How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421446650
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now by : Walter Stephens

Download or read book How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now written by Walter Stephens and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of how writing has preserved cultural practices, traditions, and knowledge throughout human history. In How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now, Walter Stephens condenses the massive history of the written word into an accessible, engaging narrative. The history of writing is not merely a record of technical innovations—from hieroglyphics to computers—but something far richer: a chronicle of emotional engagement with written culture whose long arc intimates why the humanities are crucial to society. For five millennia, myths and legends provided fascinating explanations for the origins and uses of writing. These stories overflowed with enthusiasm about fabled personalities (both human and divine) and their adventures with capturing speech and preserving memory. Stories recounted how and why an ancient Sumerian king, a contemporary of Gilgamesh, invented the cuneiform writing system—or alternatively, how the earliest Mesopotamians learned everything from a hybrid man-fish. For centuries, Jews and Christians debated whether Moses or God first wrote the Ten Commandments. Throughout history, some myths of writing were literary fictions. Plato's tale of Atlantis supposedly emerged from a vast Egyptian archive of world history. Dante's vision of God as one infinite book inspired Borges's fantasy of the cosmos as a limitless library, while the nineteenth century bequeathed Mary Shelley's apocalyptic tale of a world left with innumerable books but only one surviving reader. Stephens presents a comprehensive history of the written word and demonstrates how writing has preserved and shaped human life since the Bronze Age. These stories, their creators, and their preservation have inspired wonder and an endless appetite for historical revelation.

How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now

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Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421446642
Total Pages : 571 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now by : Walter Stephens

Download or read book How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now written by Walter Stephens and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of how writing has preserved cultural practices, traditions, and knowledge throughout human history. In How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now, Walter Stephens condenses the massive history of the written word into an accessible, engaging narrative. The history of writing is not merely a record of technical innovations—from hieroglyphics to computers—but something far richer: a chronicle of emotional engagement with written culture whose long arc intimates why the humanities are crucial to society. For five millennia, myths and legends provided fascinating explanations for the origins and uses of writing. These stories overflowed with enthusiasm about fabled personalities (both human and divine) and their adventures with capturing speech and preserving memory. Stories recounted how and why an ancient Sumerian king, a contemporary of Gilgamesh, invented the cuneiform writing system—or alternatively, how the earliest Mesopotamians learned everything from a hybrid man-fish. For centuries, Jews and Christians debated whether Moses or God first wrote the Ten Commandments. Throughout history, some myths of writing were literary fictions. Plato's tale of Atlantis supposedly emerged from a vast Egyptian archive of world history. Dante's vision of God as one infinite book inspired Borges's fantasy of the cosmos as a limitless library, while the nineteenth century bequeathed Mary Shelley's apocalyptic tale of a world left with innumerable books but only one surviving reader. Stephens presents a comprehensive history of the written word and demonstrates how writing has preserved and shaped human life since the Bronze Age. These stories, their creators, and their preservation have inspired wonder and an endless appetite for historical revelation.

Studies in Intellectual History

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421436558
Total Pages : 127 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Studies in Intellectual History by : George Boas

Download or read book Studies in Intellectual History written by George Boas and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1953. In this collection of essays, prominent midcentury intellectual historians provide critical essays on their field of specialty. Studies in Intellectual History gathers work by Harold Cherniss, George Boas, Ludwig Edelstein, Leo Spitzer, and others.

Communication in the Ancient World

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Publisher : Life in the Ancient World
ISBN 13 : 9780778717331
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis Communication in the Ancient World by : Hazel Richardson

Download or read book Communication in the Ancient World written by Hazel Richardson and published by Life in the Ancient World. This book was released on 2011-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the different forms of communication in ancient civilizations, from the first forms of writing to education, ancient books, formal languages, and communication between civilizations.

