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      • Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2020

        Eternal City

        A History of Rome in Maps

        by Maier, Jessica

        Rome may be renowned for individual sites like the Colosseum and St. Peter’s Basilica, but its most captivating feature is its many overlapping—and surviving—layers of history. Over nearly 3,000 years, the Rome of the Caesars has given way to the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of the Grand Tourists, and several more incarnations down to the present. Along the way, it has also become perhaps the most frequently mapped city on the planet. This book is the first ever published to English to tell the story of Rome through its maps. Each chapter begins with a brief historical overview of one key era and features a selection of maps, details, digitizations, and other images—all produced in full color—that illuminate the themes of that era. From the city’s first walls through its master plan for its third millennium, the Romes depicted in these maps all live on in the city that millions still visit and inhabit today.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2020

        Time in Maps

        From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era

        by Wigen, Kären

        The new field of spatial history has been driven by digital mapping tools that can readily show change over time in space. But long before such software became available, mapmakers regularly represented time in sophisticated and nuanced ways in supposedly static maps, and even those maps presented as a historical snapshot illustrate the centrality of time to what we think of as primarily a spatial medium. In this collection, an array of today’s leading scholars consider how mapmakers in a variety of contexts depicted time in their creations—from Aztecs documenting the founding of Tenochtitlan, to early modern Japanese reconstructing nostalgic landscapes before Western encroachments, to nineteenth-century Americans grappling with the new concept of deep time. The book includes a theoretical salvo and defense of traditional paper maps by William Rankin—himself a distinguished digital mapmaker—and includes more than 100 maps and related visuals, all in full color.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2020

        Invisible China

        How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise

        by Rozelle, Scott

        Twenty years ago, seemingly everything for sale at American retailers had a “Made In China” sticker on it. Now, things have changed. Every year, forty thousand Chinese factories are shuttering their doors as businesses seek cheaper labor elsewhere. Clothes manufacturing is moving to Bangladesh and Vietnam, for example, and shoes to Ethiopia. The exodus is well underway. Even as American commentators fret over “rising China,” the real threat lies in a virtually unknown story: that of a nation struggling amid a profound economic transition away from manufacturing. The culprit? Profound inequality and the lack of investment in the people of the most populous place on earth. Health and education are the grave challenges for the country’s future—and the world. Far from the prospect of global takeover, a China newly adrift has the potential to be our most unpredictable security challenge in the next decades. This book, a warning from Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, cuts through the false alarmism while laying out an ambitious plan to correct course before it’s too late.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2020

        Beethoven

        A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times

        by Kinderman, William

        Ludwig van Beethoven entered university the year that the French Revolution broke out. He went on to live through the Reign of Terror, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the battles of Wagram and Leipzig, and the era of political repression following the Congress of Vienna. Interpretations of Beethoven’s music have tended to emphasize the composer’s personal suffering and inner struggles over the political resonance of his work. Yet, as William Kinderman’s brilliantly written study shows, Beethoven’s life and art were shaped in far-reaching ways by the turbulence of his era. Starting with the composer’s formative years in Bonn, Kinderman reevaluates the political implications of Beethoven’s art, revealing how musical tensions in his major works symbolically played out the real-world struggles of his time. Written for the 250th anniversary of his birth, the book also takes stock of Beethoven’s legacy, assessing his growing worldwide appeal amid the political challenges that confront us today. Kinderman movingly considers how the Fifth Symphony helped galvanize resistance to fascism, how the Sixth has energized the environmental movement, and how Beethoven’s civic engagement will continue to inspire in politically perilous times.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2021

        Saint and the Atheist

        Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre

        by Catalano, Joseph S.

        It is hard to think of two philosophers less alike than St. Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. The former was a thirteenth-century Dominican friar known for reconciling the teachings of the Catholic Church with Aristotelianism. The latter was a twentieth-century intellectual known as the central figure in the literary-philosophical movement known as existentialism. The former was a firm believer; the latter was a notorious atheist. And yet, in The Saint and the Atheist, philosopher Joseph Catalano shows that a conversation between the two, bringing them closer to reveal similarities and bring out the real import of their differences, is fruitful for thinking through some of the central questions about faith, conscience, freedom, and the meaning of life. Written in an accessible style that presupposes no previous philosophical experience, Catalano’s book offers a compelling and profound point of entry to two of history’s most important and influential thinkers and what they can still offer to us in the present.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2020

        Digital Technology and Democratic Theory

        by Bernholz, Landemore

        One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over—and upending—nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship—all transformed by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory explores a particularly unsettling and rapidly evolving facet of our new digital lives: transformations that affect our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments. To understand these transformations, scholars from multiple disciplines (computer science, philosophy, political science, economics, history, and media and communications/journalism) wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. The contributors consider what democratic theory—broadly defined as normative theorizing about the values and institutional design of democracy—can bring to the practice of digital technologies. From the connectivity and transmission of information that has inspired positive change through movements such as the Arab Spring and #MeToo to the nefarious spread of distrust and outright disruption in democratic processes, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing not just individual states, but democracy as a philosophy and institution.

      • Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2021

        Vanished Giants

        The Lost World of the Ice Age

        by Stuart, Anthony J.

        After the extinction of dinosaurs and before the rise of humans, there existed another group of incredible creatures. Among its ranks were woolly rhinos, mastodons, sabre-tooth tigers, giant ground sloths, and many other spectacularly large animals that are no longer with us. Today, we think of these animals as part of a group known as “Pleistocene megafauna,” named for the geological era in which they lived, also known as the Ice Age. In Vanished Giants: The Lost World of the Ice Age, palaeontologist Anthony Stuart explores the lives and environments of these animals, moving between five continents and several key islands that showcase their variety and evolution. Stuart examines the animals themselves via what we’ve learned from fossil remains, and he describes the landscapes, climates, vegetation, ecological interactions, and other likely aspects of their surroundings. It’s a picture of the world as it was at the dawn of our arrival. Unlike the case of dinosaurs, however, there is no asteroid to blame for the end of that world. Instead, it seems likely that the giants of the Ice Age were driven extinct by climate change, human evolution, or perhaps both. Stuart discusses the possibilities using the latest evidence provided by radiocarbon dating, a record that is incomplete but vast and growing. Throughout, a question arises: was the extinction of Ice Age megafauna the beginning of the so-called Sixth Extinction, which is happening now? If so, what might it teach us about contemporary climate change and its likely course?

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