In Pursuit of Refinement

In Pursuit of Refinement
Author: Maurie D. McInnis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1999
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781570033148

A fully illustrated art catalogue that exemplifies Charlestonians' fascination with European culture.

The Refinement of America

The Refinement of America
Author: Richard Lyman Bushman
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2011-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307761606

This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values.

Legacy of a Southern Lady

Legacy of a Southern Lady
Author: Ann Ratliff Russell
Publisher: Clemson University Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2018-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1638041415

“Anna Calhoun Clemson was John C. Calhoun’s favorite child. After reading Ann Russell’s biography based on Anna’s letters, one finds it easy to understand why. The product of a famous family and an exceptional woman, Anna was also, as Russell ably demonstrates, very much “a southern lady.” Her story—her “life’s journey,” as Calhoun told his daughter her life would be–gives us a glimpse of an important southern family, of southern womanhood, of heartbreak and difficulty, of a nation torn apart by sectional conflict. Like Mary Chesnut’s famous diary, Anna’s letters, the crux of Russell’s study, provide us with a rich, detailed picture of southern life, both personal and public.”

Being American in Europe, 1750–1860

Being American in Europe, 1750–1860
Author: Daniel Kilbride
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421409003

When eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans made their Grand Tour of Europe, what did they learn about themselves? While visiting Europe In 1844, Harry McCall of Philadelphia wrote to his cousin back home of his disappointment. He didn’t mind Paris, but he preferred the company of Americans to Parisians. Furthermore, he vowed to be “an American, heart and soul” wherever he traveled, but “particularly in England.” Why was he in Europe if he found it so distasteful? After all, travel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was expensive, time consuming, and frequently uncomfortable. Being American in Europe, 1750–1860 tracks the adventures of American travelers while exploring large questions about how these experiences affected national identity. Daniel Kilbride searched the diaries, letters, published accounts, and guidebooks written between the late colonial period and the Civil War. His sources are written by people who, while prominent in their own time, are largely obscure today, making this account fresh and unusual. Exposure to the Old World generated varied and contradictory concepts of American nationality. Travelers often had diverse perspectives because of their region of origin, race, gender, and class. Americans in Europe struggled with the tension between defining the United States as a distinct civilization and situating it within a wider world. Kilbride describes how these travelers defined themselves while they observed the politics, economy, morals, manners, and customs of Europeans. He locates an increasingly articulate and refined sense of simplicity and virtue among these visitors and a gradual disappearance of their feelings of awe and inferiority.

Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management

Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management
Author: Catherine Faron Zucker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2018-11-08
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030036677

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, EKAW 2018, held in Nancy, France, in November 2018. The 36 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 104 submissions. The papers cover all aspects of eliciting, acquiring, modeling, and managing knowledge, the construction of knowledge-intensive systems and services for the Semantic Web, knowledge management, e-business, natural language processing, intelligent information integration, personal digital assistance systems, and a variety of other related topics. A special focus was on "Knowledge and AI", i.e. papers describing algorithms, tools, methodologies, and applications that exploit the interplay between knowledge and Artificial Intelligence techniques, with a special emphasis on knowledge discovery.

The Myth of the Moral Brain

The Myth of the Moral Brain
Author: Harris Wiseman
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2016-02-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262033925

An argument that moral functioning is immeasurably complex, mediated by biology but not determined by it. Throughout history, humanity has been seen as being in need of improvement, most pressingly in need of moral improvement. Today, in what has been called the beginnings of “the golden age of neuroscience,” laboratory findings claim to offer insights into how the brain “does” morality, even suggesting that it is possible to make people more moral by manipulating their biology. Can “moral bioenhancement”—using technological or pharmaceutical means to boost the morally desirable and remove the morally problematic—bring about a morally improved humanity? In The Myth of the Moral Brain, Harris Wiseman argues that moral functioning is immeasurably complex, mediated by biology but not determined by it. Morality cannot be engineered; there is no such thing as a “moral brain.” Wiseman takes a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from philosophy, biology, theology, and clinical psychology. He considers philosophical rationales for moral enhancement, and the practical realities they come up against; recent empirical work, including studies of the cognitive and behavioral effects of oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine; and traditional moral education, in particular the influence of religious thought, belief, and practice. Arguing that morality involves many interacting elements, Wiseman proposes an integrated bio-psycho-social approach to the consideration of moral enhancement. Such an approach would show that, by virtue of their sheer numbers, social and environmental factors are more important in shaping moral functioning than the neurobiological factors with which they are interwoven.

Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850 - 2015 (2 vols.)

Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850 - 2015 (2 vols.)
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 1127
Release: 2015-10-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004304649

The last of four two-volume sets on the key periods of paradigm shift in Chinese religious and cultural history, this book examines the transformation of values in China since 1850, in the “secular” realms of economics, science, medicine, aesthetics, media, and gender, and in each of the major religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity) as well as in Marxist discourse. The nation and science are the values invoked most frequently, with the market and democracy a distant second. As in previous periods of fundamental change in Chinese history, rationalization and secularization have played central roles, but interiorization nearly disappears as a driving force. Also in continuity with the past, the state insists on an exclusive right to define and adjudicate orthodoxy. Contributors include: Daniel H. Bays, Sébastien Billioud, Adam Yuet Chau, Na Chen, Philip Clart, Walter B. Davis, Arif Dirlik, Thomas David DuBois, Lizhu Fan, David Faure, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Ji Zhe, Xiaofei Kang, Eric I. Karchmer, André Laliberté, Angela Ki Che Leung, Xun Liu, Richard Madsen, David Ownby, Ellen Oxfeld, Volker Scheid, Grace Yen Shen, Michael Szonyi, Wang Chien-ch’uan, Xue Yu