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Author: Peter N. Stearns Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350054356 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
In this innovative textbook, leading world historian Peter Stearns analyses key examples of culture change from around the world, highlighting what culture change involves and how it can be explained and assessed, both historically and in the contemporary world. Culture change is one of the most interesting and significant features of human society, but until now there has been no book for the classroom which looks explicitly at this phenomenon. Cultural Change in Modern World History covers different kinds and levels of culture change since 1500 – from colonial culture contact in British India to modernization in Meiji Japan and changing attitudes towards gay marriage in the past decade – considering how we should define culture change, how to deal with causation and how to evaluate continuities and consequences. Stearns addresses fundamental questions: why do groups of people change their beliefs and values, and what happens when they do? Conversely, why do some groups resist culture change, and how do some manage to combine novel and more traditional cultural components? Figuring out how better to understand why groups or societies change their minds – or refuse to do so – provides a crucial perspective on human behaviors and values. As the first book to explore this important question, Cultural Change in Modern World History is a ground-breaking text for students of world history, cultural history and anthropology.
Author: Peter N. Stearns Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350054356 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
In this innovative textbook, leading world historian Peter Stearns analyses key examples of culture change from around the world, highlighting what culture change involves and how it can be explained and assessed, both historically and in the contemporary world. Culture change is one of the most interesting and significant features of human society, but until now there has been no book for the classroom which looks explicitly at this phenomenon. Cultural Change in Modern World History covers different kinds and levels of culture change since 1500 – from colonial culture contact in British India to modernization in Meiji Japan and changing attitudes towards gay marriage in the past decade – considering how we should define culture change, how to deal with causation and how to evaluate continuities and consequences. Stearns addresses fundamental questions: why do groups of people change their beliefs and values, and what happens when they do? Conversely, why do some groups resist culture change, and how do some manage to combine novel and more traditional cultural components? Figuring out how better to understand why groups or societies change their minds – or refuse to do so – provides a crucial perspective on human behaviors and values. As the first book to explore this important question, Cultural Change in Modern World History is a ground-breaking text for students of world history, cultural history and anthropology.
Author: Jon Thares Davidann Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315507951 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 218
Book Description
Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History explores cultural contact as an agent of change. It takes an encounters approach to world history since 1500, rather than a political one, to reveal different perspectives and experiences as well as key patterns and transformations. It studies the spaces between cultures historically to help us transcend human differences today in a rapidly globalizing world. The text focuses on first encounters that suggest long-term developments and particularly significant encounters that have changed the direction of world history. Because of the complexities of these encounters, the author takes a user-friendly approach to keep the text accessible to students with varying backgrounds in history.
Author: R. Alexander Bentley Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262036959 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.
Author: Eric Avila Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190200596 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 166
Book Description
The iconic images of Uncle Sam and Marilyn Monroe, or the "fireside chats" of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr.: these are the words, images, and sounds that populate American cultural history. From the Boston Tea Party to the Dodgers, from the blues to Andy Warhol, dime novels to Disneyland, the history of American culture tells us how previous generations of Americans have imagined themselves, their nation, and their relationship to the world and its peoples. This Very Short Introduction recounts the history of American culture and its creation by diverse social and ethnic groups. In doing so, it emphasizes the historic role of culture in relation to broader social, political, and economic developments. Across the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as language, region, and religion, diverse Americans have forged a national culture with a global reach, inventing stories that have shaped a national identity and an American way of life. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Author: John K. Thornton Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139536192 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1088
Book Description
A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 explores the idea that strong links exist in the histories of Africa, Europe and North and South America. John K. Thornton provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the Atlantic Basin before 1830 by describing political, social and cultural interactions between the continents' inhabitants. He traces the backgrounds of the populations on these three continental landmasses brought into contact by European navigation. Thornton then examines the political and social implications of the encounters, tracing the origins of a variety of Atlantic societies and showing how new ways of eating, drinking, speaking and worshipping developed in the newly created Atlantic World. This book uses close readings of original sources to produce new interpretations of its subject.
