Empfehlungen basierend auf "The World According to Color"

A beguiling cultural history of colour, by one of the rising stars of art history The subject of this book is mankind's extraordinary relationship with colour. It is composed of a series of voyages, ranging across the world and throughout history, which reveal the meanings that have been attached to the colours we see around us and the ways these have shaped our culture and imagination. It takes seven primary colours - black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green - and uncovers behind each a root idea, based on visual resemblances or properties so rudimentary as to be common to all societies. The book traces these meanings to show how they changed and multiplied, the role that they have played in our culture and history, and how understanding them allows us to see many of the milestones in the history of art - from Bronze Age gold-work to Turner, Titian to Yves Klein - in a new way. It proceeds by stories, which cumulatively tell another, larger one- a history of the world from the black nothing which preceded existence to the birth of our red-blooded species; the gilded gods who animated the world in antiquity to the blue horizons which framed the Age of Discovery; the pristine aspirations of Enlightenment, the technicolour innovation which fuelled the Industrial Revolution and the colour which most embodies the environmental crisis which now faces us.

We think we know ancient Greece, the civilisation that shares the same name and gave us just about everything that defines 'western' culture today, in the arts, sciences, social sciences and politics. Yet, as Greece has been brought under repeated scrutiny during the financial crises that have convulsed the country since 2010, worldwide coverage has revealed just how poorly we grasp the modern nation. This book sets out to understand the modern Greeks on their own terms.How did Greece come to be so powerfully attached to the legacy of the ancients in the first place, and then define an identity for themselves that is at once Greek and modern? This book reveals the remarkable achievement, during the last 300 years, of building a modern nation on, sometimes literally, the ruins of a vanished civilisation. This is the story of the Greek nation-state but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, of the collective identity that goes with it. It is not only a history of events and high politics, it is also a history of culture, of the arts, of people and of ideas.

New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century The tenth anniversary edition of the internationally bestselling phenomenon that cemented Yuval Noah Harari as one of the most prominent historians of our time—featuring a new afterword from the author. One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens integrates history and science to challenge everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our heritage...and our future.

In this personal and practical guide to moral self-improvement and living a good life, the second-century philosopher Epictetus tackles questions of freedom and imprisonment, stubbornness and fear, family, friendship and love, and leaves an intriguing document of daily life in the classical world. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

A sweeping and comprehensive history of Venice--from its formation in the early Middle Ages to the present day--that traces its evolution as a city, city-state, regional power, and overseas empire.No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, "another world." During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated as a model republic in an age of monarchs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became famous for its freewheeling lifestyle characterized by courtesans, casinos, and Carnival. When the city fell on hard times following the collapse of the Republic in 1797, a darker vision of Venice as a place of decay, disease, and death took hold. Today tourists from around the globe flock to the world heritage site as rising sea levels threaten its very foundations.This comprehensive account reveals the adaptations to its geographic setting that have been a constant feature of living on water from Venice's origins to the present. It examines the lives of the women and men, noble and common, rich and poor, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, who built not only the city but also its vast empire that stretched from Northern Italy to the eastern Mediterranean. It details the urban transformations that Venice underwent in response to environmental vulnerability, industrialization, and mass tourism. Alongside the city's commercial prominence has been its dramatically changing political role, including its power as a city-state, regional stronghold, and overseas empire, as well as its impact on the development of fascism. Throughout, Dennis Romano highlights the city's cultural achievements in architecture, painting, and music, particularly opera.This richly illustrated volume offers a stunning portrait of this most singular of cities.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume.

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature.Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror.The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death.

Compiled by a team of leading historians, this is a wonderfully rich, lavishly illustrated history of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The reader is taken on a journey from prehistoric times to the present day, examining such topics as the spread of literacy, the development of transport, and the evolution of country houses on the way. British cities are brought to life in artwork reconstructions that take the reader back to the Dublin of the 18th century or London in the 1850s. Scholarly yet accessible, this is the ideal introduction to British and Irish history.

