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The Beginnings of Indian Philosophy
Selections from the Rig Veda, Atharva Veda, Upanisads, and Mahabharata, Translated from the Sanskrit with an Introduction, notes, and glossarial index
Franklin Edgerton
Harvard University Press

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The Beginnings of Russian-American Relations, 1775–1815
Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov
Harvard University Press, 1975

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The Beginnings of Social Understanding
Judy Dunn
Harvard University Press, 1988

When does our acknowledgment of the social contract really begin? When do young children first display an understanding of their social world? When and why do they begin to grasp that other people have feelings and thoughts like their own, yet different? In this pathbreaking work Judy Dunn explores several aspects of the early process of social discovery: children's recognition of the feelings of others, their ability to interpret and anticipate the behavior and relationships of others, and their comprehension of the prohibitions and accepted practices of their world.

Dunn's work brings into focus an apparent paradox in our current view of the very young child's social understanding. Whereas research on infancy reveals that babies are born with a predisposition to learn about other people, and appear sensitive to the emotions and behavior of others, experimental studies suggest that children of three, four, and five years of age have difficulty gauging the feelings, intentions, and perceptions of others. Why should this social intelligence--which might be expected to be high on the developmental agenda--proceed so slowly? Is the social understanding of young children really so limited? Dunn pursues answers to these questions through close observation of children in their homes, in the complex social world of the family; her findings suggest a sophistication that has not yet been appreciated or documented.

The Beginnings of Social Understanding draws upon observations and analyses from three longitudinal studies of children during the transition from infancy to childhood, examining children's disputes, jokes, play, their questions and narratives about others. The book demonstrates children's increasing subtlety as members of a cultural world, and argues that emotional relationships and family discourse play crucial roles in the development of this understanding. Dunn breaks through traditional notions of child development as she sets forth a refreshingly original perspective from which to view the social potential of children.

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The Beginnings of Western Science
The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450
David C. Lindberg
University of Chicago Press, 1992
This landmark book represents the first attempt in two decades to survey the science of the ancient world, the first attempt in four decades to write a comprehensive history of medieval science, and the first attempt ever to present a full, unified account of both ancient and medieval science in a single volume. In The Beginnings of Western Science, David C. Lindberg provides a rich chronicle of the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to the late-medieval scholastics.

Lindberg surveys all the most important themes in the history of ancient and medieval science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. He synthesizes a wealth of information in superbly organized, clearly written chapters designed to serve students, scholars, and nonspecialists alike. In addition, Lindberg offers an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe. And throughout the book he pays close attention to the cultural and institutional contexts within which scientific knowledge was created and disseminated and to the ways in which the content and practice of science were influenced by interaction with philosophy and religion. Carefully selected maps, drawings, and photographs complement the text.

Lindberg's story rests on a large body of important scholarship produced by historians of science, philosophy, and religion over the past few decades. However, Lindberg does not hesitate to offer new interpretations and to hazard fresh judgments aimed at resolving long-standing historical disputes. Addressed to the general educated reader as well as to students, his book will also appeal to any scholar whose interests touch on the history of the scientific enterprise.
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The Beginnings of Western Science
The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, Second Edition
David C. Lindberg
University of Chicago Press, 2008
When it was first published in 1992, The Beginnings of Western Science was lauded as the first successful attempt ever to present a unified account of both ancient and medieval science in a single volume. Chronicling the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from pre-Socratic Greek philosophy to late-Medieval scholasticism, David C. Lindberg surveyed all the most important themes in the history of science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. In addition, he offered an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe.
            The Beginnings of Western Science was, and remains, a landmark in the history of science, shaping the way students and scholars understand these critically formative periods of scientific development. It reemerges here in a second edition that includes revisions on nearly every page, as well as several sections that have been completely rewritten. For example, the section on Islamic science has been thoroughly retooled to reveal the magnitude and sophistication of medieval Muslim scientific achievement. And the book now reflects a sharper awareness of the importance of Mesopotamian science for the development of Greek astronomy. In all, the second edition of The Beginnings of Western Science captures the current state of our understanding of more than two millennia of science and promises to continue to inspire both students and general readers.
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Beyond Greek
The Beginnings of Latin Literature
Denis Feeney
Harvard University Press, 2016

A History Today Best Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, and other authors of ancient Rome are so firmly established in the Western canon today that the birth of Latin literature seems inevitable. Yet, Denis Feeney boldly argues, the beginnings of Latin literature were anything but inevitable. The cultural flourishing that in time produced the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and other Latin classics was one of the strangest events in history.

