336 books match the query 'Age' and 29 start with a
Paula Becker
University of Iowa Press, 2019
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.
Andrew R. Spieldenner
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Grant Wythoff
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
How users experience and influence technological change—when so much of that change feels out of our control
Every day, we casually employ one of the most complex tools ever created, using it to read the news, plan our day, and connect with friends. In A User’s Guide to the Age of Tech, Grant Wythoff investigates the process by which now-ubiquitous technologies like our phones become integrated into our lives, showing how the “gadget” stage—before devices are widely adopted—opens the door for users to co-create these technologies and adapt them toward unexpected ends.
In this elegant, approachable work, Wythoff offers a view of how users make new technology their own, subverting dominant power structures and imagining uses never intended by their creators. Rooted in a detailed look into the history of technique (focusing on how we do things with tools rather than the tools themselves), A User’s Guide to the Age of Tech proceeds to complicate, and influence, discussion of subjects like the digital divide and AI.
Drawing on a range of sources, including novels, patents, and newspapers, Wythoff explores the vernacular philosophies that have emerged from users and their diverse, everyday practices, bringing down to earth the conversation about digital titans, away from the abstracted domains of server farms and algorithms. Lodging a passionate argument that we know ourselves better than the data brokers who appear to wield influence over our psyches, Wythoff invites readers (and tech users) to imagine their own digital technique, acknowledge their vast expertise, and see its immense value.
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Edited by Robert Frodeman, Evelyn Brister, and Luther Propst
University of Utah Press, 2024
John Marsh
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Michael Fried
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Edited by Shirley Wilson Logan and Wayne H. Slater, with an Afterword by Jessica Enoch and Scott Wible
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Gary Totten
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
Edited by Ben A. Minteer and Stephen J. Pyne
University of Chicago Press, 2015
David Morton
Ohio University Press, 2019
Age of Concrete is a history of the making of houses and homes in the subúrbios of Maputo (Lourenço Marques), Mozambique, from the late 1940s to the present. Often dismissed as undifferentiated, ahistorical “slums,” these neighborhoods are in fact an open-air archive that reveals some of people’s highest aspirations. At first people built in reeds. Then they built in wood and zinc panels. And finally, even when it was illegal, they risked building in concrete block, making permanent homes in a place where their presence was often excruciatingly precarious.
Unlike many histories of the built environment in African cities, Age of Concrete focuses on ordinary homebuilders and dwellers. David Morton thus models a different way of thinking about urban politics during the era of decolonization, when one of the central dramas was the construction of the urban stage itself. It shaped how people related not only to each other but also to the colonial state and later to the independent state as it stumbled into being.
Original, deeply researched, and beautifully composed, this book speaks in innovative ways to scholarship on urban history, colonialism and decolonization, and the postcolonial state. Replete with rare photographs and other materials from private collections, Age of Concrete establishes Morton as one of a handful of scholars breaking new ground on how we understand Africa’s cities.
John M. Hoberman, Instructor
University of Texas Press, 2014

University of Wisconsin Press, 1987
Robert Faulkner and Susan Shell, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2009
America at Risk gathers original essays by a distinguished and bipartisan group of writers and intellectuals to address a question that matters to Americans of every political persuasion: what are some of the greatest dangers facing America today? The answers, which range from dwindling political participation to rising poverty, and religion to empire, add up to a valuable and timely portrait of a particular moment in the history of American ideas.
While the opinions are many, there is a central theme in the book: the corrosion of the liberal constitutional order that has long guided the country at home and abroad. The authors write about the demonstrably important dangers the United States faces while also breaking the usual academic boundaries: there are chapters on the family, religious polarization, immigration, and the economy, as well as on governmental and partisan issues.
America at Risk is required reading for all Americans alarmed about the future of their country.
Contributors
Robert Faulkner is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Susan Shell is Professor of Political Science at Boston College.
"America at Risk goes well beyond the usual diagnoses of issues debated in public life like immigration, war, and debt, to consider the Republic’s founding principles, and the ways in which they have been displaced by newer thoughts and habits in contemporary America. A critical book for understanding our present condition."
—Francis Fukuyama, Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
"In this penetrating book, the nation’s finest social and political thinkers from across the spectrum take a careful and no-holds-barred look at the dangers facing the American political system. The conclusions are more unsettling than reassuring---but that is because they are honest and real."
—Norm Ornstein, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
"In the midst of overwrought pundits, irate soccer moms, and outraged bloggers, it is difficult to distinguish genuine dangers from false alarms and special pleading. This book enables us to do so, in a way that helps us to actually think about, not just feel anxious about, threats to those features of American society that are worth cherishing. The authors range in ideology and expertise, but they are uniformly judicious, incisive, and informative. This is a fascinating book about issues that the political system usually ignores or exaggerates."
—Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Zander Brietzke
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Steven Belletto
University of Iowa Press, 2012
Likewise, the authors describe phenomena—such as the FBI’s surveillance of writers (especially African Americans), biopolitics, development theory, struggles over the centralization and decentralization of government, and the cultural work of Reaganism—that open up new contexts for discussing postwar culture. Extending the timeline and expanding the geographic scope of Cold War culture, this book reveals both the literature and the culture of the time to be more dynamic and complex than has been generally supposed.
Timothy E. Scheurer
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
George H. Daniels
University of Alabama Press, 1968
A foundational history of science, ideas, and professional identity in nineteenth-century America.