This is the story of John Draper, Andrew White, and the conflict thesis: a centuries-old misconception that religion and science are at odds with one another. Renowned scientist John William Draper (1811-1882) and celebrated historian-politician Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918) were certain that Enlightened Science and Dogmatic Christianity were mortal enemies--and they said as much to anyone who would listen. More than a century later, their grand and sweeping version of history dominates our landscape; Draper and White's "conflict thesis" is still found in countless textbooks, lecture series, movies, novels, and more. Yet, as it would later be discovered, they were mistaken. Their work has been torn to shreds by the experts, who have declared it totally at odds with reality. So how, if this is the case, does their wrongheaded narrative still live on? Who were these two men, and what, exactly, did they say? What is it about their God-versus-Science "conflict thesis" that convinced so many? And what--since both claimed to love Science and love Christ--were they actually trying to achieve in the first place? In this book, physicist David Hutchings and historian of science and religion James C. Ungureanu dissect the work of Draper and White. They take readers on a journey through time, diving into the formation and fallacy of the conflict thesis and its polarizing impact on society. The result is a tale of Flat Earths, of anesthetic, and of autopsies; of Creation and Evolution; of laser-eyed lizards and infinite worlds. It is a story of miracles and mathematicians; souls and Great Libraries; the Greeks, the scientific method, the Not-So-Dark-After-All Ages... and, of course, of popes and unicorns.

I just got off the sunset train I'm from the Angel Town The Golden West Los Angeles Where the sun shines all year round I left a girlie back there She's the sweetest girl I know She said 'Goodbye' I'll wait for you In the Land of the Bungalow from In the Land of the Bungalow by George F. Devereux (1929) The bungalow, in all its various forms, has existed since the early seventeenth century--from its origin as a Bengalese hut, or "banggolo," made of mud, cow dung, thatch, and bamboo, to later developments as a one-story, square structure surrounded by a collonaded veranda, and the subtlepermutations exhibited in designs such as the Frank Lloyd Wright style "prairie House." Originally created as a peasant dwelling in rural India, and later an accommodation for European travellers and expansive permanent residences for the colonial ruling class who served there, the bungalow hasbecome one of the most frequently adopted house forms throughout the world and the most popular home style in the United States. Architects the world over have extolled the bungalow's merits in their interpretations of its modest style and economy, while romantic notions of this humble abode havebeen conveyed through poetry and song by both temporary sojourners and permanent residents, rejoicing in its simplistic luxury. It is, in fact, the only dwelling which, in both name and form, exists on every continent (the word bungalow has entered eighteen languages). The first work of its kind, this richly illustrated volume takes readers on an engaging tour of the history of the bungalow, explaining the evolution of this architectural wonder, from its inception as a practical dwelling place to its present day incarnation as a suburban home looked upon withaffection and pride. Here, Anthony D. King explores the historical forces, which in producing the bungalow, also shaped the modern world: colonialism and industrialization, capitalism and socialism, urbanization and suburbanization. He argues that a global culture of architectural style can beidentified with the bungalow, one which accords with the development of our international, capitalistic, and urban culture, and that the bungalow "was one of, if not the first, common house types of this culture." Every type of bungalow is discussed, including the American Craftsman and Arts andCrafts cottage styles, the Spanish Colonial and California bungalows that became the basis for suburban sprawl throughout Los Angeles, and the Japanese teahouse style that dominates the Florida landscape. Offering the definitive history of America's most popular house form, this fascinating work provides an engaging look at the charming structure of the bungalow. Indeed, as this unique book shows, one might expect to hear a happy bungalow owner (whether from a bohemian summer bungalow in the woodsof Vancouver or a family home in the suburbs of Jacksonville, Florida) singing a bungalow tune: "Far from the city, Somehow it seems, We're sitting pretty in, Our bungalow, Of dreams."