“Feeney is to be congratulated on his willingness to put Roman literary history in a big comparative context…It is a powerful testimony to the importance of Denis Feeney’s work that the old chestnuts of classical literary history—how the Romans got themselves Hellenized, and whether those jack-booted thugs felt anxiously belated or smugly domineering in their appropriation of Greek culture for their own purposes—feel fresh and urgent again.”
—Emily Wilson, Times Literary Supplement

“[Feeney’s] bold theme and vigorous writing render Beyond Greek of interest to anyone intrigued by the history and literature of the classical world.”
The Economist

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Book Of The Incipit
Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century
D. Vance Smith
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period. In the first book to examine one of the most peculiar features of one of the greatest and most perplexing poems of England's late Middle Ages-the successive attempts of Piers Plowman to begin, and to keep beginning-D. Vance Smith compels us to rethink beginning, as concept and practice, in both medieval and contemporary terms. The problem of beginning was invested with increasing urgency in the fourteenth century, imagined and grappled with in the courts, the churches, the universities, the workshops, the fields, and the streets of England. The Book of the Incipit reveals how Langland's poem exemplifies a widespread interest in beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an interest that appears in such divergent fields as the physics of motion, the measurement of time, logic, grammar, rhetoric, theology, book production, and insurrection. Smith offers a theoretical understanding of beginning that departs from the structuralisms of Edward Said and the traditional formalisms of A. D. Nuttall and most medievalist and modernist treatments of closure. Instead, he conceives a work's beginning as a figure of the work itself, the inception of language as the problem of beginning to which we continue to return. D. Vance Smith is assistant professor of English at Princeton University.
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Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose
From Poetic Translation to Elite Transcription
Enrica Sciarrino
The Ohio State University Press, 2011
In the past decade, classical scholarship has been polarized by questions concerning the establishment of a literary tradition in Latin in the late third century BCE. On one side of the divide, there are those scholars who insist on the primacy of literature as a hermeneutical category and who, consequently, maintain a focus on poetic texts and their relationship with Hellenistic precedents. On the other side are those who prefer to rely on a pool of Latin terms as pointers to larger sociohistorical dynamics, and who see the emergence of Latin literature as one expression of these dynamics. Through a methodologically innovative exploration of the interlacing of genre and form with practice, Enrica Sciarrinobridges the gap between these two scholarly camps and develops new areas of inquiry by rescuing from the margins of scholarship the earliest remnants of Latin prose associated with Cato the Censor—a “new man” and one of the most influential politicians of his day. By systematically analyzing poetic and prose texts in relation to one another and to diverse authorial subjectivities, Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose: From Poetic Translation to Elite Transcription offers an entirely new perspective on the formation of Latin literature, challenges current assumptions about Roman cultural hierarchies, and sheds light on the social value attributed to different types of writing practices in mid-Republican Rome.
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Early Greek Philosophy, Volume II
Beginnings and Early Ionian Thinkers, Part 1
André Laks and Glenn W. Most
Harvard University Press, 2016

A major new edition of the so-called Presocratics.

The fragments and testimonia of the early Greek philosophers (often labeled the ‘Presocratics’) have always been not only a fundamental source for understanding archaic Greek culture and ancient philosophy but also a perennially fresh resource that has stimulated Western thought until the present day. This new systematic conception and presentation of the evidence differs in three ways from Hermann Diels’s groundbreaking work, as well as from later editions: it renders explicit the material’s thematic organization; it includes a selection from such related bodies of evidence as archaic poetry, classical drama, and the Hippocratic corpus; and it presents an overview of the reception of these thinkers until the end of antiquity.

