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Author: Vaclav Smil Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 026228829X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
An investigation of the America-Rome analogy that goes deeper than the facile comparisons made on talk shows and in glossy magazine articles. America's post–Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, comparisons are to the bloated, decadent, ineffectual later Empire. In Why America Is Not a New Rome, Vaclav Smil looks at these comparisons in detail, going deeper than the facile analogy-making of talk shows and glossy magazine articles. He finds profound differences. Smil, a scientist and a lifelong student of Roman history, focuses on several fundamental concerns: the very meaning of empire; the actual extent and nature of Roman and American power; the role of knowledge and innovation; and demographic and economic basics—population dynamics, illness, death, wealth, and misery. America is not a latter-day Rome, Smil finds, and we need to understand this in order to look ahead without the burden of counterproductive analogies. Superficial similarities do not imply long-term political, demographic, or economic outcomes identical to Rome's.
Author: Vaclav Smil Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 026228829X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
An investigation of the America-Rome analogy that goes deeper than the facile comparisons made on talk shows and in glossy magazine articles. America's post–Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, comparisons are to the bloated, decadent, ineffectual later Empire. In Why America Is Not a New Rome, Vaclav Smil looks at these comparisons in detail, going deeper than the facile analogy-making of talk shows and glossy magazine articles. He finds profound differences. Smil, a scientist and a lifelong student of Roman history, focuses on several fundamental concerns: the very meaning of empire; the actual extent and nature of Roman and American power; the role of knowledge and innovation; and demographic and economic basics—population dynamics, illness, death, wealth, and misery. America is not a latter-day Rome, Smil finds, and we need to understand this in order to look ahead without the burden of counterproductive analogies. Superficial similarities do not imply long-term political, demographic, or economic outcomes identical to Rome's.
Author: Jardar Østbø Publisher: Ibidem Press ISBN: 9783838209005 Category : Nationalism Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
Drawing on theories of political myth and concepts of nationalism, Jardar Østbø analyzes the content and ideological function of the myth of Russia as a Third Rome. Through case studies of four prominent nationalist intellectuals, Østbø shows how this messianic myth was used to reinvent Russia and its allegedly rightful place in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though it exists in many radically different versions, the Third Rome myth in general embodies particularism and rabid anti-Westernism. At best, it portrays Russia as an essentially isolationist country. At worst, it casts the country as superior to all other nations, divinely elected to rule the world.
Author: Mary Beard Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 1631491253 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 743
Book Description
New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Foreign Affairs, and Kirkus Reviews Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction) Shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Gift Guide Selection A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A sweeping, "magisterial" history of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists shows why Rome remains "relevant to people many centuries later" (Atlantic). In SPQR, an instant classic, Mary Beard narrates the history of Rome "with passion and without technical jargon" and demonstrates how "a slightly shabby Iron Age village" rose to become the "undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean" (Wall Street Journal). Hailed by critics as animating "the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life" (Economist) in a way that makes "your hair stand on end" (Christian Science Monitor) and spanning nearly a thousand years of history, this "highly informative, highly readable" (Dallas Morning News) work examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries. With its nuanced attention to class, democratic struggles, and the lives of entire groups of people omitted from the historical narrative for centuries, SPQR will to shape our view of Roman history for decades to come.
Author: Anthony Kaldellis Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674967402 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
Although Byzantium is known to history as the Eastern Roman Empire, scholars have long claimed that this Greek Christian theocracy bore little resemblance to Rome. Here, in a revolutionary model of Byzantine politics and society, Anthony Kaldellis reconnects Byzantium to its Roman roots, arguing that from the fifth to the twelfth centuries CE the Eastern Roman Empire was essentially a republic, with power exercised on behalf of the people and sometimes by them too. The Byzantine Republic recovers for the historical record a less autocratic, more populist Byzantium whose Greek-speaking citizens considered themselves as fully Roman as their Latin-speaking “ancestors.” Kaldellis shows that the idea of Byzantium as a rigid imperial theocracy is a misleading construct of Western historians since the Enlightenment. With court proclamations often draped in Christian rhetoric, the notion of divine kingship emerged as a way to disguise the inherent vulnerability of each regime. The legitimacy of the emperors was not predicated on an absolute right to the throne but on the popularity of individual emperors, whose grip on power was tenuous despite the stability of the imperial institution itself. Kaldellis examines the overlooked Byzantine concept of the polity, along with the complex relationship of emperors to the law and the ways they bolstered their popular acceptance and avoided challenges. The rebellions that periodically rocked the empire were not aberrations, he shows, but an essential part of the functioning of the republican monarchy.