Human Frontiers

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262545101
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Human Frontiers by : Michael Bhaskar

Download or read book Human Frontiers written by Michael Bhaskar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the flow of big, world-changing ideas slowed down? A provocative look at what happens next at the frontiers of human knowledge. The history of humanity is the history of big ideas that expand our frontiers—from the wheel to space flight, cave painting to the massively multiplayer game, monotheistic religion to quantum theory. And yet for the past few decades, apart from a rush of new gadgets and the explosion of digital technology, world-changing ideas have been harder to come by. Since the 1970s, big ideas have happened incrementally—recycled, focused in narrow bands of innovation. In this provocative book, Michael Bhaskar looks at why the flow of big, world-changing ideas has slowed, and what this means for the future. Bhaskar argues that the challenge at the frontiers of knowledge has arisen not because we are unimaginative and bad at realizing big ideas but because we have already pushed so far. If we compare the world of our great-great-great-grandparents to ours today, we can see how a series of transformative ideas revolutionized almost everything in just a century and a half. But recently, because of short-termism, risk aversion, and fractious decision making, we have built a cautious, unimaginative world. Bhaskar shows how we can start to expand the frontier again by thinking big—embarking on the next Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Apollo mission—and embracing change.

The Dawn of Everything

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Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374721106
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis The Dawn of Everything by : David Graeber

Download or read book The Dawn of Everything written by David Graeber and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

A Short History of Humanity

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0753554976
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (535 download)

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Book Synopsis A Short History of Humanity by : Johannes Krause

Download or read book A Short History of Humanity written by Johannes Krause and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity has often found itself on the precipice. We've survived and thrived because we've never stopped moving... 'Stops you dead in your tracks ... An absolute revelation' Sue Black, bestselling author of All That Remains In this eye-opening book, Johannes Krause, Chair of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Humanity, offers a new way of understanding our past, present and future. Marshalling unique insights from archaeogenetics, an emerging new discipline that allows us to read our ancestors' DNA like journals chronicling personal stories of migration, Krause charts two millennia of adaption, movement and survival, culminating in the triumph of Homo Sapiens as we swept through Europe and beyond in successive waves of migration - developing everything from language, the patriarchy, disease, art and a love of pets as we did so. We also meet our ancestors, from those many of us have heard of - such as Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals - to the wildly unfamiliar but no less real: the recently discovered Denisovans, who ranged across Asia and, like humans, interbred with Neanderthals; the Aurignacians, skilled artists who, 40,000 years ago, brought about an extraordinary transformation in what our species could invent and create; the Varna, who buried their loved ones with gold long before the Pharaohs of Egypt did; and the Gravettians, big game hunters who were Europe's most successful early settlers until they perished in the face of the toughest opponent humanity had ever faced: the ice age. As well as being a radical new telling of our shared story, this book is a reminder that the global problems that keep us awake at night - climate catastrophe; the sudden emergence of deadly epidemics; refugee crises; ethnic conflict; over-population - are all things we've faced, and overcome, before.

A History of Reading

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0698178971
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (981 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of Reading by : Alberto Manguel

Download or read book A History of Reading written by Alberto Manguel and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning, and at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist and editor Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the six-thousand-year-old conversation between words and that hero without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel brilliantly covers reading as seduction, as rebellion, and as obsession and goes on to trace the quirky and fascinating history of the reader’s progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to CD-ROM.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

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Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 0547527543
Total Pages : 580 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (475 download)

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Book Synopsis The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by : Julian Jaynes

Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Sophie's World

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Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466804270
Total Pages : 544 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (668 download)

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Book Synopsis Sophie's World by : Jostein Gaarder

Download or read book Sophie's World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher. Thus begins Jostein Gaarder's unique novel, which is not only a mystery, but also a complete and entertaining history of philosophy.

How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2002

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Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393345807
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2002 by : Joy Harjo

Download or read book How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2002 written by Joy Harjo and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-01-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a quarter-century's work from the 2003 winner of the Arrell Gibson Award for Lifetime Achievement. This collection gathers poems from throughout Joy Harjo's twenty-eight-year career, beginning in 1973 in the age marked by the takeover at Wounded Knee and the rejuvenation of indigenous cultures in the world through poetry and music. How We Became Human explores its title question in poems of sustaining grace. To view text with line endings as poet intended, please set font size to the smallest size on your device.

