There are as many ways of looking at art as there are viewers of art. That huge diversity is one indication that we humans are highly distinctive lot of creative people. It does not mean, however that there are no universal principles of perception and cognition that apply to all of us as we view and appreciate art. This tutorial on art is presented in the spirit of trying to find general princ…
Explanations for the onset of the Cold War must begin with World War II. A conflict that ranks, by any conceivable measure, as the most destructive in human history, World War II brought unparalleled levels of death, devastation, privation, and disorder. ‘The conflagration of 1939–1945 was so wrenching, so total, so profound, that a world was overturned,’ notes historian Thomas G. Paterso…
Animal research is part of a complex web of relations made up of humans and animals, practices inside and outside the laboratory, formal laws and professional norms, and social imaginaries of the past and future of medicine. Researching Animal Research sets out an innovative approach for understanding and intervening in the social practices that constitute animal research. It proposes the idea …
The history film has played an exceptionally powerful role in shaping our culture’s understanding of the past, an influence that derives not simply from the cinema’s unequaled ability to re-create the past in a sensual, mimetic form, but also from its striking tendency to arouse critical and popular controversy that resonates throughout the public sphere. American films centered on the past…
Since people who work with clay come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse interests, there are probably as many concepts and views of clay as there are clay mineral species. It is not surprising, therefore, that clay scientists have varied trainings, including geology, mineralogy, chemistry, physics, and biology, and hold different perspectives. The multi-disciplinary nature of clay scienc…
In the early 1980s I was sitting in the coffee shop of the Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur, reflecting on the strange fact that Dutch troops had come ashore nearby, less than 80 years previously, on their way to perpetrate one of the more extraordinary massacres in the history of colonialism. I did not know that the Japanese had also landed in this same area in 1942, or that the Dutch had returned he…
My class was scheduled from ten until noon. Many students came late. Several arrived after 10:30. A few showed up closer to eleven. Two came after that. All of the latecomers wore the relaxed smiles I later came to enjoy. Each one greeted me, and although a few apologized briefly, none seemed terribly concerned about being late. They assumed that I understood. That Brazilians would arrive late …
Readers of this volume will be able to tell from the Introduction andnotes throughout the book how great a debt I owe to many distin-guished scholars past and present. Without them, this work would havebeen impossible. Here I want to express my gratitude to a number ofpeople who have influenced this project more directly. The book isdedicated to David R. Knechtges, wh…
A personal word: many years ago, when we were first developing the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum, we struggled with the issue of how to end the perma-nent exhibit. We had come up with an appropriate beginning that would serve thefunction of taking visitors off the National Mall, taking them back what was thenfifty years in time, moving them a continent away and introducing them to a Eu…
What is it like to write poetry right now at this moment in world history? What is it unlike? Or, to avoid comparisons at all, what is poetry now? Fascists and an “alt-right” search for platforms, opposed but not often enough; global warming renders laugh-able our comfortable and anachronistic sense of cyclical change; secular stagnation mocks the entire program of austerity; a fra…