The Edges of the Civilized World

The Edges of the Civilized World
Author: Alison Hawthorne Deming
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1999-11-20
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780312204068

Troubled by tensions that inevitably arise when civilization intrudes upon wild regions, Alison Hawthorne Deming visited some of our continent's most remote areas to answer questions that had long been on her mind. In the absence of vast frontiers, can we manage our ever-increasing numbers? How can we strike a balance with a natural world that we threaten by our very presence? With the language of a poet and the eye of a scientist, Alison Hawthorne Deming presents us with the difficult challenge of redefining our traditional notion of cultural progress and thinking of our future in new terms.

Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World

Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World
Author: Aaron W. Irvin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1119630711

A timely and academically-significant contribution to scholarship on community, identity, and globalization in the Roman and Hellenistic worlds Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World examines the construction of personal and communal identities in the ancient world, exploring how globalism, multi-culturalism, and other macro events influenced micro identities throughout the Hellenistic and Roman empires. This innovative volume discusses where contact and the sharing of ideas was occurring in the time period, and applies modern theories based on networks and communication to historical and archaeological data. A new generation of international scholars challenge traditional views of Classical history and offer original perspectives on the impact globalizing trends had on localized areas—insights that resonate with similar issues today. This singular resource presents a broad, multi-national view rarely found in western collected volumes, including Serbian, Macedonian, and Russian scholarship on the Roman Empire, as well as on Roman and Hellenistic archaeological sites in Eastern Europe. Topics include Egyptian identity in the Hellenistic world, cultural identity in Roman Greece, Romanization in Slovenia, Balkan Latin, the provincial organization of cults in Roman Britain, and Soviet studies of Roman Empire and imperialism. Serving as a synthesis of contemporary scholarship on the wider topic of identity and community, this volume: Provides an expansive materialist approach to the topic of globalization in the Roman world Examines ethnicity in the Roman empire from the viewpoint of minority populations Offers several views of metascholarship, a growing sub-discipline that compares ancient material to modern scholarship Covers a range of themes, time periods, and geographic areas not included in most western publications Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World is a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and graduate students examining identity and ethnicity in the ancient world, as well as for those working in multiple fields of study, from Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman historians, to the study of ethnicity, identity, and globalizing trends in time.

World Civilization

World Civilization
Author: Robin W. Winks
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 596
Release: 1993-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780939693283

Robin W. Winks placed particular emphasis on those developments that most directly explain the nature of the modern world: social diffusion, group and national consciousness, technological change, religious identities-those aspects of intellectual history that have contributed most to our current dilemmas. In turn this means that there is more in World Civilization: A Brief History about nationalism, imperialism, or ethnic identities than there is about monarchies, feudalism, or diplomacy. The result of the strategic and intellectual decisions made with respect to this textbook is that its proportions are not the customary ones. Particular emphasis is placed on the early origins of civilizations, on Greece and Rome, and on the period of the so-called barbarian invasions, because it is by studying these periods that students may best learn how societies are formed. Particular emphasis is also placed on the period from the French Revolution on, for it is the events of the last two hundred years that have most closely shaped our present condition. This book can be read, straight through and in its entirety, as an interpretive statement about Western history written by a person who knew a good bit about non-Western history and who could thus throw into perspective the unusual, the commonplace, and the comparable in that sector of history conventionally labeled 'Western'. The text draws on over thirty-five years of discovering, in the classroom, what students themselves wish to ask about the past rather than what a body of scholars may have concluded they should wish to ask. Though this book is largely about Western civilization, it is also about world civilizations, for from the eighteenth century forward--and in many aspects of life, much earlier-the non-West has interacted with the West in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to separate one from the other when dealing at this level of generalization. As a teacher of the history of exploration and discovery, of imperialism and decolonizati

On Civilization's Edge

On Civilization's Edge
Author: Kathryn Ciancia
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190067454

A Conversation -- On the Edge, In the World -- Democracy as Civilizing Mission -- The Integration Myth -- The Many Meanings of the Border -- Polish Towns? Jewish Towns? -- Depoliticizing the Volhynian Village -- Regionalism, or The Limits of Inclusion -- Thinking Technocratically.

Angels on the Edge of the World

Angels on the Edge of the World
Author: Kathy Lavezzo
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801473098

In a view that sweeps from the tenth century to the mid 16th century, this text shows how the English people's concern with their island's relative isolation on the global map contributed to the emergence of a distinctive English national consciousness in which marginality came to be seen as a virtue.

Savage Anxieties

Savage Anxieties
Author: Robert A. Williams
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137116072

From one of the world's leading experts on Native American law and indigenous peoples' human rights comes an original and striking intellectual history of the tribe and Western civilization that sheds new light on how we understand ourselves and our contemporary society. Throughout the centuries, conquest, war, and unspeakable acts of violence and dispossession have all been justified by citing civilization's opposition to these differences represented by the tribe. Robert Williams, award winning author, legal scholar, and member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe, proposes a wide-ranging reexamination of the history of the Western world, told from the perspective of civilization's war on tribalism as a way of life. Williams shows us how what we thought we knew about the rise of Western civilization over the tribe is in dire need of reappraisal.

Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John

Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John
Author: Steven J. Friesen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2001-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195131533

After more than a century of debate about the significance of imperial cults for the interpretation of Revelation, this is the first study to examine both the archaeological evidence and the Biblical text in depth. Friesen argues that a detailed analysis of imperial cults as they were practiced in the first century CE in the region where John was active allows us to understand John's criticism of his society's dominant values. He demonstrates the importance of imperial cults for society at the time when Revelation was written, and shows the ways in which John refuted imperial cosmology through his use of vision, myth, and eschatological expectation.

A Crack in the Edge of the World

A Crack in the Edge of the World
Author: Simon Winchester
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2013-02-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062277456

The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale. The quake resulted from a rupture in a part of the San Andreas fault, which lies underneath the earth's surface along the northern coast of California. Lasting little more than a minute, the earthquake wrecked 490 blocks, toppled a total of 25,000 buildings, broke open gas mains, cut off electric power lines throughout the Bay area, and effectively destroyed the gold rush capital that had stood there for a half century. Perhaps more significant than the tremors and rumbling, which affected a swatch of California more than 200 miles long, were the fires that took over the city for three days, leaving chaos and horror in its wake. The human tragedy included the deaths of upwards of 700 people, with more than 250,000 left homeless. It was perhaps the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. Simon Winchester brings his inimitable storytelling abilities -- as well as his unique understanding of geology -- to this extraordinary event, exploring not only what happened in northern California in 1906 but what we have learned since about the geological underpinnings that caused the earthquake in the first place. But his achievement is even greater: he positions the quake's significance along the earth's geological timeline and shows the effect it had on the rest of twentieth-century California and American history. A Crack in the Edge of the World is the definitive account of the San Francisco earthquake. It is also a fascinating exploration of a legendary event that changed the way we look at the planet on which we live.