Browse Items (10 total)

  • Tags: modernity

The Enlightenment legacy is under siege. Defend it.

Linker defines Enlightenment legacies as "individualism, international commerce and trade, moral cosmopolitanism, freedom of the press and a culture of publicity, technological modernity, the valorization of expertise" and defends them against…

The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

A collection of essays published during the Weimar Republic that reflect on the contemporary state of reason and society as expressed in the material products of modern mass capitalism, most notebly in dance revues, photography, and the literary…

Critique of Instrumental Reason

A series critical essays that connect the rise of Enlightenment thinking with the emergence of state bureaucratic apparatuses that oppress human societies through a distinctive form of ‘instrumental rationality’.

The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization

Written over the scope of 20 years of research, Mignolo argues that European colonizers used writing technologies (like the alphabet) as a weapon of war in Mesoamerica, with subsequent political and cultural projects in the Enlightenment serving to…

The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future.

Written by Paul Tillich’s student, Rubenstein argues the holocaust is the rational expression of historical tendencies made possible by the European Enlightenment, it’s focus on rational order and technical mastery of nature.

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

A landmark text critiquing the universalizing project of the European enlightenment. It argues the so-called promises of the intellectual movement remain unfulfilled, as does the forward-moving, developmental picture of history as a progressive…

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.

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…

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.…

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…