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Author: Theodore Vrettos Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451603487 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
Alexandria was the greatest cultural capital of the ancient world. Accomplished classicist and author Theodore Vrettos now tells its story for the first time in a single volume. His enchanting blend of literary and scholarly qualities makes stories that played out among architectural wonders of the ancient world come alive. His fascinating central contention that this amazing metropolis created the western mind can now take its place in cultural history. Vrettos describes how and why the brilliant minds of the ages -- Greek scholars, Roman emperors, Jewish leaders, and fathers of the Christian Church -- all traveled to the shining port city Alexander the Great founded in 332 B.C. at the mouth of the mighty Nile. There they enjoyed learning from an extraordinary population of peaceful citizens whose rich intellectual life would quietly build the science, art, faith, and even politics of western civilization. No one has previously argued that, unlike the renowned military centers of the Mediterranean such as Rome, Carthage, and Sparta, Alexandria was a city of the mind. In a brief section on the great conqueror and founder Alexander, we learn that he himself was a student of Aristotle. In Part Two of his majestic story, Vrettos shows that in the sciences the city witnessed an explosion: Aristarchus virtually invented modern astronomy; Euclid wrote the elements of geometry and founded mathematics; amazingly, Eratosthenes precisely figured the circumference of the earth; and 2,500 years before Freud, the renowned Alexandrian physician Erasistratus identified a mysterious connection between sexual problems and nervous breakdowns. What could so cerebral a community care about geopolitics? As Vrettos explains in the third part of this epic saga, if Rome wanted power and prestige in the Mediterranean, the emperors had to secure the good will of the ruling class in Alexandria. Julius Caesar brought down the Roman Republic, and then almost immediately had to go to Alexandria to secure his power base. So begins a wonderfully told story of political intrigue that doesn't end until the Battle of Actium in 33 B.C. when Augustus Caesar defeated the first power couple, Anthony and Cleopatra. The fourth part of Alexandria focuses on the sphere of religion, and for Vrettos its center is the famous Alexandrian Library. The chief librarian commissioned the Septuagint, the oldest Greek version of the Old Testament, which was completed by Jewish intellectuals. Local church fathers Clement and Origen were key players in the development of Christianity; and the Coptic religion, with its emphasis on personal knowledge of God, flourished. Vrettos has blended compelling stories with astute historical insight. Having read all the ancient sources in Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Latin himself, he has an expert's knowledge of the everyday reality of his characters and setting. No reader will ever forget walking with him down this lost city's beautiful, dazzling streets.
Author: Theodore Vrettos Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451603487 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
Alexandria was the greatest cultural capital of the ancient world. Accomplished classicist and author Theodore Vrettos now tells its story for the first time in a single volume. His enchanting blend of literary and scholarly qualities makes stories that played out among architectural wonders of the ancient world come alive. His fascinating central contention that this amazing metropolis created the western mind can now take its place in cultural history. Vrettos describes how and why the brilliant minds of the ages -- Greek scholars, Roman emperors, Jewish leaders, and fathers of the Christian Church -- all traveled to the shining port city Alexander the Great founded in 332 B.C. at the mouth of the mighty Nile. There they enjoyed learning from an extraordinary population of peaceful citizens whose rich intellectual life would quietly build the science, art, faith, and even politics of western civilization. No one has previously argued that, unlike the renowned military centers of the Mediterranean such as Rome, Carthage, and Sparta, Alexandria was a city of the mind. In a brief section on the great conqueror and founder Alexander, we learn that he himself was a student of Aristotle. In Part Two of his majestic story, Vrettos shows that in the sciences the city witnessed an explosion: Aristarchus virtually invented modern astronomy; Euclid wrote the elements of geometry and founded mathematics; amazingly, Eratosthenes precisely figured the circumference of the earth; and 2,500 years before Freud, the renowned Alexandrian physician Erasistratus identified a mysterious connection between sexual problems and nervous breakdowns. What could so cerebral a community care about geopolitics? As Vrettos explains in the third part of this epic saga, if Rome wanted power and prestige in the Mediterranean, the emperors had to secure the good will of the ruling class in Alexandria. Julius Caesar brought down the Roman Republic, and then almost immediately had to go to Alexandria to secure his power base. So begins a wonderfully told story of political intrigue that doesn't end until the Battle of Actium in 33 B.C. when Augustus Caesar defeated the first power couple, Anthony and Cleopatra. The fourth part of Alexandria focuses on the sphere of religion, and for Vrettos its center is the famous Alexandrian Library. The chief librarian commissioned the Septuagint, the oldest Greek version of the Old Testament, which was completed by Jewish intellectuals. Local church fathers Clement and Origen were key players in the development of Christianity; and the Coptic religion, with its emphasis on personal knowledge of God, flourished. Vrettos has blended compelling stories with astute historical insight. Having read all the ancient sources in Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Latin himself, he has an expert's knowledge of the everyday reality of his characters and setting. No reader will ever forget walking with him down this lost city's beautiful, dazzling streets.
