Conservators as first responders in a world where our cultural heritage is increasingly at riskConservation can be understood as a form of knowing; conservators extract meaning about the past from what remains, while noting what is missing and sometimes repairing it. In this erudite and virtuosic book, the historian Peter N. Miller imagines the outlines of a new, expansive notion of conservation that links the world around us—natural and man-made—to the world insid...

Antiquarian, lawyer, and cat lover Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) was a “prince” of the Republic of Letters and the most gifted French intellectual in the generation between Montaigne and Descartes. From Peiresc’s study in Aix-en-Provence, his insatiable curiosity poured forth in thousands of letters that traveled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provençal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recov...

Antiquarian, lawyer, and cat lover Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) was a “prince” of the Republic of Letters and the most gifted French intellectual in the generation between Montaigne and Descartes. From Peiresc’s study in Aix-en-Provence, his insatiable curiosity poured forth in thousands of letters that traveled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provençal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recov...

Weaving together literary and scholarly insights, History and Its Objects will prove indispensable reading for historians and cultural historians, as well as anthropologists and archeologists worldwide. — Nathan Schlanger, École nationale des chartes, ParisCultural history is increasingly informed by the history of material culture—the ways in which individuals or entire societies create and relate to objects both mundane and extraordinary—rather t...

The ten essays published in this volume were written over the space of a decade, but they were conceived from the start as a coherent whole, presenting Peiresc's study of discrete languages and literatures of the Near East and North Africa. For Peiresc the student of the Classical past, this described the eastern and southern space in which the Greeks and Romans lived and strove. For Peiresc the Christian, this was the world of the Bible that impacted upon the Greeks and Romans. And for Pe...

When István Hont died in 2013, the world lost a giant of intellectual history. A leader of the Cambridge School of Political Thought, Hont argued passionately for a global-historical approach to political ideas. To better understand the development of liberalism, he looked not only to the works of great thinkers but also to their reception and use amid revolution and interstate competition. His innovative program of study culminated in the landmark 2005 book Jealousy of Trade, whi...

This book is a project in comparative history, but along two distinct axes, one historical and the other historiographical. Its purpose is to constructively juxtapose the early modern European and Chinese approaches to historical study that have been called "antiquarian." As an exercise in historical recovery, the essays in this volume amass new information about the range of antiquarian-type scholarship on the past, on nature, and on peoples undertaken at either end of the Eurasian landma...

Find order and beauty in the kitchen with this delightfully elegant primer on washing the dishes that elevates and illuminates a seemingly routine chore.Washing the dishes is an ordinary, everyday task--but with examination and care, it can become much more. In this reverent guide to the household chore, Peter Miller shows us how washing dishes can become a joy, a delight, a meditative exercise, and an act of grace and rhythm.We pay so much attention to rec...

Ann Miller (1923-2004) was an American actress, dancer, singer and author. Best known as a tap dancer, Miller practiced all forms of dance, and some of her solo routines are considered as good as any recorded in film musical history. Despite a reputation as a kook who believed she was psychic, and the potentially flat image of a "glamour girl," Miller's wit, charm and genuine ability to act gave her and her characters depth.This biography presents Ann Miller's career in the context...

Collins Shorts – insight in an instant.The swarm behaviour of ant colonies has inspired computer programs for streamlining factory processes, telephone networks, and truck routes – find out how in this enlightening short that introduces a new take on the concept of collective intelligence and how it can be used to solve some of our most complex problems in business, science and technology.Collins Shorts are a fresh look at the ebook short, with the emphasis on vibrant desig...

A love letter to the small shop, and shop owners everywhere, by beloved bookseller Peter Miller.For more than four decades, Peter Miller has run a design bookshop that shares his name in Seattle. He has also written three of his own books, manuals about cooking and about food and about eating together. In Shopkeeping, Miller writes for the first time about his other love: shopkeeping.“There is a tradition of shopkeeping, a tradition of codes, etiqu...

Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis has been described as the most controversial of Lewis’s fiction—despised by some and celebrated by others. Yet Lewis himself regarded the novel as “far and away the best [book] I have written.” What are we to make of this strange and oftentimes dark retelling of the pagan myth of Cupid and Psyche?In this new guide, renowned philosopher and writer Peter Kreeft introduces readers to the style, setting, and characters of Lewis’s novel; walks ...