American Science in the Age of Jackson is a landmark study that traces the emergence of a distinctly American scientific community during one of the most transformative periods in the nation's history. Focusing on the years between 1815 and 1845, George H. Daniels examines how a loosely connected network of amateur naturalists, physicians, educators, and scientific enthusiasts evolved into a more organized and professional body of researchers united by shared goals, methods, institutions, and intellectual commitments. Through an innovative analysis of leading scientists and the scientific journals that connected them, Daniels reconstructs the foundations of American science at the moment it began to establish an independent identity.
Originally recognized as the first major effort to define an American scientific community, this influential work explores the individuals, publications, and philosophical traditions that shaped scientific inquiry in the early republic and Jacksonian era. Daniels examines the careers and writings of the most prominent American scientists of the period, demonstrating how they built professional networks, established standards of evidence and inquiry, and promoted science as an essential component of national progress. In doing so, he illuminates the institutional development of scientific societies, colleges, journals, and research programs that would lay the groundwork for the nation's later scientific achievements.
Featuring biographical sketches of leading scientists, analyses of early scientific journals, and a detailed examination of the ideas that united the nation's scientific elite, American Science in the Age of Jackson remains a foundational text for understanding the origins of scientific culture in the United States. More than a history of science, it is a history of intellectual ambition, institutional growth, and the pursuit of knowledge in a rapidly changing society. Scholars and students of American history, history of science, intellectual history, philosophy, and nineteenth-century studies will find this volume an indispensable resource for understanding how American science established the foundations of its modern identity.
John L. Rury
Rutgers University Press, 2024

Roberta Newnham
Intellect Books, 2013
By Michael Gagarin
University of Texas Press, 2002
Winner, Friends of the Dallas Public Library Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, 2003
Antiphon was a fifth-century Athenian intellectual (ca. 480-411 BCE) who created the profession of speechwriting while serving as an influential and highly sought-out adviser to litigants in the Athenian courts. Three of his speeches are preserved, together with three sets of Tetralogies (four hypothetical paired speeches), whose authenticity is sometimes doubted. Fragments also survive of intellectual treatises on subjects including justice, law, and nature (physis), which are often attributed to a separate Antiphon the Sophist. Were these two Antiphons really one and the same individual, endowed with a wide-ranging mind ready to tackle most of the diverse intellectual interests of his day?
Through an analysis of all these writings, this book convincingly argues that they were composed by a single individual, Antiphon the Athenian. Michael Gagarin sets close readings of individual works within a wider discussion of the fifth-century Athenian intellectual climate and the philosophical ferment known as the sophistic movement. This enables him to demonstrate the overall coherence of Antiphon's interests and writings and to show how he was a pivotal figure between the sophists and the Attic orators of the fourth century. In addition, Gagarin's argument allows us to reassess the work of the sophists as a whole, so that they can now be seen as primarily interested in logos (speech, argument) and as precursors of fourth-century rhetoric, rather than in their usual role as foils for Plato.
Jeremy Wade Morris and Sarah Murray, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2018
George L. Hersey
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Julie Koser
Northwestern University Press, 2016
Armed Ambiguity is a fascinating examination of the tropes of the woman warrior constructed by print culture—including press reports, novels, dramatic works, and lyrical texts—during the decades-long conflict in Europe around 1800.
In it, Julie Koser sheds new light on how women’s bodies became a battleground for competing social, cultural, and political agendas in one of the most pivotal periods of modern history. She traces the women warriors in this work as reflections of the social and political climate in German-speaking lands, and she reveals how literary texts and cultural artifacts that highlight women’s armed insurrection perpetuated the false dichotomy of "public" versus "private" spheres along a gendered fault line. Koser illuminates how reactionary visions of "ideal femininity" competed with subversive fantasies of new femininities in the ideological battle being waged over the restructuring of German society.
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 2004
James S. Lai
Temple University Press, 2022
Social media provides ethno-racial immigrant groups—especially those who cannot vote due to factors such as lack of citizenship and limited English proficiency—the ability to mobilize and connect around collective issues. Online spaces and discussion forums have encouraged many Asian Americans to participate in public policy debates and take action on social justice issues. This form of digital group activism serves as an adaptive political empowerment strategy for the fastest-growing and largest foreign-born population in America. Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media illuminates how associating online can facilitate and amplify traditional forms of political action.
James Lai provides diverse case studies on contentious topics ranging from affirmative action debates to textbook controversies to emphasize the complexities, limitations, and challenges of connective action that is relevant to all racial groups. Using a detailed multi-methods approach that includes national survey data and Twitter hashtag analysis, he shows how traditional immigrants, older participants, and younger generations create online consensus and mobilize offline to foment political change. In doing so, Lai provides a nuanced glimpse into the multiple ways connective action takes shape within the Asian American community.
Robert Weisbuch
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Patricia Ticineto Clough
University of Minnesota Press, 2000
Explores the connection between new theories, new technologies, and new ways of thinking.
In this book, Patricia Ticineto Clough reenergizes critical theory by viewing poststructuralist thought through the lens of "teletechnology," using television as a recurring case study to illuminate the changing relationships between subjectivity, technology, and mass media.
Autoaffection links diverse forms of cultural criticism-feminist theory, queer theory, film theory, postcolonial theory, Marxist cultural studies and literary criticism, the cultural studies of science and the criticism of ethnographic writing—to the transformation and expansion of teletechnology in the late twentieth century. These theoretical approaches, Clough suggests, have become the vehicles of unconscious thought in our time.In individual chapters, Clough juxtaposes the likes of Derridean deconstruction, Deleuzian philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She works through the writings of Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Grosz—to name only a few—placing all in dialogue with a teletechnological framework. Clough shows how these cultural criticisms have raised questions about the foundation of thought, allowing us to reenvision the relationship of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert.