A History of the World in 100 Objects

Author: Neil MacGregor
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141966831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 564

Book Description
This book takes a dramatically original approach to the history of humanity, using objects which previous civilisations have left behind them, often accidentally, as prisms through which we can explore past worlds and the lives of the men and women who lived in them. The book's range is enormous. It begins with one of the earliest surviving objects made by human hands, a chopping tool from the Olduvai gorge in Africa, and ends with an object from the 21st century which represents the world we live in today. Neil MacGregor's aim is not simply to describe these remarkable things, but to show us their significance - how a stone pillar tells us about a great Indian emperor preaching tolerance to his people, how Spanish pieces of eight tell us about the beginning of a global currency or how an early Victorian tea-set tells us about the impact of empire. Each chapter immerses the reader in a past civilisation accompanied by an exceptionally well-informed guide. Seen through this lens, history is a kaleidoscope - shifting, interconnected, constantly surprising, and shaping our world today in ways that most of us have never imagined. An intellectual and visual feast, it is one of the most engrossing and unusual history books published in years.

Objects in Air

Author: Margareta Ingrid Christian
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022676480X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited. Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.

Tangible Things

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199382298
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
In a world obsessed with the virtual, tangible things are once again making history. Tangible Things invites readers to look closely at the things around them, ordinary things like the food on their plate and extraordinary things like the transit of planets across the sky. It argues that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past. The authors of this book pulled an astonishing array of materials out of storage--from a pencil manufactured by Henry David Thoreau to a bracelet made from iridescent beetles--in a wide range of Harvard University collections to mount an innovative exhibition alongside a new general education course. The exhibition challenged the rigid distinctions between history, anthropology, science, and the arts. It showed that object-centered inquiry inevitably leads to a questioning of categories within and beyond history. Tangible Things is both an introduction to the range and scope of Harvard's remarkable collections and an invitation to reassess collections of all sorts, including those that reside in the bottom drawers or attics of people's houses. It interrogates the nineteenth-century categories that still divide art museums from science museums and historical collections from anthropological displays and that assume history is made only from written documents. Although it builds on a larger discussion among specialists, it makes its arguments through case studies, hoping to simultaneously entertain and inspire. The twenty case studies take us from the Galapagos Islands to India and from a third-century Egyptian papyrus fragment to a board game based on the twentieth-century comic strip "Dagwood and Blondie." A companion website catalogs the more than two hundred objects in the original exhibition and suggests ways in which the principles outlined in the book might change the way people understand the tangible things that surround them.

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America

Author: Jennifer Van Horn
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469629577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 457

Book Description
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans' material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women's contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman's application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee's donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

The Lives of Objects

Author: Maia Kotrosits
Publisher: Class 200: New Studies in Religion
ISBN: 022670758X
Category : Church history
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
"Judaism and Christianity as condensed illustrations of how people across time struggle with the materiality of life and death. Speaking across many fields, including classics, history, anthropology, literary, gender, and queer studies, the book journeys through the ancient Mediterranean world by way of the myriad physical artifacts that punctuate the transnational history of early Christianity. By bringing a psychoanalytically inflected approach to bear upon her materialist studies of religious history, Kotrosits makes a contribution not only to our understanding of Judaism and early Christianity, but also our sense of how different disciplines construe historical knowledge, and how we as people and thinkers understand our own relation to our material and affective past"--

Significant Objects

Author: Joshua Glenn
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
ISBN: 1606995251
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
100 EXTRAORDINARY STORIES ABOUT ORDINARY THINGS SIGNIFICANT OBJECTS: A Literary and Economic Experiment Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. That secondhand flotsam definitely becomes more valuable: sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. Who would have believed that random junk could inspire so much imagination? The founders of the Significant Objects project, that’s who. This book collects 100 of the finest tales from this unprecedented creative experiment; you’ll never look at a thrift-store curiosity the same way again. FEATURING ORIGINAL STORIES BY: Chris Adrian • Rob Agredo • Kurt Andersen • Rachel Axler • Rob Baedeker • Nicholson Baker • Rosecrans Baldwin • Matthew Battles • Charles Baxter • Kate Bernheimer • Susanna Breslin • Kevin Brockmeier • Matt Brown • Blake Butler • Meg Cabot • Tim Carvell • Patrick Cates • Dan Chaon • Susanna Daniel • Adam Davies • Kathryn Davis • Matthew De Abaitua • Stacey • D'Erasmo • Helen DeWitt • Doug Dorst • Mark Doty • Ben Ehrenreich • Mark Frauenfelder • Amy Fusselman • William Gibson • Myla Goldberg • Ben Greenman • Jason Grote • Jim Hanas • Jennifer Michael Hecht • Sheila Heti • Christine Hill • Dara Horn • Shelley Jackson • Heidi Julavits • Ben Katchor • Matt Klam • Wayne Koestenbaum • Josh Kramer • Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer • Neil LaBute • Victor LaValle • J. Robert Lennon • Jonathan Lethem • Todd Levin • Laura Lippman • Mimi Lipson • Robert Lopez • Joe Lyons • Sarah Manguso • Merrill Markoe • Tom McCarthy • Miranda Mellis • Lydia Millet • Maud Newton • Annie Nocenti • Stephen O’Connor • Stewart O’Nan • Jenny Offill • Gary Panter • Ed Park • James Parker • Benjamin Percy • Mark Jude Poirier • Padgett Powell • Bob Powers • Todd Pruzan • Dan Reines • Nathaniel Rich • Peter Rock • Lucinda Rosenfeld • Greg Rowland • Luc Sante • R.K. Scher • Toni Schlesinger • Matthew Sharpe • Jim Shepard • David Shields • Marisa Silver • Curtis Sittenfeld • Bruce Sterling • Scarlett Thomas • Jeff Turrentine • Deb Olin Unferth • Tom Vanderbilt • Matthew J. Wells • Joe Wenderoth • Margaret Wertheim • Colleen Werthmann • Colson Whitehead • Carl Wilson • Cintra Wilson • Sari Wilson • Douglas Wolk • John Wray

