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American Lucifers
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Book Synopsis American Lucifers by : Jeremy Zallen
Download or read book American Lucifers written by Jeremy Zallen and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half the story. At worst, it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their stories. The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and consume the changing means of illumination over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed slavery, industrial capitalism, and urban families in profound, often hidden ways. Only by taking the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers, match-manufacturing children and coal miners, night-working seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poor—those American lucifers—as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood.
Book Synopsis American Lucifers by : Jeremy Zallen
Download or read book American Lucifers written by Jeremy Zallen and published by University of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2022-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "American lucifers tracks how struggles to produce light transformed American history, beginning with the rise of the American whale fishery in the 1750s and culminating in the emergence, around the Civil War, of the petroleum industry and its primary product, kerosene. Between this shift from oil harvested from whales to oil extracted from rocks, American light was substantially derived from a substance called camphene, a highly explosive liquid mixture of spirits of turpentine and highly distilled alcohol, generally extracted from North Carolina pines by enslaved workers. Over the course of this narrative, Jeremy Zallen reveals the centrality of slavery to labor in gasworks, coal mines, guano islands, and factories that made illumination possible. Moreover, though the lights they created may have offered a veneer of progress and convenience, they also made it possible for industry to extract workers' and slaves' labor around the clock. The availability of these illuminants extended men's working days to the point that women and children were expected to shoulder all domestic labor as a matter of course"--
Download or read book Lucifer's Tears written by James Thompson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Snow Angels comes a new novel featuring Inspector Vaara. Inspector Kari Vaara has left the Arctic Circle and returned- reluctantly-to Helsinki, where headaches and sleeplessness plague him. But he must work through the pain. He has two cases on his plate: the brutal murder of a Russian businessman's wife, and-more secretively-an investigation into an elderly Finnish national hero who may have played a darker role in World War II than the public knows. Vaara's past has turned him into a haunted man. The questions he's asking now may turn him into a hunted man as well...
Book Synopsis Lucifer's Banker Uncensored by : Bradley C. Birkenfeld
Download or read book Lucifer's Banker Uncensored written by Bradley C. Birkenfeld and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated and Uncensored! As a private banker working for the largest bank in the world, UBS, Bradley Birkenfeld was an expert in Switzerland's shell-game of offshore companies and secret numbered accounts. He wined and dined ultrawealthy clients whose millions of dollars were hidden away from business partners, spouses, and tax authorities. As his client list grew, Birkenfeld lived a life of money, fast cars, and beautiful women, but when he discovered that UBS was planning to betray him, he blew the whistle to the US Government. The Department of Justice scorned Birkenfeld's unprecedented whistle-blowing and attempted to silence him with a conspiracy charge. Yet Birkenfeld would not be intimidated. He took his secrets to the US Senate, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Internal Revenue Service, where he prevailed. His bombshell revelations helped the US Treasury recover over $15 billion (and counting) in back taxes, fines, and penalties from American tax cheats. But Birkenfeld was shocked to discover that at the same time he was cooperating with the US Government, the Department of Justice was still doggedly pursuing him. He was arrested and served thirty months in federal prison. When he emerged, the Internal Revenue Service gave him a whistle-blower award for $104 million, the largest such reward in history. A page-turning real-life thriller, Lucifer's Banker Uncensored is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the secret Swiss high-net worth banking industry and a harrowing account of our government's justice system. Readers will follow Birkenfeld and share his outrage with the incompetence and possible corruption at the Department of Justice, and they will cheer him on as he ''hammers'' one of the most well-known and powerful banks in the world.
Book Synopsis American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 by : Edward L. Ayers
Download or read book American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 written by Edward L. Ayers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power and created visions of America still resonant today. With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest. Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. So, Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. It was Henry David Thoreau who, speaking of John Brown, challenged a hostile crowd "Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?" Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.