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0593318323 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies about a woman questioning her place in the world, wavering between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. “Another masterstroke in a career already filled with them.” —O, the Oprah Magazine Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. In the arc of one year, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed city, in the middle of her life’s journey, realizes that she’s lost her way. The city she calls home acts as a companion and interlocutor: traversing the streets around her house, and in parks, piazzas, museums, stores, and coffee bars, she feels less alone. We follow her to the pool she frequents, and to the train station that leads to her mother, who is mired in her own solitude after her husband’s untimely death. Among those who appear on this woman’s path are colleagues with whom she feels ill at ease, casual acquaintances, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. Until one day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will abruptly change. This is the first novel Lahiri has written in Italian and translated into English. The reader will find the qualities that make Lahiri’s work so beloved: deep intelligence and feeling, richly textured physical and emotional landscapes, and a poetics of dislocation. But Whereabouts, brimming with the impulse to cross barriers, also signals a bold shift of style and sensibility. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.
Author: Paul Stephenson Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674269454 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 481
Book Description
A comprehensive new history of the Eastern Roman Empire based on the science of the human past. As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome’s power but fear Rome’s ruin—will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive. In New Rome, Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel, scientifically minded interpretation of antiquity’s end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. From these and other sources, we learn that pollution and pandemics influenced the fate of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. During its final five centuries, the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters, the degradation of the human environment, and pathogens previously unknown to the empire’s densely populated, unsanitary cities. Despite the Plague of Justinian, regular “barbarian” invasions, a war with Persia, and the rise of Islam, the empire endured as a political entity. However, Greco-Roman civilization, a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium, did not. Politics, war, and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban, material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empire’s transformation into Byzantium.
Author: Justin M. Pigott Publisher: Brepols Publishers ISBN: 9782503584485 Category : Church history Languages : en Pages : 231
Book Description
Traditional representations of Constantinople during the period from the First Council of Constantinople (381) to the Council of Chalcedon (451) portray a see that was undergoing exponential growth in episcopal authority and increasing in its confidence to assert supremacy over the churches of the east as well as to challenge Rome's authority in the west. Central to this assessment are two canons - canon 3 of 381 and canon 28 of 451 - which have for centuries been read as confirmation of Constantinople's ecclesiastical ambition and evidence for its growth in status. However, through close consideration of the political, episcopal, theological, and demographic characteristics unique to early Constantinople, this book argues that the city's later significance as the centre of eastern Christianity and foil to Rome has served to conceal deep institutional weaknesses that severely inhibited Constantinople's early ecclesiastical development. By unpicking teleological approaches to Constantinople's early history and deconstructing narratives synonymous with the city's later Byzantine legacy, this book offers an alternative reading of this crucial seventy-year period. It demonstrates that early Constantinople's bishops not only lacked the institutional stability to lay claim to geo-ecclesiastical leadership but that canon 3 and canon 28, rather than being indicative of Constantinople's rising episcopal strength, were in fact attempts to address deeply destructive internal weaknesses that had plagued the city's early episcopal and political institutions.
Author: Michèle Lowrie Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3111334805 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
However shared the Roman inheritance may be, it hardly unifies. Which Rome is the model, the Republic or the Empire? The Rome of imperial conquest or of civil war? By whom is it ruled? By the glorious conqueror who extended universal peace, the rule of law, and infrastructure – roads and aqueducts – or by the detested tyrant who imposed domination? Or worse, the corruptor of republican liberty and source of putrefying decadence? Rome always returns, but which Rome? France presents itself as a privileged locus for Rome’s return since the beginnings of its history. The perennial recourse to ancient Rome – as model or anti-model – binds together a cohesive tradition. The logic of this gesture asserts a unity beyond modern identity politics, which depend on defining a “them” against “us,” to resist nativist assumptions about national character, French, German, Italian, American, etc. All share the same polysemous inheritance, for good or ill. All are Roman and all resist Rome without needing to agree on what exactly is shared. The unity underlying the discourse, however, no longer depends on defining Rome as an origin. Instead, Rome’s figuration persists discursively, as a translation: to be translated time and time again.
Author: Vaclav Smil
Author: Vaclav Smil
Author: Cyril A. Mango
Author: Jardar Østbø
Author: Mary Beard
Author: Richard De Bary
Author: Anthony Kaldellis
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Author: Paul Stephenson
Author: Justin M. Pigott
Author: Michèle Lowrie