Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type.Part civics primer, part cultural history, "The Story of America" excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's "Way to Wealth", Thomas Paine's "Common Sense", "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression.From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.Here he lyes --A pilgrim passed I --The way to wealth --The age of Paine --We the parchment --I.O.U. --A Nue Merrykin Dikshunary --His Highness --Man of the people --Pickwick in America --The humbug --President Tom's cabin --Pride of the prairie --Longfellow's ride --Rock, paper, scissors --Objection --Chan the man --The uprooted --Rap sheet --To wit

    Discoverer of a New World, it became the greatest power on earth and created a Golden Age of culture quite breathtaking in the quality of its achievement. Within 150 years, Spain was in a state of decay and fast being left behind by more progressive European nations. Here, from award-winning historian Malveena McKendrick, is the dramatic story of the rise and fall of the Spanish empire.

    Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

    It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century.Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle.Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters -- Manet, Seurat, and Cezanne -- who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices."Suspensions of Perception" decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception -- in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.

    In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

    A republican city-state funded by trade and banking, its often bloody political scene was dominated by rich mercantile families, the most famous of which were the Medici. This enthralling book charts the family's huge influence on the political, economic and cultural history of Florence. Beginning in the early 1430s with the rise of the dynasty under the near-legendary Cosimo de Medici, it moves through their golden era as patrons of some of the most remarkable artists and architects of the Renaissance, to the era of the Medici Popes and Grand Dukes, Florence's slide into decay and bankruptcy, and the end, in 1737, of the Medici line.

    When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women.Written with humor and meticulous detail, Nature’s Body draws on these and other examples to uncover the ways in which assumptions about gender, sex, and race have shaped scientific explanations of nature. Schiebinger offers a rich cultural history of science and a timely and passionate argument that science must be restructured in order to get it right.

    This book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and wonder, from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as objects of natural inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders of nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is simultaneously a history of the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists. Pursued in tandem, these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than opposed to one another.--From the IntroductionWonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions--these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.

    Contains more than 400 letters and poems written to family, creditors, debtors, and bankers.

    Using the paintings of the era as his starting point - in his view, the one mode of Victorian art yet to be rescued from indifference - Paxman explores themes of family, urban life, industry, empire, and imagination to uncover truths (and explode some myths) about Victorian Britain.To Paxman, these paintings were the television of their day, immensely popular visual narratives that attracted crowds by the hundreds of thousands: a single picture show featuring Elizabeth Butler's Balaclava (depicting survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade) drew 50,000 viewers, some of them openly weeping. The Victorians shows how artists like Butler, William Powell Frith, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Luke Fildes, and Ford Madox Brown were chronicling a world changing before their eyes, and his overview ranges across the whole of Victorian life and culture: from high gothic architecture to the birth of the football league, from the novels of Dickens to the technological marvels of Brunel.Published to coincide with a landmark BBC series, The Victorians is an opinionated, informed, surprising, and hugely enthusiastic appraisal of the birth of modern Britain - a glorious reminder of how the Victorians made us who we are today.

     Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling novel, The Goldfinch, introduced millions of readers to a painting that becomes a lifelong obsession. Painted in 1654 by Carel Fabritius, the work is of a small bird, chained to its perch. This mysterious portrait, a masterpiece of the Dutch Golden Age, has been lost and found, adored and abandoned, for nearly four centuries. Now more famous than ever, this painting is the subject of its own book—a look behind the scenes at its creation and the tumultuous life of its creator. This gripping, true story of adventure, romance, and artistic fervor has never before been told and will enthrall readers of the now famous novel. Set against the vibrant backdrop of Holland in the seventeenth century, when it was the economic capital of the world, the book is populated by a glittering crowd of the wealthy and young, high society with appetites for success and excess. Holland was the center of the art world as well, boasting both Rembrandt, (Fabritius' mentor), and Vermeer (his rival). And there is Carel Fabritius himself—handsome, talented, hell-bent on greatness, but unable to escape tragedy. Yet through The Goldfinch, he achieves immortality. Deborah Davis is the author of the best-selling Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X, Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball, Gilded: How Newport Became the Richest Resort in America, and the prize-winning Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation. Cover design by Adil Dara

    The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

    The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton’s highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock’s days as a student under Benton. Pollock’s first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock. In true Oedipal fashion, Pollock even fell in love with Benton’s wife.Pollock later broke away from his mentor artistically, rocketing to superstardom with his stunning drip compositions. But he never lost touch with Benton or his ideas—in fact, his breakthrough abstractions reveal a strong debt to Benton’s teachings. In an epic story that ranges from the cafés and salons of Gertrude Stein’s Paris to the highways of the American West, Henry Adams, acclaimed author of Eakins Revealed, unfolds a poignant personal drama that provides new insights into two of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

    Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory, 1815–1900 and Art in Theory, 1900–1990, its primary aim is to provide students and teachers with the documentary material for informed and up-to-date study. Its 240 texts, clear principles of organization and considerable editorial content offer a vivid and indispensable introduction to the art of the early modern period.Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger have collected writing by artists, critics, philosophers, literary figures, and administrators of the arts, some reprinted in their entirety, others excerpted from longer works. A wealth of material from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Latin sources is also provided, including many new translations.Among the major themes treated are early arguments over the relative merits of ancient and modern art, debates between the advocates of form and color, the beginnings of modern art criticism in reviews of the Salon, art and politics during the French Revolution, the rise of landscape painting, and the artistic theories of Romanticism and Neo-classicism.Each section is prefaced by an essay that situates the ideas of the period in their historical context, while relating theoretical concerns and debates to developments in the practice of art. Each individual text is also accompanied by a short introduction. An extensive bibliography and full index are provided.

    His pioneering study is informed by the conviction that color is a contingent, historical occurrence whose meaning, like language, lies in the particular contexts in which it is experienced and interpreted.Gage covers topics as diverse as the optical mixing techniques implicit in mosaic; medieval color-symbolism; the equipment of the manuscript illuminator's workshop, the color languages and color practices of Latin America at the time of the Spanish Conquest; the earliest history of the prism; and the color ideas of Goethe and Runge, Blake and Turner, Seurat and Matisse.From the perspective of the history of science, Gage considers the bearing of Newton's optical discoveries on painting, the chemist Chevreul's contact with painters and the growing interest of experimental psychologists in the topic of color in the late nineteenth century, particularly in relation to synaesthesia. He includes an invaluable overview of the twentieth-century literature that bears on the historical interpretation of color in art. Gage's explorations further extend the concepts he addressed in his prize-winning book, Color and Culture.