Volume I contains introductory and reference materials essential for using all other parts of the edition.
Volume II presents preliminary chapters on ancient doxography, the cosmological and moral background, and includes the early Ionian thinkers Pherecydes, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes.
Volume III includes the early Ionian thinkers Xenophanes and Heraclitus.
Volume IV presents Pythagoras and the Pythagorean School, including Hippasus, Philolaus, Eurytus, Archytas, Hicetas, and Ecphantus, along with chapters on doctrines not attributed by name and reception.
Volume V includes the western Greek thinkers Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus, Empedocles, Alcmaeon, and Hippo.
Volume Vi includes the later Ionian and Athenian thinkers Anaxagoras, Archelaus, and Diogenes of Apollonia, along with chapters on early Greek medicine and the Derveni Papyrus.
Volume VII includes the atomists Leucippus and Democritus.
Volume VIII includes the so-called sophists Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, and Hippias, along with testimonia relating to the life, views, and argumentative style of Socrates.
Volume IX includes the so-called sophists Antiphon, Lycophron, and Xeniades, along with the Anonymous of Iamblichus, the Dissoi Logoi, a chapter on characterizations of the ‘sophists’ as a group, and an appendix on philosophy and philosophers in Greek drama.

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A Final Story
Science, Myth, and Beginnings
Nasser Zakariya
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Popular science readers embrace epics—the sweeping stories that claim to tell the history of all the universe, from the cosmological to the biological to the social. And the appeal is understandable: in writing these works, authors such as E. O. Wilson or Steven Weinberg deliberately seek to move beyond particular disciplines, to create a compelling story weaving together natural historical events, scientific endeavor, human discovery, and contemporary existential concerns.

In A Final Story, Nasser Zakariya delves into the origins and ambitions of these scientific epics, from the nineteenth century to the present, to see what they reveal about the relationship between storytelling, integrated scientific knowledge, and historical method. While seeking to transcend the perspectives of their own eras, the authors of the epics and the debates surrounding them are embedded in political and social struggles of their own times, struggles to which the epics in turn respond. In attempts to narrate an approach to a final, true account, these synthesizing efforts shape and orient scientific developments old and new. By looking closely at the composition of science epics and the related genres developed along with them, we are able to view the historical narrative of science as a form of knowledge itself, one that discloses much about the development of our understanding of and relationship to science over time.
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Genentech
The Beginnings of Biotech
Sally Smith Hughes
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In the fall of 1980, Genentech, Inc., a little-known California genetic engineering company, became the overnight darling of Wall Street, raising over $38 million in its initial public stock offering. Lacking marketed products or substantial profit, the firm nonetheless saw its share price escalate from $35 to $89 in the first few minutes of trading, at that point the largest gain in stock market history. Coming at a time of economic recession and declining technological competitiveness in the United States, the event provoked banner headlines and ignited a period of speculative frenzy over biotechnology as a revolutionary means for creating new and better kinds of pharmaceuticals, untold profit, and a possible solution to national economic malaise.
 
Drawing from an unparalleled collection of interviews with early biotech players, Sally Smith Hughes offers the first book-length history of this pioneering company, depicting Genentech’s improbable creation, precarious youth, and ascent to immense prosperity. Hughes provides intimate portraits of the people significant to Genentech’s science and business, including cofounders Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and in doing so sheds new light on how personality affects the growth of science. By placing Genentech’s founders, followers, opponents, victims, and beneficiaries in context, Hughes also demonstrates how science interacts with commercial and legal interests and university research, and with government regulation, venture capital, and commercial profits.
 
Integrating the scientific, the corporate, the contextual, and the personal, Genentech tells the story of biotechnology as it is not often told, as a risky and improbable entrepreneurial venture that had to overcome a number of powerful forces working against it.  
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God's Rascal
J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism
Barry Hankins
University of Tennessee Press, 2022

Loathed by mainstream Southern Baptists, J. Frank Norris (1877–1952) was in many ways the Southern Baptist Convention’s first fundamentalist. Twenty-five years after its first publication, this second edition of Barry Hankins’s field-defining work God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism engages new scholar- ship on American fundamentalism to reassess one of the most controversial figures in the history of American Christianity. In this completely revised edition, Hankins pens an entirely new chapter on J. Frank Norris’s murder trial, examines newly uncovered details regarding his recurrent sexual improprieties, and reconsiders his views on race in order to place J. Frank Norris, a man both despicable and captivating, among the most significant Southern fundamentalists of the twentieth century.