New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421440938
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship by : Ann Blair

Download or read book New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship written by Ann Blair and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This edited collection assembles a set of essays investigating the past, present, and future historiography of scholars who write about the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe. Contributors examine how scholars in recent decades have broken down traditional boundaries imposed on this period by exploring shifting conceptions of periodization, geography, genre, and evidence"--

Man Made God

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Publisher : Stellar House Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0979963141
Total Pages : 379 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (799 download)

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Book Synopsis Man Made God by : Barbara G. Walker

Download or read book Man Made God written by Barbara G. Walker and published by Stellar House Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extraordinary independent scholar of comparative religion and mythology Walker examines a time when the Goddess and her consort/son ruled supreme and forward into the era when the patriarchy usurped Her worship.

The Epic of Gilgamish

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Publisher : Legare Street Press
ISBN 13 : 9781015427921
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (279 download)

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Book Synopsis The Epic of Gilgamish by : R. Campbell Thompson

Download or read book The Epic of Gilgamish written by R. Campbell Thompson and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Lord's Oysters

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis The Lord's Oysters by : Gilbert Byron

Download or read book The Lord's Oysters written by Gilbert Byron and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationally acclaimed when first published in 1957 by Atlantic/Little, Brown, The Lord's Oysters has never previously been available in a paperback edition. While presented as a novel, it captures with vivid fidelity the life of the Chesapeake watermen and their families in the early 20th century.

Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421426889
Total Pages : 437 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800 by : Walter Stevens

Download or read book Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800 written by Walter Stevens and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The essays gathered in this volume demonstrate that studying early modern European literary forgeries is a fascinating cultural adventure” (Lina Bolzoni author of The Gallery of Memory). This comprehensive study of literary and historiographical forgery goes well beyond questions of authorship. It spotlights the imaginative vitality of forgery and its sinister impact on genuine scholarship. This volume demonstrates that early modern forgery was a literary tradition in its own right, with distinctive connections to politics, Greek and Roman classics, religion, philosophy, and modern literature. The early modern explosion in forgery of all kinds—particularly in the fields of literary and archaeological falsification—demonstrates a dramatic shift in attitudes toward historical evidence and in the relation of texts to contemporary society. The authors capture the impact of this evolution within many cultural transformations, including the rise of print, changing tastes and fortunes of the literary marketplace, and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. The thirteen essays draw on Johns Hopkins University’s Bibliotheca Fictiva, the world’s premier research collection dedicated exclusively to the subject of literary forgery. It consists of several thousand rare books and unique manuscript materials from the early modern period and beyond. Contributors: Frederic Clark, James Coleman, Richard Cooper, Arthur Freeman, Anthony Grafton, A. Katie Harris, Earle A. Havens, Jack Lynch, Shana D. O’Connell, Ingrid Rowland, Walter Stephens, Elly Truitt, Kate Tunstall

The Age of Analogy

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421420775
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Analogy by : Devin Griffiths

Download or read book The Age of Analogy written by Devin Griffiths and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-10-28 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did literature shape nineteenth-century science? Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles, were the two most important evolutionary theorists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Although their ideas and methods differed, both Darwins were prolific and inventive writers: Erasmus composed several epic poems and scientific treatises, while Charles is renowned both for his collected journals (now titled The Voyage of the Beagle) and for his masterpiece, The Origin of Species. In The Age of Analogy, Devin Griffiths argues that the Darwins’ writing style was profoundly influenced by the poets, novelists, and historians of their era. The Darwins, like other scientists of the time, labored to refashion contemporary literary models into a new mode of narrative analysis that could address the contingent world disclosed by contemporary natural science. By employing vivid language and experimenting with a variety of different genres, these writers gave rise to a new relational study of antiquity, or “comparative historicism,” that emerged outside of traditional histories. It flourished instead in literary forms like the realist novel and the elegy, as well as in natural histories that explored the continuity between past and present forms of life. Nurtured by imaginative cross-disciplinary descriptions of the past—from the historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot to the poetry of Alfred Tennyson—this novel understanding of history fashioned new theories of natural transformation, encouraged a fresh investment in social history, and explained our intuition that environment shapes daily life. Drawing on a wide range of archival evidence and contemporary models of scientific and literary networks, The Age of Analogy explores the critical role analogies play within historical and scientific thinking. Griffiths also presents readers with a new theory of analogy that emphasizes language's power to foster insight into nature and human society. The first comparative treatment of the Darwins’ theories of history and their profound contribution to the study of both natural and human systems, this book will fascinate students and scholars of nineteenth-century British literature and the history of science.