Technological change is about more than inventions. This concise history of the Industrial Revolution places the eighteenth-century British Industrial Revolution in global context, locating its causes in government protection, global competition, and colonialism. Inventions from spinning jennies to steam engines came to define an age that culminated in the acceleration of the fashion cycle, the intensification in demand and supply of raw materials and the rise of a plantation system that w...

"The Jewess Pallas Athena"--a line from a poem by Paul Celan. It is a provocative phrase, cutting across cultures and traditions. But it poses questions: How to reconstruct a culture that has been destroyed? How to conceive of history after the catastrophes of the twentieth century?This book begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the first Jewish women to raise their voices in German. It ends two hundred years later, with another group of Jewish women looking back at a country f...

The U.S. city is undergoing constant change. In the East and Midwest, most cities were founded as trading posts on waterways. They boomed during the industrial era and reached their population peak in the mid-20th century, before suburbanization and deindustrialization caused them to decline in importance. Traces of decay were everywhere, and the prognosis for the future was conceivably poor.As Barbara Hahn shows in her book, this trend now seems to have been broken: Things are loo...

How did Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco come to dominate the industry?In her sweeping history of the American tobacco industry, Barbara Hahn traces the emergence of the tobacco plant’s many varietal types, arguing that they are products not of nature but of economic relations and continued and intense market regulation.Hahn focuses her study on the most popular of these varieties, Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco. First grown in the inland Piedmont along the Virginia–No...

The Cotton Kings relates a colorful economic drama with striking parallels to contemporary American economic debates. At the turn of the twentieth century, dishonest cotton brokers used bad information to lower prices on the futures market, impoverishing millions of farmers. To fight this corruption, a small group of brokers sought to control the price of cotton on unregulated exchanges in New York and New Orleans. They triumphed, cornering the world market in cotton and raising i...

A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”—the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a cropHuman efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands to dry zones, from one imperial colony to another. This book is a bold but approachable attempt to redefine historical inquiry based on the “crops...

A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”—the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a cropHuman efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands to dry zones, from one imperial colony to another. This book is a bold but approachable attempt to redefine historical inquiry based on the “crops...

A biography of a Jewish woman, a writer who hosted a literary and political salon in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany, written by one of the twentieth century's most prominent intellectuals, Hannah Arendt.Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt’s first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though not published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, passi...

THE LAND OF THE WHITE BIRDS presents a chance for children aged 6-12 and their parents to increase their environmental awareness together. It is a book for reading on your own as well as for reading aloud. The book contains a section with a varied range of activities, based on the super learning system, that help to deepen the children's knowledge about processes of cause and effect in our natural environment. Young readers are captivated following the adventures of Nick, a young hare who ...

How global competition brought the plantation kingdom to its knees.In 1850, America’s plantation economy reigned supreme. U.S. cotton dominated world markets, and American rice, sugarcane, and tobacco grew throughout a vast farming empire that stretched from Maryland to Texas. Four million enslaved African Americans toiled the fields, producing global commodities that enriched the most powerful class of slaveholders the world had ever known. But fifty years later—a...

Leverage Your Security Expertise in IBM® System z™ Mainframe EnvironmentsFor over 40 years, the IBM mainframe has been the backbone of the world’s largest enterprises. If you’re coming to the IBM System z mainframe platform from UNIX®, Linux®, or Windows®, you need practical guidance on leveraging its unique security capabilities. Now, IBM experts have written the first authoritative book on mainframe security spec...

"Each [essay is] a model of clarity, weight, gravity . . . each superbly centered on the moods, manners, works . . . of ten exemplary men and women" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review)."Dark times" is Brecht's phrase, and Hannah Arendt uses it suggest that those she writes about are not "mouthpieces of the Zeitgeist", but, rather, that the routine repetitive horrors of the twentieth century form the substance of the dark against which their lives of illuminat...