Book picks similar to
The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History by James M. Banner Jr.
history
historiography
nonfiction
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Rock Retirement: A Simple Guide to Help You Take Control and be More Optimistic About the Future
Roger Whitney - 2017
Traditional retirement advice usually boils down to saving more, sacrificing more, and settling for less. This approach makes people dependent on systems outside their control, such as the market, economy, and investment returns. The result: people lose power over determining their life. What sets Rock Retirement apart is its holistic approach to helping people take back control and act intentionally towards the life they want. It addresses the fears, hopes, and dreams that people have about retirement, goes way beyond the numbers, and shows them how to balance living well today and tomorrow.
Memorable Teaching: Leveraging Memory to Build Deep and Durable Learning in the Classroom
Peps Mccrea - 2017
I doubt you'll find an education book with more useful insights per minute of reading time." - Dylan Wiliam - Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, UCLThis book is for any educator who's interested in understanding how learning works, and how to optimise their teaching to make it happen.From the author of Lean Lesson Planning, this latest instalment in the High Impact Teaching series pulls together the best available evidence from cognitive science and educational research, and stitches them together into a concise and coherent set of actionable principles to improve your impact in the classroom.POWER UP YOUR TEACHINGIt's an evidence-informed teacher's guide to building enduring understanding, and sits alongside books such as Make It Stick, Why Don't Students Like School?, and What Every Teacher Needs To Know About Psychology.---CONTENTSAct I PreliminariesWhy memory?Memory architectureThe 9 principlesAct II Principles1: Manage information2: Orient attention3: Streamline communication4: Regulate load5: Expedite elaboration6: Refine structures7: Stabilise changes8: Align pedagogies9: Embed metacognitionPRAISE FOR MEMORABLE TEACHING"I can't remember when I have ever read a book that takes such complex ideas and communicates them with sophistication and simplicity." - Oliver Caviglioli, Founder and author of HOW2s"The book packs an awful lot of useful material into a short, easy to read format and as such is something that all teachers should add to their collections." - Josh Goodrich, Head of CPD at Oasis Southbank"A truly excellent book which sets out the science behind learning with remarkable clarity." - Mark Enser, Head of Geography at Heathfield Community College
Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds
David C. Pollock - 1999
The book is rich with real-life anecdotes and examines the nature of the TCK kid experience and its effects on maturing, developing a sense of identity, and adjusting to one's passport country upon return. The authors give readers an understanding of the challenges and benefits of the TCK life and provide practical suggestions and advice on maximizing those benefits.
The History of Cuba
Clifford L. Staten - 2003
This remarkable nation has had a long history of relations with larger political powers that were drawn to the island because of its valuable resources and strategic location. Ties between Cuba and the United States have been strong since the mid-nineteenth century, and the theme of U.S. dominance over the island and its people is a primary historical perspective. Cuba's history is told in eight chronological chapters, from its earliest days as a Spanish colony, through its wars for independence and the U.S. occupation in the twentieth century to Batista, the Cold War, and the so-called "Special Period," when Cuba faced the crisis of the downfall of the Soviet Union. With special emphasis on the twentieth century, the Castro era, and U.S.-Cuba relations, this is the most accessible and current history of Cuba available.
A Field Guide for the Hero's Journey
Jeff Sandefer - 2012
Perhaps you’re afraid that if you try, you’ll fail. The startling truth is this: Just about anyone can do great things, can live a life that’s remarkable, purposeful, excellent, and yes, even heroic. If you want to be a hero, you can be. How? That’s what this book is all about. Will you choose to do it? Will you decide to journey heroically, instead of spending your life merely marking time? If so, this is the book for you. Welcome to your heroic journey.
The Dirtbag's Guide to Life: Eternal Truth for Hiker Trash, Ski Bums, and Vagabonds
Tim Mathis - 2019
I'd love to just get this guide out there in response!” - Heather "Anish" Anderson. 2019 National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, and author of Thirst: 2600 Miles to Home“Have you read Rolf Potts' Vagabonding? It feels a bit like the American Vagabonding.” - Six2 - Pacific Crest and Appalachian Trail Alum.“Gosh I love your book! I'm trying to read it, but for some reason I can't stop crying!!! It resonates so much and I feel so emotional about it.” - Kathy Vaughan, Team UltraPedestrian and co-author of 98 Days of Wind: The Greatest Fail of Our Life“You’re going to have to change the name if you want anyone to pick up your book who doesn’t consider themselves a “dirtbag,” “trash,” or a “bum.”” - Random stranger on Facebook who is not impressed with the title.Screw picket fences. Live your best life. Sleep in the dirt. While a life of adventure has traditionally been reserved for the rich and the sponsored, to the dirtbag, it's a birthright for the masses. Partly a celebration of an underappreciated subculture of hiker trash, ski bums, and vagabonds, and partly a "how to" guide for adventure on the cheap, The Dirtbag's Guide to Life is the first solid attempt to define an outdoor movement that has taken root in backpacker hostels, long trails, and climbing crags around the world.Distilling personal wisdom and practical lessons from dozens of the world’s most dedicated dirtbags, this book is for anyone who dreams of hitchhiking trips through Patagonia and summers spent trail running in Montana, but who can’t be bothered by mainstream frivolities like expensive clothes and basic hygiene.The book answers important logistical questions about the major barriers to a life centered on adventure, and covers practical topics like financial planning and career strategies. It also digs into the big philosophical questions that long-term dirtbags all eventually wrestle with - like how to manage your most important relationships, how to live as a responsible human being, and how to find meaning when you develop a life centered on playing outside.