Norris merged a southern populist tradition with militant fundamentalism, carving out a distinctly take-no-prisoners political niche within the Baptist church that often offended his allies as much as his enemies. Indeed, Norris was about as bad as a fundamentalist could be. He resided in a world of swirling conspiracies of leftists who, he argued, intended to subvert both evangelical religion and American culture. There are times when Norris’s ego looms so large in his story that he seemed less interested in the threat these alleged conspiracies posed than in their power to keep him in the limelight. Finally, his tactics foreshadowed those employed in the fundamentalists’ tenacious takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that would occur more than twenty years after Norris’s death.

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Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism
Richard L. Bushman
University of Illinois Press, 1984
Winner of the David Woolley Evans and Beatrice Evans Biography Award and a History Book Club selection, 1985.
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Marshall Plan Modernism
Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia
Jaleh Mansoor
Duke University Press, 2016
Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors of traumatic memories of World War II. Rather, she locates the motivation for this violence in the history of the medium of painting and in the economic history of postwar Italy. Reconfiguring the relationship between politics and aesthetics, Mansoor illuminates how the monochrome's reemergence reflected Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni's aesthetic and political critique of the Marshall Plan's economic warfare and growing American hegemony. It also anticipated the struggles in Italy's factories, classrooms, and streets that gave rise to Autonomia in the 1960s. Marshall Plan Modernism refigures our understanding of modernist painting as a project about labor and the geopolitics of postwar reconstruction during the Italian Miracle.
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The New Anthology of American Poetry
Traditions and Revolutions, Beginnings to 1900
Edited by Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano
Rutgers University Press, 2002

2003 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Volume I begins with a generous selection of Native American materials, then spans the years from the establishment of the American colonies to about 1900, a world on the brink of World War I and the modern era. Part One focuses on poetry from the very beginnings through the end of the eighteenth century. The expansion and development of a newly forged nation engendered new kinds of poetry. Part Two includes works from the early nineteenth century through the time of the Civil War. The poems in Part Three reflect the many issues affecting a nation undergoing tumultuous change: the Civil War, immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and cultural diversification.

Such well-recognized names as Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Phillis Wheatley, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Stephen Crane appear in this anthology alongside such less frequently anthologized poets as George Horton, Sarah Helen Whitman, Elizabeth Oakes-Smith, Frances Harper, Rose Terry Cooke, Helen Hunt Jackson, Adah Menken, Sarah Piatt, Ina Coolbrith, Emma Lazarus, Albery Whitman, Owl Woman (Juana Manwell) Sadakichi Hartmann, Ernest Fenollosa, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and—virtually unknown as a poet—Abraham Lincoln. It also includes poems and songs reflecting the experiences of a variety of racial and ethnic groups.

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Railroad Labor Disputes
The Beginnings of Federal Strike Policy
Gerald G. Eggert
University of Michigan Press, 1967
At Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 16, 1877, angry laborers struck the B & O Railroad because of a 10 percent wage cut. Spontaneous strikes soon choked railroad service from Baltimore to St. Louis and from Buffalo to Louisville. The violent wave of discontent developed into the country's first national labor crisis. The use of federal troops to restore order was only one of many decisions—sometimes blundering or biased, sometimes enlightened—the government would make during the next twenty years in coping with railway strikes. Not until the defeat of the Pullman Strike in 1894 did railway labor disorders subside. Railroad Labor Disputes describes the federal government's methods of dealing with railroad labor problems in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and shows how the beginnings of federal strike policy evolved. To explain the bias of government officials against the working man and for railroad management, Gerald Eggert examines the backgrounds, interests, and ambitions of the shapers of federal policy. Eggert also underscores the lack of congressional leadership and the erratic planning of the executive branch, which compelled the federal courts to play a large part in making policy. Particularly in times of crisis, accident and chance determined the policy as much as reason and forethought. Occasionally decisions supported strikers, but policy became increasingly anti-labor in its bias. "Riots" and "insurrections" were quelled by troops; "conspiring to obstruct the mails" justified federal strikebreaking; hampering interstate commerce produced federal reprisal. Court injunctions were first used to protect railroads in receivership, later any railroad at any time. Strikes were even judged violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. After the Pullman strike of 1894, government policy grew more reasonable. Eggert emphasizes that the Erdman Act reflected this trend. Thereafter, railroad officials increasingly accepted the principle of collective bar
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Russian Philosophy, Volume 1
The Beginnings of Russian Philosophy; The Slavophiles; The Westernizers
James M. Edie
University of Tennessee Press, 1976
Russian philosophy begins through the impregnation of the ancient Byzantine tradition of Old Russia by the Western thought of the French Enlightenment, and then by German Romanticism. The first original Russian philosopher, Gregory Skovoroda, the "Russian Socrates," was followed by the early philosophy of history and culture, Alexander Radishchev and Peter Chasadayev. The fateful break of Russian philosophiers into two opposed camps of the Slavophiles was accomplished by the middle of the nineteenth century.
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Sandow the Magnificent
Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding
David L. Chapman
University of Illinois Press, 1994