Author: Alida Clemente Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 9780367702311 Category : City planning Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book examines the overlapping spaces in modern Western cities to explore the small-scale processes that shaped these cities between c.1750 and 1900. It highlights the ways in which time and space matter, framing individual actions and practices and their impact on larger urban processes. It draws on the original and detailed studies of cities in Europe and North America through a micro-geographical approach to unravel urban practices, experiences and representations at three different scales: the dwelling, the street and the neighbourhood. Part I explores the changing spatiality of housing, examining the complex and contingent relationship between public and private, and commercial and domestic, as well as the relationship between representations and lived experiences. Part II delves into the street as a thoroughfare, connecting the city, but also as a site of contestation over the control and character of urban spaces. Part III draws attention to the neighbourhood as a residential grouping and as a series of spaces connecting flows of people integrating the urban space. Drawing on a range of methodologies, from space syntax and axial analysis to detailed descriptions of individual buildings, this book blends spatial theory and ideas of place with micro-history. With its fresh perspectives on the Western city created through the built environment and the everyday actions of city dwellers, the book will interest historical geographers, urban historians and architects involved in planning of cities across Europe and North America.
Author: Jeff Guinn Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101623268 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
Cash McLendon faces off against stone-cold enforcer Killer Boots in a final showdown in this rousing Western adventure from the New York Times bestselling author of Buffalo Trail—winner of the TCU Texas Book Award. Cash McLendon, reluctant hero of the epic Indian battle at Adobe Walls, has journeyed to Mountain View in the Arizona Territory with one goal: to convince Gabrielle Tirrito that he’s a changed man and win her back from schoolteacher Joe Saint. As they’re about to depart by stage for their new life in San Francisco, Gabrielle is kidnapped by enforcer Killer Boots, who is working on orders from crooked St. Louis businessman Rupert Douglass. Cash, once married to Douglass’s troubled daughter, fled the city when she died of accidental overdose—and Douglass vowed he’d track Cash down and make him pay. Now McLendon, accompanied by Joe Saint and Major Mulkins, hits the trail in pursuit of Gabrielle and Killer Boots, hoping to make a trade before it’s too late...
Author: Tom Clavin Publisher: St. Martin's Press ISBN: 146688262X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
The instant New York Times bestseller! Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City’s streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West. Enter Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Young and largely self-trained men, the lawmen led the effort that established frontier justice and the rule of law in the American West, and did it in the wickedest place in the United States. When they moved on, Wyatt to Tombstone and Bat to Colorado, a tamed Dodge was left in the hands of Jim Masterson. But before long Wyatt and Bat, each having had a lawman brother killed, returned to that threatened western Kansas town to team up to restore order again in what became known as the Dodge City War before riding off into the sunset. #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin's Dodge City tells the true story of their friendship, romances, gunfights, and adventures, along with the remarkable cast of characters they encountered along the way (including Wild Bill Hickock, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, and Theodore Roosevelt) that has gone largely untold—lost in the haze of Hollywood films and western fiction, until now.
