Browse Items (123 total)
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Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence
"A fractured meditation on the incompleteness and inadequacy of each possible response to collective atrocities," is how the author of this work describes what she has written, and it is an apt description. It is a beautiful book, written by a…
“The Past is Evil/Evil is Past: On Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism,”
Bevernage turns to the Enlightenment in order to explain why so much of contemporary politics is focused on rectifying past wrongs. He argues that the 18th century saw the emergence of a modern philosophy of history, which identified the past with…
Tags: destruction, disciplines, historiography, human rights
Alimut Elohit: Shnei Hiburim al Elohim ve Asson[Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster]
Ophir, an Israeli philosopher, examines the connection between God and disasters. From the bible and through much of western history, disasters were seen as caused in some manner by God's will. Ophir examines this tendency and argues that in the…
Tags: citizenship, destruction, disciplines, revolution, transgression
Death and the Maiden
A play written by the Argentine-Chilean playwrite and activist, Ariel Dorfman. It tells the story of a woman confronting the man who allegedly took part in her torture under the previous, dictatorial regime. The woman's husband is a magistrate who is…
Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: the Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror
Crawford offers a new take on the rise of the Gothic in the late 18th century. Most interpretations see the gothic as a reaction to the upheavals of the revolutionary era. The new realities created by Revolution, so the argument goes, gave rise to…
Tags: art, destruction, disciplines, revolution, transgression
Man and Society in Calamity: the Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, and Pestilence upon the Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization, and Cultural Life
This is a new edition of a book published originally in 1942 by one of the founders of American sociology, Pitrim Sorokin. At the time the book fell under the radar and it remains little known today, but it is a pioneering work in many ways,…
Ice, Mud, and Blood
Ice, Mud and Blood moves through global climate history, and the accompanying science, more or less chronologically, weaving together diverse climate periods and expert knowledge about them. The first chapter “Greenhouse” is a bird’s eye view of…
Tags: climate, climate change
Invisible in the Storm: The Role of Mathematics in Understanding Weather
Readable and informative, Invisible in the Storm is an important companion book for weather and climate scholars because it emphasizes an additional lens through which weather can be studied––the history of math. Invisible in the Storm is a mix of…
Tags: climate, climate change, weather
Air Apparent
Air Apparent shows how the weather map has taken on a variety of forms throughout the last four centuries––moving from a hand-eye executed graphic object to a computer-printed and later digitally displayed graphic––by tracing “graphical code” across…
Tags: climate, climate change, weather
Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
Written from a Marxist perspective, this book examines the emergence of capitalist modernity in terms of the extraction of natural resources. It analyzes the ways in which the Enlightenment ideology of history as progress depends on reducing "Nature"…
Tags: Anthropocene, capitalism, climate, ecology, materialism
Transatlantic Slave Trade Database
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The actual number is estimated to…
Tags: Africa, In-between, modernity, Slave trade, slavery
Claiming the Past: History, Memory, and Innovation Following the Christmas Flood of 1717
The Christmas Flood of 1717 affected much of the North Sea coastline between Denmark and the northern Netherlands and was one of the greatest disasters of the early modern era. This article investigates the impact of the flood in the northern Dutch…
Tags: adaptation, disaster, early modern, enlightenment, flood, Netherlands
The Letter from Dublin: Climate Change, Colonialism, and the Royal Society in the Seventeenth Century
This article discusses an anonymous letter published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1676 that reports the theories of American colonists about the cause of their warming climate (cultivation and deforestation), and offers Ireland’s colonial…
Tags: 17th century, climate, climate change, Ireland, science, Virginia
Slave Biographies, Atlantic Database Network
Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network is an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. It includes the names, ethnicities, skills, occupations, and illnesses of individual slaves.…
Tags: identity, In-between, modernity, Slave trade, slavery
Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World
A global history of the 1815 Tambora eruption, the climate changes it brought, and their impact on societies, culture, and science. Includes chapters on the experiences of famines in Bengal, Yunnan, and Ireland, and reactions by writers in America…
Tags: 19th century, climate, disaster, famine
Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies (ESSSS)
The ESSSS project, directed by Jane Landers and administered at Vanderbilt University, digitally preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. The ESSSS Digital Archive…
Tags: In-between, Latin America, modernity, religion, slavery
The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Laws
Jenny Martinez argues that the foundation of the movement that we know today as human rights was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.
Tags: abolitionism, human rights, In-between, modernity, Slave trade
A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America
European encountered climates in northern North America that were harsher and more variable than their notions about weather and geography led them to expect. In A Temperate Empire, Anya Zilberstein reveals how colonial conditions generated…
Tags: 18th century, 19th century, Atlantic, climate, colonialism, science
"The Climate of History: Four Theses."
This article argues that the thesis of the Anthropocene offers grounds for a reconciliation between human history and natural history, abolishing the Enlightenment ideology of history as the progressive conquest of nature by Man. Drawing on research…
Tags: Anthropocene, capitalism, climate, ecology, materialism
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