303 books match the query 'Time' and 23 start with a
Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Edited by Howard M. Brown
University of Chicago Press, 1983
Alex Capus
Haus Publishing, 2009
Caroline Humphrey and Hurelbaatar Ujeed
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Pascal Richet
University of Chicago Press, 2007
The quest to pinpoint the age of the Earth is nearly as old as humanity itself. For most of history, people trusted mythology or religion to provide the answer, even though nature abounds with clues to the past of the Earth and the stars. In A Natural History of Time, geophysicist Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of how scientists and philosophers examined those clues and from them built a chronological scale that has made it possible to reconstruct the history of nature itself.
Richet begins his story with mythological traditions, which were heavily influenced by the seasons and almost uniformly viewed time cyclically. The linear history promulgated by Judaism, with its story of creation, was an exception, and it was that tradition that drove early Christian attempts to date the Earth. For instance, in 169 CE, the bishop of Antioch, for instance declared that the world had been in existence for “5,698 years and the odd months and days.”
Until the mid-eighteenth century, such natural timescales derived from biblical chronologies prevailed, but, Richet demonstrates, with the Scientific Revolution geological and astronomical evidence for much longer timescales began to accumulate. Fossils and the developing science of geology provided compelling evidence for periods of millions and millions of years—a scale that even scientists had difficulty grasping. By the end of the twentieth century, new tools such as radiometric dating had demonstrated that the solar system is four and a half billion years old, and the universe itself about twice that, though controversial questions remain.
The quest for time is a story of ingenuity and determination, and like a geologist, Pascal Richet carefully peels back the strata of that history, giving us a chance to marvel at each layer and truly appreciate how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.
Best, John
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Ida Fink
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Aimee E. Newell
Ohio University Press, 2014
Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework—primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States—made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this exquisitely illustrated book explores how women experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America.
The book is filled with individual examples, stories, and over eighty fine color photographs that illuminate the role that samplers and needlework played in the culture of the time. For example, in October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785–1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained, “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth [and] it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.”
Situated at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study, and the history of aging, this book brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapters explore the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework, technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production, and how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. Far from being solely decorative ornaments or functional household textiles, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. These “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source for the lives of mature antebellum women.
Publication of this book was made possible in part through generous funding from the Coby Foundation, Ltd and from the Quilters Guild of Dallas, Helena Hibbs Endowment Fund.
Jimena Canales
University of Chicago Press, 2009
In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn’t until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, the impact on modern science and society was profound. Revealing the history behind this infinitesimal interval, A Tenth of a Second sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries.
Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies—telegraphy, photography, cinematography—Jimena Canales locates the reverberations of this “perceptual moment” throughout culture. Once scientists associated the tenth of a second with the speed of thought, they developed reaction time experiments with lasting implications for experimental psychology, physiology, and optics. Astronomers and physicists struggled to control the profound consequences of results that were a tenth of a second off. And references to the interval were part of a general inquiry into time, consciousness, and sensory experience that involved rethinking the contributions of Descartes and Kant.
Considering its impact on much longer time periods and featuring appearances by Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Einstein, among others, A Tenth of a Second is ultimately an important contribution to history and a novel perspective on modernity.
Sabine Chalvon-Demersay
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Catherine Grant
Duke University Press, 2022

William Gedney
Duke University Press, 2021

Vladimir Soloukhin, Translated from the Russian and with an Introduction by Valerie Z. Nollan
Northwestern University Press, 1993
Charles Morgan Jr., With a New Foreword by Senator Doug Jones
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Brings back into print a classic account of courage and calamity in the long march toward racial justice in the South, and the nation
On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young Black girls. The very next day, a prominent white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. was scheduled to speak at a luncheon held by the Young Men’s Business Club of Birmingham. A well-regarded figure in the city’s legal and business establishment, Morgan had been mentioned frequently as a candidate for political office. To the shock of his longtime friends and associates, Morgan deviated from his planned remarks, instead using his platform to place the blame for the murder of the four young girls squarely on the shoulders of the city’s white middle-class establishment, those seated before him.
As much as his stand was admired nationally, in Birmingham the results were destructive for him personally. Threats against his life and the lives of his family poured in daily by phone and mail, his political career was finished, and he was faced with financial ruin. Within weeks, he moved his family out of the state, and thenceforward committed himself to legal action in the name of racial justice. In 1964, he established the regional office of the ACLU in Atlanta. In the 1964 Supreme Court case Reynolds v. Sims, Morgan successfully argued that districts in state legislatures needed to be of nearly equal size, establishing the principle of “one man, one vote” to effectively end the use of gerrymandering.
A Time to Speak was originally published in 1964, a mere year after Morgan and his family fled Birmingham. The memoir recounts not only his speech, but his entire upbringing and the political, cultural, and social milieus in which he was raised and which gave rise to the cowardice, institutional silence, fear, and hate that those conditions nursed. This new edition features a foreword from US Senator Doug Jones.
Mark C. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Stephen Harrigan
University of Texas Press, 2025
A new collection of essays grappling with identity and memory, from a master of the form.
The author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Gates of the Alamo, the sweeping Texas history Big Wonderful Thing, and decades of incisive journalism, Stephen Harrigan is an adept writer skilled in crafting memorable characters. From this singular voice now comes a collection of essays tackling the most personal, and yet most expansive, themes of all: identity, memory, and time itself.
An Anchor in the Sea of Time unfolds individual stories but also a larger narrative about the development and distortions of history. In one essay, a painting on his grandparents’ wall is seared in Harrigan’s young mind. In another, a group trip to Vietnam stirs up a sobering confrontation with class privilege among Americans who fought there and others, like Harrigan, who did their best not to. The award-winning essay “Off Course” reflects on the father Harrigan never met. And Harrigan’s reporting about the Karankawas, an Indigenous group from the Texas coast once thought to be extinct, takes readers deep into the recesses of collective forgetting and offers glimpses of the possibility of recovery. A vivid encounter with lost selves, vanished worlds, and futures yet unrealized, An Anchor in the Sea of Time is perhaps the most personal book yet from this beloved writer.
Sharon R. Kaufman
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Prudence M. Rice
University Press of Colorado, 2019
Enoch Brater, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Ilse Aichinger
Seagull Books, 2023