Author: Roger T. Ames Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824872584 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
In a single generation, the rise of Asia has precipitated a dramatic sea change in the world’s economic and political orders. This reconfiguration is taking place amidst a host of deepening global predicaments, including climate change, migration, increasing inequalities of wealth and opportunity, that cannot be resolved by purely technical means or by seeking recourse in a liberalism that has of late proven to be less than effective. The present work critically explores how the pan-Asian phenomenon of Confucianism offers alternative values and depths of ethical commitment that cross national and cultural boundaries to provide a new response to these challenges. When searching for resources to respond to the world’s problems, we tend to look to those that are most familiar: Single actors pursuing their own self-interests in competition or collaboration with other players. As is now widely appreciated, Confucian culture celebrates the relational values of deference and interdependence—that is, relationally constituted persons are understood as embedded in and nurtured by unique, transactional patterns of relations. This is a concept of person that contrasts starkly with the discrete, self-determining individual, an artifact of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western European approaches to modernization that has become closely associated with liberal democracy. Examining the meaning and value of Confucianism in the twenty-first century, the contributors—leading scholars from universities around the world—wrestle with several key questions: What are Confucian values within the context of the disparate cultures of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam? What is their current significance? What are the limits and historical failings of Confucianism and how are these to be critically addressed? How must Confucian culture be reformed if it is to become relevant as an international resource for positive change? Their answers vary, but all agree that only a vital and critical Confucianism will have relevance for an emerging world cultural order.
Author: Joel Mokyr Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691168881 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
Why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much has been made of the details of the Industrial Revolution, what remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today's unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development. Bringing together economics, the history of science and technology, and models of cultural evolution, Mokyr demonstrates that culture—the beliefs, values, and preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior—was a deciding factor in societal transformations. Mokyr looks at the period 1500–1700 to show that a politically fragmented Europe fostered a competitive "market for ideas" and a willingness to investigate the secrets of nature. At the same time, a transnational community of brilliant thinkers known as the “Republic of Letters” freely circulated and distributed ideas and writings. This political fragmentation and the supportive intellectual environment explain how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe but not China, despite similar levels of technology and intellectual activity. In Europe, heterodox and creative thinkers could find sanctuary in other countries and spread their thinking across borders. In contrast, China’s version of the Enlightenment remained controlled by the ruling elite. Combining ideas from economics and cultural evolution, A Culture of Growth provides startling reasons for why the foundations of our modern economy were laid in the mere two centuries between Columbus and Newton.
Author: Reuven Amitai Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 082484789X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 362
Book Description
Since the first millennium BCE, nomads of the Eurasian steppe have played a key role in world history and the development of adjacent sedentary regions, especially China, India, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. Although their more settled neighbors often saw them as an ongoing threat and imminent danger—“barbarians,” in fact—their impact on sedentary cultures was far more complex than the raiding, pillaging, and devastation with which they have long been associated in the popular imagination. The nomads were also facilitators and catalysts of social, demographic, economic, and cultural change, and nomadic culture had a significant influence on that of sedentary Eurasian civilizations, especially in cases when the nomads conquered and ruled over them. Not simply passive conveyors of ideas, beliefs, technologies, and physical artifacts, nomads were frequently active contributors to the process of cultural exchange and change. Their active choices and initiatives helped set the cultural and intellectual agenda of the lands they ruled and beyond. This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars from different disciplines and cultural specializations to explore how nomads played the role of “agents of cultural change.” The beginning chapters examine this phenomenon in both east and west Asia in ancient and early medieval times, while the bulk of the book is devoted to the far flung Mongol empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This comparative approach, encompassing both a lengthy time span and a vast region, enables a clearer understanding of the key role that Eurasian pastoral nomads played in the history of the Old World. It conveys a sense of the complex and engaging cultural dynamic that existed between nomads and their agricultural and urban neighbors, and highlights the non-military impact of nomadic culture on Eurasian history. Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change illuminates and complicates nomadic roles as active promoters of cultural exchange within a vast and varied region. It makes available important original scholarship on the new turn in the study of the Mongol empire and on relations between the nomadic and sedentary worlds.
Author: Robert Marks Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 074255418X Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
How did the modern world get to be the way it is? How did we come to live in a globalized, industrialized, capitalistic set of nation-states? Moving beyond Eurocentric explanations and histories that revolve around the rise of the West, distinguished historian Robert B. Marks explores the roles of Asia, Africa, and the New World in the global story. He defines the modern world as marked by industry, the nation state, interstate warfare, a large and growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the world, and an escape from environmental constraints. Bringing the saga to the present, Marks considers how and why the United States emerged as a world power in the 20th century and the sole superpower by the 21st century; the powerful resurgence of Asia; and the vastly changed relationship of humans to the environment.
Author: Peter N. Stearns
Author: Peter N. Stearns
Author: Jon Thares Davidann
Author: R. Alexander Bentley
Author: Ronald Inglehart
Author: Eric Avila
Author: John K. Thornton
Author: Roger T. Ames
Author: Joel Mokyr
Author: Reuven Amitai
Author: Robert Marks