Before Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Reeves, or Charles Atlas, there was German-born Eugen Sandow (1867-1925), a muscular vaudeville strongman who used his good looks, intelligence, and business savvy to forge a fitness empire. 

David L. Chapman tells the story of the immensely popular showman who emphasized physique display rather than lifting prowess. But he also looks at Sandow's success off-stage, where the entertainer helped found the fitness movement by establishing a worldwide chain of gyms, publishing a popular magazine, selling exercise equipment, and pioneering the use of food supplements. Chapman explains physical culture's popularity in terms of its wider social implications while delving into how Sandow, by making exercise fashionable, ushered in the fitness craze that continues today. 

This new edition has been revised and enlarged with an afterword that includes unpublished information, new photographs of Sandow and his contemporaries, and an updated index.

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Syriac Christian Culture
Beginnings to Renaissance
Aaron Michael Butts
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
Syriac Christianity developed in the first centuries CE in the Middle East, where it continued to flourish throughout Late Antiquity and the Medieval period, while also spreading widely, as far as India and China. Today, Syriac Christians are found in the Middle East, in India, as well in diasporas scattered across the globe. Over this extended time period and across this vast geographic expanse, Syriac Christians have built impressive churches and monasteries, crafted fine pieces of art, and written and transmitted a sizable body of literature. Though often overlooked, neglected, and even persecuted, Syriac Christianity has been – and continues to be – an important part of the humanistic heritage of the last two millennia. The present volume brings together fourteen studies that offer fresh perspectives on Syriac Christianity, especially its literary texts and authors. The timeframes of the individual studies span from the second-century Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible up to the thirteenth century with the end of the Syriac Renaissance. Several studies analyze key authors from Late Antiquity, such as Aphrahat, Ephrem, Narsai, and Jacob of Serugh. Others investigate translations into Syriac, both from Hebrew and from Greek, while still others examine hagiography, especially its formation and transmission. Reflecting a growing trend in the field, the volume also devotes significant attention to the Medieval period, during which Syriac Christians lived under Islamic rule. The studies in the volume are united in their quest to explore the richness, diversity, and vibrance of Syriac Christianity.
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Written on Bamboo and Silk
The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions, Second Edition
Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Paleography, which often overlaps with archaeology, deciphers ancient inscriptions and modes of writing to reveal the knowledge and workings of earlier societies. In this now-classic paleographic study of China, Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien traces the development of Chinese writing from the earliest inscriptions to the advent of printing, with specific attention to the tools and media used. This edition includes material that treats the many major documents and ancient Chinese artifacts uncovered over the forty years since the book’s first publication, as well as an afterword by Edward L. Shaughnessy.
Written on Bamboo and Silk has long been considered a landmark in its field. Critical in this regard is the excavation of numerous sites throughout China, where hundreds of thousands of documents written on bamboo and silk—as well as other media—were found, including some of the earliest copies of historical, medical, astronomical, military, and religious texts that are now essential to the study of early Chinese literature, history, and philosophy. Discoveries such as these have made the amount of material evidence on the origins and evolution of communication throughout Chinese history exceedingly broad and rich, and yet Tsien succeeds in tackling it all and building on the earlier classic work that changed
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