Kategoria BISAC: History >> Civilization

A Best Book of the Year:
Mother Jones Bloomberg News National Post Kirkus
In these pages, Nicholas Basbanes the consummate bibliophile s bibliophile shows how paper has been civilization s constant companion. It preserves our history and gives record to our very finest literary, cultural, and scientific accomplishments. Since its invention in China nearly two millennia ago, the technology of paper has spread throughout the inhabited world.
With deep knowledge and care, Basbanes traces paper s trail from the earliest handmade sheets to the...

The ancient Tamil poetic corpus of the Caṅam ("The Academy") is a national treasure for Tamilians and a battle-ground for linguists and historians of politics, culture and literature. Going back to oral predecessors probably dating back to the beginning of the first millennium, it has had an extremely rich and variegated history. Collected into anthologies and endowed with literary theories and voluminous commentaries, it became the centre-piece of the Tamil literary canon, associated with the royal court of the Pandya dynasty in Madurai. Its decline began in the late middle ages,...

For Harry Redner, the phrase "beyond civilization" refers to the new and unprecedented condition the world is now entering--specifically, the condition commonly known as globalization. Redner approaches globalization from the perspective of history and seeks to interpret it in relation to previous key stages of human development. His account begins with the Axial Age (700-300 BC) and proceeds through Modernity (after AD 1500) to the present global condition.

What is globalization doing to civilization? In answering this question, Redner studies the role played by capitalism, the...

Focusing on the selection, preparation, and mythology of food, Montanari traverses such subjects as the status of the pantry over the centuries, the various strategies of cooking over time, the...

The vastness of Britain's nineteenth-century empire and the gap between imperial policy and colonial practice demanded an institutional culture that encouraged British administrators to identify the interests of imperial service as their own. In Corporate Character, Eddy Kent examines novels, short stories, poems, essays, memoirs, private correspondence, and parliamentary speeches related to the East India Company and its effective successor, the Indian Civil Service, to explain the origins of this imperial ethos of "virtuous service."

Exploring the appointment, training,...

The time period covered by this volume extends from the accession of Sargon of Akkad to the end of the Gutian period (2334-2133 BC). In this corpus we find the first extensive use of the Akkadian language, in it oldest known dialect, for royal inscriptions. Nearly all the texts in this volume are recorded in that language; a few are in Sumerian, and four are bilingual. Invaluable for the reconstruction of the history of the period are a handful of large Old Babylonian tablets inscribed with collections of the Sargonic kings' triumphal inscriptions. Complete transliterations of the...