India

Author: Vidya Dehejia
Publisher: Roli Books
ISBN: 9788194969174
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
We are constantly surrounded by objects, by 'things' that channel and dictate our everyday life, 'things' that we take for granted. But these objects speak to us, and speak about us. They have a story to tell that reflects our values and aspirations, our achievements and dreams, and reveal more about us than we realize! This richly illustrated book focuses on 100 objects to tell a story of India that unravels in a series of thematic sections that allow the objects to take center-stage. The stories that some objects tell will be new to readers; at other times, the objects themselves may be familiar but the story they tell may not be obvious. The 100 objects shed light on the varying priorities and the differing strands of achievement that arose over time to create the rich multi-cultural medley that is today's India.

Interacting with Objects

Author: Maurice Nevile
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027269831
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Book Description
Objects are essential for how, together, people create and experience social life and relate to the physical environment around them. Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity presents studies which use video recordings of real-life settings to explore how objects feature in social interaction and activity. The studies consider many objects (e.g. paper documents, food, a camera, art, furniture, and even the human body), across various situations, such as shopping, visiting the doctor, interviews and meetings, surgery, and instruction in dance, craft, or cooking. Analyses reveal in precise detail how, as people interact, objects are seen, touched and handled, heard, created, transformed, planned, imagined, shared, discussed, or appreciated. With the companion collection Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond multitasking, the book advances understanding of the complex organisation and accomplishment of social interaction, especially the significance of embodiment, materiality, participation and temporality. By focussing on objects in and for actual occasions of human action, Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity will interest many researchers and practitioners in language and social interaction, communication and discourse, design, and also more widely within anthropology, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines.

My Life in 100 Objects

Author: Margaret Randall
Publisher: New Village Press
ISBN: 1613321155
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
Traces the remarkable life of a feminist poet through the items and images that have have defined her experiences My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit. As Randall’s adventures often coincide with important moments in history, many of her objects provide a transcontinental glimpse into social upheavals and transitions. She shares memories from her years in Cuba (1969 to 1980) and Nicaragua (1980 to 1984), as well as briefer periods in North Vietnam (immediately preceding the end of the war in 1975), and Peru (during the government of Velasco Alvarado). In her introduction, Randall states, “objects and places have always been alive to me.” Her history too is alive, as much of a means to consider our own present as it is to glimpse her vibrant past.

Scripting with Objects

Author: Avinash C. Kak
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470255781
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 1315

Book Description
Object-Oriented scripting with Perl and Python Scripting languages are becoming increasingly important for software development. These higher-level languages, with their built-in easy-to-use data structures are convenient for programmers to use as "glue" languages for assembling multi-language applications and for quick prototyping of software architectures. Scripting languages are also used extensively in Web-based applications. Based on the same overall philosophy that made Programming with Objects such a wide success, Scripting with Objects takes a novel dual-language approach to learning advanced scripting with Perl and Python, the dominant languages of the genre. This method of comparing basic syntax and writing application-level scripts is designed to give readers a more comprehensive and expansive perspective on the subject. Beginning with an overview of the importance of scripting languages—and how they differ from mainstream systems programming languages—the book explores: Regular expressions for string processing The notion of a class in Perl and Python Inheritance and polymorphism in Perl and Python Handling exceptions Abstract classes and methods in Perl and Python Weak references for memory management Scripting for graphical user interfaces Multithreaded scripting Scripting for network programming Interacting with databases Processing XML with Perl and Python This book serves as an excellent textbook for a one-semester undergraduate course on advanced scripting in which the students have some prior experience using Perl and Python, or for a two-semester course for students who will be experiencing scripting for the first time. Scripting with Objects is also an ideal resource for industry professionals who are making the transition from Perl to Python, or vice versa.