced by three levels of commentary. An introduction explains the context of Galois' work, the various publications in which it appears, and the vagaries of his manuscripts. Then there is a chapter in which the five mathematical articles published in his lifetime are reprinted. After that come the testamentary letter and the first memoir (in which Galois expounded on the ideas that led to Galois Theory), which are the most famous of the manuscripts. These are followed by the second memoir and other lesser known manuscripts. This book makes available to a wide mathematical and historical readership some of the most exciting mathematics of the first half of the nineteenth century, presented in its original form. The primary aim is to establish a text of what Galois wrote. The details of what he did, the proper evidence of his genius, deserve to be well understood and appreciated by mathematicians as well as historians of mathematics.