Book Synopsis Rethinking American Disasters by : Cynthia A. Kierner
Download or read book Rethinking American Disasters written by Cynthia A. Kierner and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2023-04-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking American Disasters is a pathbreaking collection of essays on hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and other calamities in the United States and British colonial America over four centuries. Proceeding from the premise that there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster, the collection invites readers to consider disasters and their aftermaths as artifacts of and vantage points onto their historical contexts.
Book Synopsis A Companion to American Agricultural History by : R. Douglas Hurt
Download or read book A Companion to American Agricultural History written by R. Douglas Hurt and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-05-11 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a solid foundation for understanding American agricultural history and offers new directions for research A Companion to American Agricultural History addresses the key aspects of America’s complex agricultural past from 8,000 BCE to the first decades of the twenty-first century. Bringing together more than thirty original essays by both established and emerging scholars, this innovative volume presents a succinct and accessible overview of American agricultural history while delivering a state-of-the-art assessment of modern scholarship on a diversity of subjects, themes, and issues. The essays provide readers with starting points for their exploration of American agricultural history—whether in general or in regards to a specific topic—and highlights the many ways the agricultural history of America is of integral importance to the wider American experience. Individual essays trace the origin and development of agricultural politics and policies, examine changes in science, technology, and government regulations, offer analytical suggestions for new research areas, discuss matters of ethnicity and gender in American agriculture, and more. This Companion: Introduces readers to a uniquely wide range of topics within the study of American agricultural history Provides a narrative summary and a critical examination of field-defining works Introduces specific topics within American agricultural history such as agrarian reform, agribusiness, and agricultural power and production Discusses the impacts of American agriculture on different groups including Native Americans, African Americans, and European, Asian, and Latinx immigrants Views the agricultural history of America through new interdisciplinary lenses of race, class, and the environment Explores depictions of American agriculture in film, popular music, literature, and art A Companion to American Agricultural History is an essential resource for introductory students and general readers seeking a concise overview of the subject, and for graduate students and scholars wanting to learn about a particular aspect of American agricultural history.
Book Synopsis The Lucifer Principle by : Howard Bloom
Download or read book The Lucifer Principle written by Howard Bloom and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A philosophical look at the history of our species which alternated between fascinating and frightening . . . like reading Dean Koontz or Stephen King.” —Rocky Mountain News The Lucifer Principle is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture to put forth the thesis that “evil” is a by-product of nature’s strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric. In a sweeping narrative that moves lucidly among sophisticated scientific disciplines and covers the entire span of the earth’s—as well as mankind’s—history, Howard Bloom challenges some of our most popular scientific assumptions. Drawing on evidence from studies of the most primitive organisms to those on ants, apes, and humankind, the author makes a persuasive case that it is the group, or “superorganism,” rather than the lone individual that really matters in the evolutionary struggle. But biology is not destiny, and human culture is not always the buffer to our most primitive instincts we would like to think it is. In these complex threads of thought lies the Lucifer Principle, and only through understanding its mandates will we able to avoid the nuclear crusades that await us in the twenty-first century. “A revolutionary vision of the relationship between psychology and history, The Lucifer Principle will have a profound impact on our concepts of human nature. It is astonishing that a book of such importance could be such a pleasure to read.”—Elizabeth F. Loftus, author of Memory
Book Synopsis The Lucifer Effect by : Philip Zimbardo