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
Simon Winchester - 2021
It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing—and have done—with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World examines in depth how we acquire land, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the essential question: who actually owns the world’s land—and why does it matter?
Creating Tomorrow's Schools Today: Education - Our Children - Their Futures
Richard Gerver - 2010
Education is the platform for our success or failure, but is our system still fit for purpose? Will our children be equipped to face the challenges the future holds: the rapidly changing employment patterns and the global environmental, economic and social crises ahead of us? Or will our children grow up to resent their school years and blame them for their unfulfilled potential and achievement?Creating Tomorrow's Schools Today explores these questions in the context of early schooling and primary education, presents powerful arguments for change and highlights strategies that offer a solution.
Extraordinary Parenting: the essential guide to parenting and educating at home
Eloise Rickman - 2020
Whether you’re planning to make a permanent move to homeschooling or you’re temporarily balancing it alongside paid work, Extraordinary Parenting shows that you don’t need a huge house, endless free time, or a host of expensive resources to unlock your child’s potential.Instead, this straightforward and empathic book will teach you to:— Deepen your connection with your child to create an attachment that promotes learning and openness.— Build strong, adaptable family rhythms to provide your child with security and stimulation every day, every month, and every year.— Create a calm, simplified home environment which will encourage deep play and independence — whatever your living situation.— Discover enjoyable ways of learning together as a family, identify your child’s interests, and use traditional teaching materials in a creative way.— Take care of your own needs as a parent, in order to become the parent your child needs.Based on years of research and hands-on work with parents, this book will reassure you that, whilst extraordinary times call for extraordinary parenting, you can be sure that you are up to the challenge.
Freedom: An Unruly History
Annelien de Dijn - 2020
Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the Atlantic Revolutions.We tend to think of freedom as something that is best protected by carefully circumscribing the boundaries of legitimate state activity. But who came up with this understanding of freedom, and for what purposes? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of thinking about freedom in the West, Annelien de Dijn argues that we owe our view of freedom not to the liberty lovers of the Age of Revolution but to the enemies of democracy.The conception of freedom most prevalent today--that it depends on the limitation of state power--is a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking about liberty. For centuries people in the West identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. They had what might best be described as a democratic conception of liberty.Understanding the long history of freedom underscores how recently it has come to be identified with limited government. It also reveals something crucial about the genealogy of current ways of thinking about freedom. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who created our modern democracies--it was invented by their critics and opponents. Rather than following in the path of the American founders, today's "big government" antagonists more closely resemble the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.
The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
Jonathan Rauch - 2021
Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: "cancel culture." At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony.In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the "Constitution of Knowledge"--our social system for turning disagreement into truth.By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do--and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy
Nicholas Lemann - 1999
Combining vibrant storytelling, vivid portraiture, and thematic analysis, Lemann shows why this experiment did not turn out as planned. It did create a new elite, but it also generated conflict and tension—and America's best educated, most privileged people are now leaders without followers.Drawing on unprecedented access to the Educational Testing Service's archives, Lemann maintains that America's meritocracy is neither natural nor inevitable, and that it does not apportion opportunity equally or fairly. His important study not only asks profound moral and political questions about the past and future of our society but also carries implications for current social and educational policy. As Brent Staples noted in his New York Times editorial column: "Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts announced that prospective students would no longer be required to submit SAT scores with their applications. . . . Holyoke's president, Joanne Creighton, was personally convinced by reading Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test, which documents how the SAT became a tool for class segregation."All students of education, sociology, and recent U.S. history—especially those focused on testing, theories of learning, social stratification, or policymaking—will find this book fascinating and alarming.
The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting
Anne Trubek - 2014
Signatures--far from John Hancock's elegant model--have become scrawls. In her recent and widely discussed and debated essays, Anne Trubek argues that the decline and even elimination of handwriting from daily life does not signal a decline in civilization, but rather the next stage in the evolution of communication.Now, in The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, Trubek uncovers the long and significant impact handwriting has had on culture and humanity--from the first recorded handwriting on the clay tablets of the Sumerians some four thousand years ago and the invention of the alphabet as we know it, to the rising value of handwritten manuscripts today. Each innovation over the millennia has threatened existing standards and entrenched interests: Indeed, in ancient Athens, Socrates and his followers decried the very use of handwriting, claiming memory would be destroyed; while Gutenberg's printing press ultimately overturned the livelihood of the monks who created books in the pre-printing era. And yet new methods of writing and communication have always appeared. Establishing a novel link between our deep past and emerging future, Anne Trubek offers a colorful lens through which to view our shared social experience.
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
James C. Scott - 2017
But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family—all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction. Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians” who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.