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"historical interest"
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The immeasurable world : journeys in desert places
\"[An] account of travels in six deserts on five continents that evoke the timeless allure of these remote and forbidding places ... Restless, unhappy in love, and intrigued by the Desert Fathers who forged Christian monasticism in the Egyptian desert, Will Atkins decided to travel in six of the world's driest, hottest places: the Empty Quarter of Oman, the Gobi Desert of North China, the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, the man-made desert of the Aral Sea in Kazkahstan, the Black Rock and Sonoran Deserts of the American Southwest, and the Sinai Desert of Egypt. Each of his travel narratives effortlessly weaves aspects of natural history, historical background, and present-day reportage into a compelling tapestry that reveals the human appeal of these often inhuman landscapes\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
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
Lessons from the Chinese imperial examination system
In this paper, we set out to explore the world’s first major standardised examination system. In the field of language testing and assessment, works such as measured words (Spolsky, 1995), measured constructs (Weir, Vidakovic & Galaczi, 2013), and Cambridge English exams — the first hundred years (Hawkey & Milanovic, 2013) all point to the fact that contemporary tests reflect many years of accumulated knowledge and practice. Perhaps more importantly, they also remind us of the social and educational impact of the tests we develop. With this in mind, we explore the very first example of a standardised examination system — the Chinese imperial examination system (the Kējǔ — in Chinese Hanyu Pinyin 科举).
Journal Article
Maringá and its historical heritage: a case study on the cathedral of the Assumption - doi: 10.4025/actascitechnol.v35i4.11063 Maringá and its historical heritage: a case study on the cathedral of the Assumption - doi: 10.4025/actascitechnol.v35i4.11063
The most tangible register of a civilization’s evolution is the heritage it preserves over the years. It is a vehicle for the transmission of peoples’ memory and culture. Although the city of Maringa in the state of Paraná, Brazil, is just 66 years old, it has several important buildings within its urban context whose preservation is not guaranteed by law. In fact, they are in danger of disappearing amid the city’s fast growth. Current research, surveying the preservation state of historical buildings in the municipality, is based on published studies, research at the City Hall, reports by the Historical Heritage Commission and in loco visits, with special emphasis on the Cathedral of the Assumption, the city’s symbol, whose preservation is still not legally guaranteed. The history of the building of the Cathedral, its most relevant external and internal architectonic features and its furniture for future inventories are focused. Current study raised the historic deployment of the Cathedral, its most relevant architectural features, both exterior and interior, including some of its details, to serve as a basis for inventories for future legal registrations and interventions.
Journal Article
Borderlands Saints : Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture
In Borderlands Saints, Desiree A. Martin examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, Cesar Chavez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, she traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs. Popular spirituality of this kind engages the use and exchange of relics, faith healing, pilgrimages, and spirit possession, exemplifying the contradictions between high and popular culture, human and divine, and secular and sacred. Martin focuses upon a wide range of Mexican and Chicano/a cultural works drawn from the nineteenth century to the present, covering such diverse genres as the novel, the communique, drama, the essay or cronica, film, and contemporary digital media. She argues that spiritual practice is often represented as narrative, while narrative - whether literary, historical, visual, or oral -- may modify or even function as devotional practice.
eBook
HISTORICAL MEANINGFULNESS IN SHARED ACTION
Why should past occurrences matter to us as such? Are they in fact meaningful in a specifically historical way, or do they only become meaningful in being connected to other sorts of meaning-political or speculative, for example-as many notable theorists imply? Ranke and Oakeshott affirmed a purely historical meaningfulness but left its nature unclear. The purpose of this essay is to confirm historical meaningfulness by arguing that our commanding practical interest in how we share action with other actors is distinctively engaged by presumed information about past occurrences. We recognize that past occurrences have determined the conditions of action sharing, constraining our practice with regard to which actors we share practical reality with and which compounding actions we may or must join in progress.
Journal Article
José Vasconcelos
Mexican educator and thinker Jose Vasconcelos is to Latinos what W.E.B. Du Bois is to African Americans--a controversial scholar who fostered an alternative view of the future. InJosè
Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race, his influential 1925 essay, \"Mestizaje\" key to understanding the role he played in the shaping of multiethnic America--is for the first time showcased and properly analyzed. Freshly translated here by John H. R. Polt, \"Mestizaje\" suggested that the Brown Race from Latin America was called to dominate the world, a thesis embraced by activists and scholars north and south of the Rio Grande. Ilan Stavans insightfully and comprehensively examines the essay in biographical and historical context, and considers how many in the United States, especially Chicanos during the civil rights era, used it as a platform for their political agenda. The volume also includes Vasconcelos's long-forgotten 1926 Harris Foundation Lecture at the University of Chicago, \"The Race Problem in Latin America,\" where he cautioned the United States that rejecting mestizaje in our own midst will ultimately bankrupt the nation.
eBook
Exile and Abjection 2006
This chapter introduces the key concepts of exile and abjection. Initially, exile was a punishment but now, in modern times, it is often considered to be a metaphor for a certain kind of person or condition with appropriate modifiers. Modernity is characterized by the transformation of a world once conceived as a congeries of places gradually being transformed. Thus, the notion of exile has a purely historical interest, its relevance to time consists of the extent to which it allows the identification of what people lost or the price they paid for entrance into the condition of modernity. The chapter offers further definitions of exile in line with the notions of place and community.
Book Chapter
