Imaging the French Revolution. The Poverty of an Idea. THE libertarian writer Charles Murray has probably done more than any other contemporary thinker to keep alive the idea of a “culture of poverty,” the theory that poor people are trapped by distorted norms and aspirations and not merely material deprivation. His latest book, “Coming Apart,” has gotten a flood of attention for its depiction of a white underclass increasingly disconnected from marriage, work, religion and the rule of law. Overlooked in the debate, however, is the role that an earlier book — by Michael Harrington, a young Socialist intellectual whose views differed radically from Mr. Murray’s — played in framing, and bringing to the forefront, the analysis of poverty as a social problem. Published 50 years ago this month, when Harrington was 34, “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” was a surprise best seller that influenced the direction of social welfare policy, particularly Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, as well as the backlash that followed it.
Five Best: Books on the Cold War. Career Advice: It's Not Harry Potter. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations Revisited. Graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/books/nyt-madison-1962.pdf. HSLF 1000: The West: Enlightenment to Present [Halsall] | Modern History Sourcebook | Term Paper | Stylesheet | Halsall Homepage | Class Hours: Keating214 Tue, 2:30-3:45pm, Fri, 1-2:15pm COURSE OUTLINE - with links to online lecture notes and primary sources This course is an introduction to the events, ideas, and developments that have created modernity since the 17th century. In world historical terms this has been the period of the achievement and collapse of European political and cultural hegemony.
Although we shall look at other areas, our concentration will be on the changes that took place in the European World in the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise of European powers to world domination, the crises of politics and culture in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the emergence of a bipolar world after 1945. The textbook (in a new edition for this semester - do not buy older editions!) Donald Kagan, et al., The Western Heritage , Volume II: Since 1648 , 6th Edition, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998) Kate L. Thomas S. Monsters. Numerous documents from antiquity tell of monstrous people living at the edge of the known world. In the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder described extraordinary races of humans living in India and Ethiopia: these included mouthless hairy creatures called Astomi, who had no need of food or drink; men with dog’s heads; and one-legged creatures who could hop at incredible speed and use their giant feet as umbrellas to protect them from the sun.
Pliny was himself repeating ancient authorities, and his account of these marvellous races was in turn influential throughout the Middle Ages, during which antique monster lore became part of a Christian framework. For Christians, the monstrous races tested not only their credulity, but also their ethics. Monstrous illustrations Interest in monstrous races endured through the Middle Ages. In 10th century England, descriptions of such creatures were gathered together into a text known as the Wonders of the East. Demons in Christianity Bestiaries. The battle of Towton: Nasty, brutish and not that short. The Worst of the Madness by Anne Applebaum. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder Basic Books, 524 pages, $29.95 Stalin’s Genocides by Norman M. Naimark Princeton University Press, 163 pp., $26.95 Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to outsiders, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the impact of war, occupation, and the Holocaust on ordinary morality.
Had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. Murder became ordinary during wartime, wrote Miłosz, and was even regarded as legitimate if it was carried out on behalf of the resistance. For all of these reasons, Miłosz explained, “the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously.”
But Miłosz’s bitter analysis did not go far enough. Snyder’s ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness. SBL Publications. XBox Apocalypse: Video Games and Revelatory Literature Rachel Wagner As surprising as it may seem at first glance, many of today’s violent video games exhibit remarkable similarities to ancient Jewish and Christian apocalypses. Both video games and apocalypses can be viewed as imaginatively inspired otherworldly journeys with a pronounced eschatological focus. Indeed, we can readily view video games as the most poignant site for contemporary renegotiation of the genre of apocalypse.
One of the easiest ways to observe the structural similarities between video games and apocalypses is to use the standard definition produced by the SBL “Apocalypse Group” in 1979. An apocalypse is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world. Industrial Revolution in Britain. USM Western Civilization. Op-Ed Columnist - Two Theories of Change.
China's authoritarian capitalism undermines Western values, argu. THE BEIJING CONSENSUS: How China's Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century By Stefan Halper 296 pp. $28.95 THE END OF THE FREE MARKET: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? By Ian Bremmer 244 pp. $26.95 FREEDOM FOR SALE: Why the World is Trading Democracy for Security By John Kampfner 304pp. $27.95 In a chest-thumping essay and book published 20 years ago, Francis Fukuyama asserted that the end of the Cold War ushered in the everlasting dominance of Western democracy. Well, it turns out history lives on. Stefan Halper, the former administration staffer and now a senior fellow at the University of Cambridge, England, sums up the dilemma as "the shrinking of Western appeal as a politicoeconomic brand. " "Twenty years ago . . . globalization was driven by American capitalism and its two founding ideas -- that markets, not governments, drive progress, and that democracy is the optimal way to organize society," Halper explains in his tightly written argument.