Historical Dynamics

Author: Peter Turchin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400889316
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics--why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract--this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history. Peter Turchin develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of ethnic assimilation/religious conversion, and the interaction between population dynamics and sociopolitical stability. He then translates these into a spectrum of mathematical models, investigates the dynamics predicted by the models, and contrasts model predictions with empirical patterns. Turchin's highly instructive empirical tests demonstrate that certain models predict empirical patterns with a very high degree of accuracy. For instance, one model accounts for the recurrent waves of state breakdown in medieval and early modern Europe. And historical data confirm that ethno-nationalist solidarity produces an aggressively expansive state under certain conditions (such as in locations where imperial frontiers coincide with religious divides). The strength of Turchin's results suggests that the synthetic approach he advocates can significantly improve our understanding of historical dynamics.

Dynamics of World History

Author: Christopher Dawson
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497651409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
In scope and in vision Christopher Dawson’s historiography ranks with the work of men like Spengler, Northrop, and Toynbee. Several major themes run through Dawson’s work, but perhaps his most unique contribution was his insistence on the importance of religion in shaping and sustaining civilizations. Religion, Dawson believed, is the great creative force in any culture, and the loss of a society’s historic religion therefore portends a process of social dissolution. For this reason, Dawson concluded that Western society must find a way to revitalize its spiritual life if it is to avoid irreversible decay. Progress, the real religion of modernity, is insufficient to sustain cultural health. And an ahistorical, secularized Christianity is an oxymoron, a pseudo-religion only nominally related to the historic religion of the West. Dawson maintained that the hope of the present age lay in the reconciliation of the religious tradition of Christianity with the intellectual tradition of humanism and the new knowledge about man and nature provided by modern science. Dynamics of World History shows that though such a task may be difficult, it is not impossible.

A History of Complex Dynamics

Author: Daniel S. Alexander
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 366309197X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
The contemporary study of complex dynamics, which has flourished so much in recent years, is based largely upon work by G. Julia (1918) and P. Fatou (1919/20). The goal of this book is to analyze this work from an historical perspective and show in detail, how it grew out of a corpus regarding the iteration of complex analytic functions. This began with investigations by E. Schröder (1870/71) which he made, when he studied Newton's method. In the 1880's, Gabriel Koenigs fashioned this study into a rigorous body of work and, thereby, influenced a lot the subsequent development. But only, when Fatou and Julia applied set theory as well as Paul Montel's theory of normal families, it was possible to develop a global approach to the iteration of rational maps. This book shows, how this intriguing piece of modern mathematics became reality.

A Short History of Mathematical Population Dynamics

Author: Nicolas Bacaër
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0857291157
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
As Eugene Wigner stressed, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in the physical sciences and their technological applications. The role of mathematics in the biological, medical and social sciences has been much more modest but has recently grown thanks to the simulation capacity offered by modern computers. This book traces the history of population dynamics---a theoretical subject closely connected to genetics, ecology, epidemiology and demography---where mathematics has brought significant insights. It presents an overview of the genesis of several important themes: exponential growth, from Euler and Malthus to the Chinese one-child policy; the development of stochastic models, from Mendel's laws and the question of extinction of family names to percolation theory for the spread of epidemics, and chaotic populations, where determinism and randomness intertwine. The reader of this book will see, from a different perspective, the problems that scientists face when governments ask for reliable predictions to help control epidemics (AIDS, SARS, swine flu), manage renewable resources (fishing quotas, spread of genetically modified organisms) or anticipate demographic evolutions such as aging.

The Historical Dynamics of Chinese Politics

Author: Guangbin Yang
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811913927
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Book Description
This book puts forward a new perspective, the historical dynamics of Chinese politics, for better understanding China’s politics, which is from the vertical history of China and the dimension of horizontal world politics, combining the historical analysis of how Chinese politics has come along the way and the comparative analysis of China's governance achievements in world politics. Based on this premise, this book attempts to explain the democratic discourse of contemporary Chinese political logic. The historical dynamics of Chinese politics comes from long-term communication between the author and Western scholars, which may help the global audience to understand China’s politics from all angles.

The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region

Author: Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816535159
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Book Description
"One of the most complete collections of essays on U.S.-Mexico border studies"--Provided by publisher.

Secular Cycles

Author: Peter Turchin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691136963
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
"Secular Cycles elaborates and expands upon the demographic-structural theory first advanced by Jack Goldstone, which provides an explanation of long-term oscillations. This book tests that theory's specific and quantitative predictions by tracing the dynamics of population numbers, prices and real wages, elite numbers and incomes, state finances, and sociopolitical instability. Turchin and Nefedov study societies in England, France, and Russia during the medieval and early modern periods, and look back at the Roman Republic and Empire. Incorporating theoretical and quantitative history, the authors examine a specific model of historical change and, more generally, investigate the utility of the dynamical systems approach in historical applications."--BOOK JACKET.

Dynamics of Emigration

Author: Stefan Berger
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 180073610X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
As a pioneering volume to consider the impact of exile on historical scholarship in the twentieth century in a systematic and global way, looking at Europe, North America, South America and Asia, Dynamics of Emigration asks about epistemic repercussions on the experience of exile and exiles. Analyzing both the impact that exile scholars had on their host societies and on the societies they had to leave, the volume investigates exiles’ pathways to integration into new host societies and the many difficulties they face establishing themselves in new surroundings. Focusing on the age of extremes and the realms of exile from fascist and right-wing dictatorships as well as communist regimes, the contributions look at the reasons scholars have for going into exile while providing side-by-side examination of the support organizations and paths for success involved with living in exile.

What is Masculinity?

Author: J. Arnold
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230307256
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Book Description
Across history, the ideas and practices of male identity have varied much between time and place: masculinity proves to be a slippery concept, not available to all men, sometimes even applied to women. This book analyses the dynamics of 'masculinity' as both an ideology and lived experience - how men have tried, and failed, to be 'Real Men'.

Multicultural Dynamics and the Ends of History

Author: Real Fillion
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
ISBN: 0776618288
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Book Description
Multicultural Dynamics and the Ends of History provides a strikingly original reading of key texts in the philosophy of history by Kant, Hegel, and Marx, as well as strong arguments for why these texts are still relevant to understanding history today. Réal Fillion offers a critical exposition of the theses of these three authors on the dynamics and the ends of history, in order to provide an answer to the question: "Where are we headed?" Grounding his answer in the twin observations that the world is becoming increasingly multicultural and increasingly unified, Fillion reasserts the task of the speculative philosophy of history as it had been understood by German philosophy: the articulation and understanding the historical process as a developmental whole. Fillion's interpretation engages many recent strands of social and political thought in order to provide a new understanding of current events, and possible futures, grounded in the understanding of the dynamics of the past and the present provided by Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The result is a rich and timely answer to the question of where our world is headed today.