Download or read book The Lucifer Effect written by Philip Zimbardo and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive firsthand account of the groundbreaking research of Philip Zimbardo—the basis for the award-winning film The Stanford Prison Experiment Renowned social psychologist and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo explores the mechanisms that make good people do bad things, how moral people can be seduced into acting immorally, and what this says about the line separating good from evil. The Lucifer Effect explains how—and the myriad reasons why—we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. Here, for the first time and in detail, Zimbardo tells the full story of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the landmark study in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into “guards” and “inmates” and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners. By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the “bad apple” with that of the “bad barrel”—the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around. This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, though, Zimbardo also offers hope. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically. Like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, The Lucifer Effect is a shocking, engrossing study that will change the way we view human behavior. Praise for The Lucifer Effect “The Lucifer Effect will change forever the way you think about why we behave the way we do—and, in particular, about the human potential for evil. This is a disturbing book, but one that has never been more necessary.”—Malcolm Gladwell “An important book . . . All politicians and social commentators . . . should read this.”—The Times (London) “Powerful . . . an extraordinarily valuable addition to the literature of the psychology of violence or ‘evil.’”—The American Prospect “Penetrating . . . Combining a dense but readable and often engrossing exposition of social psychology research with an impassioned moral seriousness, Zimbardo challenges readers to look beyond glib denunciations of evil-doers and ponder our collective responsibility for the world’s ills.”—Publishers Weekly “A sprawling discussion . . . Zimbardo couples a thorough narrative of the Stanford Prison Experiment with an analysis of the social dynamics of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.”—Booklist “Zimbardo bottled evil in a laboratory. The lessons he learned show us our dark nature but also fill us with hope if we heed their counsel. The Lucifer Effect reads like a novel.”—Anthony Pratkanis, Ph.D., professor emeritus of psychology, University of California
Download or read book Lucifer's Legacy written by Frank Close and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Download or read book Oil Palm written by Jonathan E. Robins and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-05-21 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oil palms are ubiquitous—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows, sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia and across the tropics. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment. By telling the story of the oil palm across multiple centuries and continents, Robins demonstrates how the fruits of an African palm tree became a key commodity in the story of global capitalism, beginning in the eras of slavery and imperialism, persisting through decolonization, and stretching to the present day.
Book Synopsis Rendered Obsolete by : Jamie L. Jones
Download or read book Rendered Obsolete written by Jamie L. Jones and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2023-08-10 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the mid-nineteenth century, the US whaling industry helped drive industrialization and urbanization, providing whale oil to lubricate and illuminate the country. The Pennsylvania petroleum boom of the 1860s brought cheap and plentiful petroleum into the market, decimating whale oil's popularity. Here, from our modern age of fossil fuels, Jamie L. Jones uses literary and cultural history to show how the whaling industry held firm in US popular culture even as it slid into obsolescence. Jones shows just how instrumental whaling was to the very idea of "energy" in American culture and how it came to mean a fusion of labor, production, and the circulation of power. She argues that dying industries exert real force on environmental perceptions and cultural imaginations. Analyzing a vast archive that includes novels, periodicals, artifacts from whaling ships, tourist attractions, and even whale carcasses, Jones explores the histories of race, labor, and energy consumption in the nineteenth-century United States through the lens of the whaling industry's legacy. In terms of how they view power, Americans are, she argues, still living in the shadow of the whale.
Book Synopsis Manufacturing Catastrophe by : Shaun S. Nichols
Download or read book Manufacturing Catastrophe written by Shaun S. Nichols and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manufacturing Catastrophe tracks the history of industrialization, deindustrialization, and globalization in Massachusetts over the past two centuries. It a history of wrenching economic transformation as told from the perspective of everyday people: European peasants traveling the oceans in search of industrial work, runaway factory owners venturing out in search of cheaper labor abroad, and harried local policymakers trying to recover from repeated bouts of economic cataclysm. For those concerned about the future of American industry in the face of global competition, it provides critical lessons on how some of America's pioneering industrial cities have weathered the tempests of economic upheaval and industrial rebirth.
Book Synopsis Interpreting Energy at Museums and Historic Sites by : Leah S. Glaser
Download or read book Interpreting Energy at Museums and Historic Sites written by Leah S. Glaser and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book will help museums and historic sites interpret historic energy use within cultural contexts.
