History
Yet what any individual in the Frankish Empire [of the 8th century AD] got to read was often a matter of chance. The full range of classical literature was by no means still available in its entirety. Much had disappeared and had been lost forever. Because of lack of knowledge
History
The most impressive application of Ibn Khaldun's approach is his historical and sociological elaboration of the cyclical pattern of rise, peak, and decline. If a society becomes a leading civilization or even the dominant culture in a region, according to Ibn Khaldun the peak of this civilization is
LIS + DataSci
While voting for ALA Council this weekend, I came up with five positive characteristics in a nominee: 1. Longer than five years' membership in ALA. Fresh voices on Council are good (see below), but please take a few season cycles to learn from the inside how ALA works before
Commerce
My German friends at Ohio State laughed to hear that I had ancestors named Biedermann. To be a "Biedermann," in German slang, is to be someone narrow and strict, someone who merely follows orders. That joshing came to mind while reading Rick Anderson's recent article, in
History
"Before cameras, educated, well-to-do travelers had learned to sketch so that they could draw what they saw on their trips, in the same way that, before phonograph recordings, bourgeois families listened to music by making it themselves at home, playing the piano and singing in the parlor.
Media
From an article in the May 24, 2014 issue of The Economist about how racial minorities in the United States live in places where they breathe dirtier air: [...]The study does not address why [race matters more than income in determining whether someone will live exposed to dirtier air]. A
History
"The premodern city was a walled space protected by defensive installations. Even when walls no longer fulfilled a military purpose, they continued to operate as customs boundaries. When they lost that function too, they served as symbolic markers of space. Whole empires expressed their superiority over the 'barbarians&
History
The Scots were right to vote "no" on the referendum for independence because the referendum was misleading. However Scotland voted this week, and whatever the Scots may wish, they will not be independent of England. A vote cannot widen the River Tweed. A vote cannot reduce England to
History
Though the Scots have decided to remain in the United Kingdom, the closeness of the referendum and the panic that gripped the UK government during the last week before voting suggest a parallel between the fate of the Habsburg Empire after its great Napoleonic War struggle and the fate of
Chapbook
"[T]he culture of [collegiate] English departments [is] structured by an invidious binary opposition between writing teachers and literary scholars that could not be improved by tinkering. Because the profession was organized by–indeed, founded upon–this distinction, it could be undone only by a deconstructive process striking at
Chapbook
“To put it simply, the quasi-religious status once accorded English literature by a class of individuals whose background was mainly privileged and Anglo-Germanic is hardly viable any longer. […] Men and women of letters, whether in or outside of the academy, have a reduced stature today in comparison to
Commerce
"It was a tendency [during the nineteenth century], especially after 1860, to conceive of governance not merely as control of strategic centers but as ongoing activity on the part of regional authorities. [...] This territorialization was bound up with the projection of imagined shapes of the nation onto mappable space