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"Technology and civilization History Fiction."
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Sapiens : a graphic history. Volume three, The masters of history
\"Sometimes history seems like a laundry list of malevolent monarchs, pompous presidents and dastardly dictators. But are they really the ones in the driving seat? Sapiens: A Graphic History-The Masters of History takes us on an immersive and hilarious ride through the human past to discover the forces that change our world, bring us together, and just as often... tear us apart. Grab a front-row seat to the greatest show on earth, and explore the rise of money, religion and empire. Join our fabulous host Heroda Tush, as she wonders: Which historical superhero will display the power to make civilizations rise and fall? Will Mr. Random prove that luck and circumstance prevail? Will Lady Empire convince us of the irrefutable shaping force of conquerors? Or will Clashwoman beat them all to greatness by reminding us of the endless confrontations that seem to forever plague our species?\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Postal Culture
The nationalization of the postal service in Italy transformed post-unification letter writing as a cultural medium. Both a harbinger of progress and an expanded, more efficient means of circulating information, the national postal service served as a bridge between the private world of personal communication and the public arena of information exchange and production of public opinion. As a growing number of people read and wrote letters, they became part of a larger community that regarded the letter not only as an important channel in the process of information exchange, but also as a necessary instrument in the education and modernization of the nation.
In Postal Culture , Gabriella Romani examines the role of the letter in Italian literature, cultural production, communication, and politics. She argues that the reading and writing of letters, along with epistolary fiction, epistolary manuals, and correspondence published in newspapers, fostered a sense of community and national identity and thus became a force for social change.
eBook
Shaky Foundations
Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications.Shaky Foundationsprovides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science.
By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.
Based on extensive archival research,Shaky Foundationsaddresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.
eBook
Novel Cultivations
Nineteenth-century English nature was a place of experimentation, exoticism, and transgression, as site and emblem of the global exchanges of the British Empire. Popular attitudes toward the transplantation of exotic species-botanical and human-to Victorian greenhouses and cities found anxious expression in a number of fanciful genre texts, including mysteries, science fiction, and horror stories.
Situated in a mid-Victorian moment of frenetic plant collecting from the far reaches of the British empire,Novel Cultivationsrecognizes plants as vital and sentient subjects that serve-often more so than people-as actors and narrative engines in the nineteenth-century novel. Conceptions of native and natural were decoupled by the revelation that nature was globally sourced, a disruption displayed in the plots of gardens as in those of novels.
Elizabeth Chang examines here the agency asserted by plants with shrewd readings of a range of fictional works, from monstrous rhododendrons in Daphne du Maurier'sRebeccaand Mexican prickly pears in Olive Schreiner'sStory of an African Farm,to Algernon Blackwood's hair-raising\"The Man Whom the Trees Loved\"and other obscure ecogothic tales. This provocative contribution to ecocriticism shows plants as buttonholes between fiction and reality, registering changes of form and content in both realms.
eBook
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future
Authors' note: Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The occasion is the tercentenary of the end of Western culture (1540 – 2073); the dilemma being addressed is how we – the children of the Enlightenment – failed to act on robust information about climate change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold. Our historian concludes that a second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on “free” markets, disabled the world's powerful nations in the face of tragedy. Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were hamstrung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind – even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People's Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988 – 2073) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2074).
Journal Article
The cultural evolution of love in literary history
Since the late nineteenth century, cultural historians have noted that the importance of love increased during the Medieval and Early Modern European period (a phenomenon that was once referred to as the emergence of ‘courtly love’). However, more recent works have shown a similar increase in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Indian and Japanese cultures. Why such a convergent evolution in very different cultures? Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, we leverage literary history and build a database of ancient literary fiction for 19 geographical areas and 77 historical periods covering 3,800 years, from the Middle Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. We first confirm that romantic elements have increased in Eurasian literary fiction over the past millennium, and that similar increases also occurred earlier, in Ancient Greece, Rome and Classical India. We then explore the ecological determinants of this increase. Consistent with hypotheses from cultural history and behavioural ecology, we show that a higher level of economic development is strongly associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction (our proxy for the importance of love in a culture). To further test the causal role of economic development, we used a difference-in-difference method that exploits exogenous regional variations in economic development resulting from the adoption of the heavy plough in medieval Europe. Finally, we used probabilistic generative models to reconstruct the latent evolution of love and to assess the respective role of cultural diffusion and economic development.Using qualitative and quantitative methods, Baumard et al. build a database of ancient literary fiction. They find that higher levels of economic development are associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction.
Journal Article
Vulnerability, Embodiment and Emerging Technologies: A Still Open Issue
When reflecting on the human condition, vulnerability is a characteristic which is clearly evident, because anyone is exposed to the possibility of being wounded (and is, therefore, vulnerable, from the Latin word \"vulnus\", wound). In fact, human vulnerability, intended as a universal condition affecting finite and mortal human beings, is closely linked to embodiment, intended as the constitutive bond every human has with a physical body, subject to changes and to the passing of time. In today’s cultural context, permeated by emerging technologies, theories in favor of the so-called human enhancement through the use of the Genetics–Nanotechnology–Robotics (GNR) Revolution or NBIC Convergence technologies, in particular transhumanism, are emerging in the bioethical debate and seem to question the fundamentally vulnerable nature of human beings, by proposing not only abstract theories, but also concrete techno-scientific projects for its overcoming. Such a project, however, could turn out to be fallacious and inconsistent and could lead to ethically unacceptable consequences. Instead, a coherent (and ethical) way of responding to constitutive human vulnerability seems to be its understanding and acceptance.
Journal Article
Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space
Over the past 20 years a small group of astronomers and planetary scientists has actively promoted the idea that an asteroid might collide with the Earth and destroy civilization. Despite concerns about placing weapons in space, the asteroid scientists repeatedly met with scientists from the Strategic Defense Initiative to discuss mitigation technologies. This paper examines the narrative context in which asteroids were constructed as a threat and astronomy was reconfigured as an interventionist science. I argue that conceptualizing asteroids through narratives of technological salvation invoked a 'narrative imperative' that drew the astronomers towards the militaristic endings that their stories demanded. Impact-threat science thus demonstrates both the ways in which scientific research can be framed by fictional narratives and the ideological ends that such narratives can serve.
Journal Article
Postal Culture
InPostal Culture, Gabriella Romani examines the role of the letter in Italian literature, cultural production, communication, and politics.
eBook
Ancient Greeks
Ancient Greeks, the newest entry in the Oxford Profiles series, chronicles the lives and accomplishments of 42 historically important Greek figures. Personal anecdotes and stories, together with a timeline, a glossary of Greek terms, and more than 100 photographs and maps help to bring each individual vividly to life. With figures from fields as diverse as literature, mathematics, politics, the military, philosophy, and science, Ancient Greeks provides a comprehensive examination of the origins of modern civilization.
eBook