World Art History

This book is a unique inquiry into the history and the ongoing moral significance of mass communication as an idea and social form. Organized around narrative accounts of individuals and their communicative worlds, it strives to refigure mass communication as a concept, illuminate significant but overlooked rhetorical episodes in its history, and call listeners to reconsider their own engagements with it today.

Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the 20th century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life's work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. "I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of everyday people," he explained, because "as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry."

Over the decades, the reputation of the samurai has grown to mythical proportions, owing to such films as Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, as well as works such as James Clavell's epic Shogun. In Legends of the Samurai, Hiroaki Sato confronts both the history and the legend of the samurai, untangling the two to present an authentic picture of these legendary warriors.

From prehistoric Mexico to modern Istanbul, Mary Beard looks beyond the familiar canon of Western imagery to explore the history of art, religion, and humanity. Conceived as an accompaniment to How Do We Look and The Eye of Faith, the famed Civilizations shows on PBS, renowned classicist Mary Beard has created this elegant volume on how we have looked at art.

The heroic story of Pussy Riot, who resurrected the power of truth in a society built on lies. On February 21, 2012, five young women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. In neon-colored dresses, tights, and balaclavas, they performed a “punk prayer” beseeching the “Mother of God” to “get rid of Putin.” They were quickly shut down by security, and in the weeks and months that followed, three of the women were arrested and tried, and two were sentenced to a remote prison colony. But the incident captured international headlines, and footage of it went viral.

The violin has formed an important aspect of Jewish culture for centuries, both as a popular instrument with classical Jewish musicians—Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman—and also a central factor of social life as part of the enduring Klezmer tradition. But during the Holocaust, the violin assumed extraordinary new roles within the Jewish community. For some musicians, the instrument was a liberator; for others, it was a savior that spared their lives. Music historian James A. Grymes tells the amazing, horrifying, and inspiring story of the violins of the Holocaust.

Nancy Sorel’s portrait pays homage to these unsung heroes. They came from Boston, New York, Milwaukee, and St. Louis; from Yakima, Washington; Austin, Texas; and Sioux City, Iowa; from San Francisco and all points east. They left comfortable homes and safe surroundings for combat-zone duty. As women war correspondents, they brought to the battlefields of World War II a fresh optic, and reported back home what they witnessed with a new sensibility.

A giant in American journalism in the vanguard of "The Greatest Generation" reveals his World War II experiences in this National Geographic book. More than 100 of Cronkite's letters from 1943-45 (plus a few earlier letters) survive. They reveal surprising and little-known facts about this storied public figure in the vanguard of "The Greatest Generation". They chronicle both a great love story and a great war story.

The goals of the budo - the martial arts and ways of Japan - lie in refining the body and spirit. These goals are not always the obvious ones - and are learned only through the guidance and direction of great teachers. The techniques, methods, and rituals of the sensei can serve as guides to a well-lived life - and provide invaluable lessons for today's martial artists.

Best-selling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans’ peculiar fascination with small things - and what small things tell us about our larger world.

It is a historical peculiarity of landscape painting that it begins with the artificial, and only after that proceeds towards the natural. For example, landscape paintings, and especially fanciful Nilotic panoramas, were one of the genres produced by artists in Pompeii. When, with the Renaissance, landscape painting once again started to establish itself after a long interval, the representations of the surrounding world that artists began to produce as a separate and independent genre, rather than simply as a background for human figures, were usually more fanciful than real.

As the most destructive war in history ravaged Europe, many of the world's most cherished cultural objects were in harm's way. The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History recounts the astonishing true story of 11 men and one woman who risked their lives amidst the bloodshed of World War II to preserve churches, libraries, monuments, and works of art that for centuries defined the heritage of Western civilization.

Mazes and Labyrinths is a look into the origin and mystery of mazes. From ancient stone carvings, Minoan palaces to today's hedge-maze, Matthews chronicles the history of the maze. With devoted scholarship to "the lure of the labyrinth," W. H. Matthews has composed an exhaustive history of mazes and labyrinths from antiquity to the present.

The Ninth Symphony, a symbol of freedom and joy, was Beethoven’s mightiest attempt to help humanity find its way from darkness to light, from chaos to peace. Yet the work was born in a repressive era, with terrified Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and Romanovs using every means at their disposal to squelch populist rumblings in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s wars. Ironically, the premiere of this hymn to universal brotherhood took place in Vienna, the capital of a nation that Metternich was turning into the first modern police state.

After the long period of cultural decline known as the Dark Ages, Europe experienced a rebirth of scholarship, art, literature, philosophy, and science, and began to develop a vision of Western society that remains at the heart of Western civilization today.

Here can be no doubt that the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy in London is more than a merely artistic event. It represents a new stage in the burgeoning relationship between contemporary China and the West. The opening, originally scheduled for January, was brought forward to coincide with a State Visit to Britain by the Chinese president, Hu Jintao. The "Three Emperors" of the title were the second, third, and fourth rulers of the Qing Dynasty, and their period in power spanned nearly a century-and-a-half, from the mid-17th century until the end of the 18th.

His sculptures have never been afraid of being seen. What I mean by this apparently paradoxical statement is that Pomodoro has never needed the shelter of the museum - defined by me here as "a space set apart for art" - in order to make his point as an artist. His sculptures have never been afraid of being seen. What I mean by this apparently paradoxical statement is that Pomodoro has never needed the shelter of the museum - defined by me here as "a space set apart for art" - in order to make his point as an artist.

Britain’s Culture Minister, David Lammy, recently suggested that the history of slavery should be made a compulsory part of the nation’s school curriculum. Mick Hume, a columnist in The Times, promptly retorted, “Slavery and the Holocaust are now likely to be taught as little chunks of history, removed from any proper context. They become simplistic parables of good and evil, over which children are encouraged to emote and empathise...." How well founded was this criticism?

Going to the Frida Kahlo exhibition current at Tate Modern in London is like entering the shrine of a secular saint. The rooms are thronged. People peer closely at the paintings, many of them very small. They seem afraid to talk much above a whisper. There are a number of reasons for this reaction. One is Hayden Herrera’s highly readable biography of the artist, first published in 1983, and now established as a classic feminist text. Another is the feminist movement’s general need for heroines, which has had a similar effect on the posthumous reputation of Georgia O’Keeffe. A third, probably the most powerful, reason is Kahlo’s own personality, which combined self-assertion, defiance and masochism in almost equal proportions. In this respect Kahlo can be compared with a slightly later generation of English-language poets, male and female. Prominent among them are Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

From the earliest times, human beings have found it difficult to represent their own bodies in a straightforward way. The rare painted images of humans in Paleolithic art are much less naturalistic than the images of animals created at the same epoch. At the dawn of art, representations of the nude body were simply vehicles for statement about the need for fertility if the human race was to survive successfully.