Book Synopsis In Whose Ruins by : Alicia Puglionesi
Download or read book In Whose Ruins written by Alicia Puglionesi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this examination of landscape and memory, four sites of American history are revealed as places where historical truth was written over by oppressive fiction—with profound repercussions for politics past and present. Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal. They present a national identity based on harvesting the treasures that lay in wait for European colonization. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through the US landscape, from Native American earthworks in West Virginia to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, this history is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire’s power. Showing the hidden costs of ruthless economic growth, particularly to Indigenous people and ways of understanding, this book illuminates the myth-making intimately tied to place. From the ground up, the project of settlement, expansion, and extraction became entwined with the spiritual values of those who hoped to gain from it. Every nation tells some stories and suppresses others, and In Whose Ruins illustrates the way American myths have been inscribed on the earth itself, overwriting Indigenous histories and binding us into an unsustainable future. In these pages, historian Alicia Puglionesiilluminates the story of the Grave Creek Stone, “discovered” in an ancient Indigenous burial mound, and used to promote the theory that a lost white race predated Native people in North America—part of a wider effort to justify European conquest with alternative histories. When oil was discovered in the corner of western Pennsylvania soon known as Petrolia, prospectors framed that treasure, too, as a birthright passed to them, through Native guides, from a lost race. Puglionesi traces the fate of ancient petroglyphs that once adorned rock faces on the Susquehanna River, dynamited into pieces to make way for a hydroelectric dam. This act foreshadowed the flooding of Native lands around the country; over the course of the 20th century, almost every major river was dammed for economic purposes. And she explores the effects of the US nuclear program in the Southwest, which contaminated vast regions in the name of eternal wealth and security through atomic power. This promise rang hollow for the surrounding Native, Hispanic, and white communities that were harmed, and even for some scientists. It also inspired nationwide resistance, uniting diverse groups behind a different vision of the future—one not driven by greed and haunted by ruin. This deeply researched work of narrative history traces the roots of American fantasies and fears in a national tradition of selective forgetting. Connecting the power of myths with the extraction of power from the land itself reveals the truths that have been left out and is an invaluable torch in the search for a way forward.
Book Synopsis Crimes Against Nature by : Karl Jacoby
Download or read book Crimes Against Nature written by Karl Jacoby and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-02-22 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This Study of the Early American conservation movement reveals the hidden history of three of the nation's first parks: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Karl Jacoby traces the effects that the criminalization of such traditional rural practices as hunting, fishing, and foraging had on country people in these areas. Despite the presence of new environmental regulations, poaching arson, and timber stealing became widespread among the Native Americans, poor whites, and others who had long relied on the natural resources now contained within conservation areas. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes," providing a rich and multifaceted portrayal of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." "Crimes against Nature includes previously unpublished historical photographs depicting such subjects as poachers in Yellowstone and a Native American "squatters' camp" at the Grand Canyon. This study demonstrates the importance of considering class for understanding environmental history and opens a new perspective on the social history of rural and poor people a century age."--Jacket of 2001 edition
Book Synopsis To Have and Have Not by : Brian C. Black
Download or read book To Have and Have Not written by Brian C. Black and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Written by a leading scholar, this essential introduction to the history of energy traces one of humans’ most basic ecological interactions: energy exchange. From fire to agriculture, water wheels to electric dynamos, the rise in intensity led humans to define a new “high energy” existence during the twentieth century. Industrialization and consumption increased the connection between energy and economic and political power, clarifying its importance throughout the world wars and into the Cold War. To Have and Have Not reveals a world in which energy supply now defines global standing, starkly revealing the connection between history and current events that perfectly situates our modern conundrum of a future without fossil fuels. Climate change and the supply of sustainable energy now permeates our modern policy making as we bear witness to the waning years of energy borrowed from the distant past. Brian Black argues that our history of growing energy reliance and past transitions is essential context for understanding our inevitable shift to cleaner energy. Placing this story within the current, rapidly changing historical discourse, this book is timely and persuasive as it lays out our current transition from fossil fuels.