Author: Ronald M. James Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 0803240082 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 175
Book Description
Spent cartridges. The pieces of an original Tabasco Pepper Sauce bottle. Shards of a ceramic pot, stained red. For archaeologists each of the thousands of artifacts uncovered at a site tells a story. For noted Comstock authority Ronald M. James, it is a story resulting from decades of research and excavation at one of the largest National Historic Landmarks in America, the Nevada town that, with the discovery of the Comstock Lode, became a boomtown microcosm of the American West. Drawing on the work of hundreds of volunteers, students, and professional archaeologists, Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past shows how every detail—from unearthed artifacts to reports of local saloons to plans for the cemetery to surviving nineteenth-century buildings—adds to our view of Virginia City when it was one of the richest places on earth. James recreates this unlikely epitome of frontier industry and cosmopolitan living, the thriving hub of corporate executives, middle-class families, miners, prostitutes, and barkeepers—and more foreign-born residents per capita than anywhere else in the country—in a spot that had begun its life a few years earlier as the mining camp of several lucky guys. An excavation of the history of Virginia City, a window on the heyday of the American frontier, James’s book is also an enlightening look at how archaeology brings the story of the past to life.
Author: Pierre Manent Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674727703 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
What is the best way to govern ourselves? The history of the West has been shaped by the struggle to answer this question, according to Pierre Manent. A major achievement by one of Europe's most influential political philosophers, Metamorphoses of the City is a sweeping interpretation of Europe's ambition since ancient times to generate ever better forms of collective self-government, and a reflection on what it means to be modern. Manent's genealogy of the nation-state begins with the Greek city-state, the polis. With its creation, humans ceased to organize themselves solely by family and kinship systems and instead began to live politically. Eventually, as the polis exhausted its possibilities in warfare and civil strife, cities evolved into empires, epitomized by Rome, and empires in turn gave way to the universal Catholic Church and finally the nation-state. Through readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, and others, Manent charts an intellectual history of these political forms, allowing us to see that the dynamic of competition among them is a central force in the evolution of Western civilization. Scarred by the legacy of world wars, submerged in an increasingly technical transnational bureaucracy, indecisive in the face of proliferating crises of representative democracy, the European nation-state, Manent says, is nearing the end of its line. What new metamorphosis of the city will supplant it remains to be seen.
Author: Carl Abbott Publisher: University of Arizona Press ISBN: 9780816515707 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
Honolulu to Houston and from Fargo to Fairbanks to show how Western cities organize the region's vast spaces and connect them to the even larger sphere of the world economy. His survey moves from economic change to social and political response, examining the initial boom of the 1940s, the process of change in the following decades, and the ultimate impact of Western cities on their environments, on the Western regional character, and on national identity. Today, a.
Author: Everee Jimerson Clarke Publisher: Arcadia Publishing ISBN: 1439629773 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 132
Book Description
Pleasant City, a neighborhood of West Palm Beach, Florida, is the oldest African-American community in Palm Beach County. The first black settlers came to a place called the Styx--later owned by white millionaires who then rented their backyards to black workers--to work on the railroad and Henry Flagler's hotel and mansion. Forced out when the land became valuable, the blacks purchased land and settled Pleasant City. Pleasant City was marketed as a "High Class Colored Subdivision" in 1913, and many of the pioneers still have descendants in the area today.
Author: Ray Laurence Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139500783 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 371
Book Description
The city is widely regarded as the most characteristic expression of the social, cultural and economic formations of the Roman Empire. This was especially true in the Latin-speaking West, where urbanism was much less deeply ingrained than in the Greek-speaking East but where networks of cities grew up during the centuries following conquest and occupation. This well-illustrated synthesis provides students and specialists with an overview of the development of the city in Italy, Gaul, Britain, Germany, Spain and North Africa, whether their interests lie in ancient history, Roman archaeology or the wider history of urbanism. It accounts not only for the city's geographical and temporal spread and its associated monuments (such as amphitheatres and baths), but also for its importance to the rulers of the Empire as well as the provincials and locals.
Author: Theodore Vrettos
Author: Theodore Vrettos
Author: Michael Pacione
Author: Alida Clemente
Author: Jeff Guinn
Author: Tom Clavin
Author: Ronald M. James
Author: Pierre Manent
Author: Carl Abbott
Author: Everee Jimerson Clarke
Author: Ray Laurence