Encyclopedia of the War of 1812

Customer Reviews:

Very Good.......2002-05-20

I did not think much of this book at first. However, over time I have found it to be to far better. It covers nearly all topics of the war and gives a good brief description. Some are better covered than others. Most have an extremely useful list of references for further reading. Therefore, it is useful for the beginner and expert.
A few maps are at the front and end of the book. Individual battles do not have a high level of detail or maps. A large portion is dedicated to bios of those involved.

Useful reference work.......2000-04-22

"Encyclopedia of the War of 1812" fills a gap in the study of American history. The War of 1812 is often regarded as the last chapter in the American Revolution. It is usually boiled down to a mere skirmish between the fledging American nation and the British Empire before the two eventually became firm allies.

The encyclopedia includes useful entries ranging from a few lines to several pages on key military and civilian leaders on both sides of the conflict, significant battles, and important diplomatic treaties that resulted in starting and ending the war. In all, this a fine reference work that allows the War of 1812 to stand as a watershed in the development of the American nation.

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Encyclopedia of the War of 1812. (Book Reviews).(Review): An article from: Journal of Southern History
Samuel J. Watson
Manufacturer: Southern Historical Association
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

History | Encyclopedias | Reference | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: B0008IIUKQ
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Southern Historical Association on November 1, 2001. The length of the article is 847 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Encyclopedia of the War of 1812. (Book Reviews).(Review)
Author: Samuel J. Watson
Publication: Journal of Southern History (Refereed)
Date: November 1, 2001
Publisher: Southern Historical Association
Volume: 67 Issue: 4 Page: 840(3)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

WAR OF 1812: An entry from Thomson Gale's
<i>West's Encyclopedia of American Law</i>

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WAR OF 1812: An entry from Thomson Gale's West's Encyclopedia of American Law

Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

War of 1812 | Military | History | Subjects | Books

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Book Description

â€œWest's Encyclopedia of American Lawâ€ is 13 volumes and 5,000 entries of comprehensive information on the fascinating American Legal System and its components. Covering historical and current terms, concepts, events, movements, cases, and persons significant to U.S law, Westâ€™s has been written, updated, and reviewed by lawyers and professors with the everyday user in mind. Everyone from the layperson hooked on the weekly TV courtroom procedural to the serious student can find such valuable information as brief definitions of legal jargon, exhaustive examinations of courtroom procedure, explanations of complex topics such as civil rights, biographies of standout attorneys, analyses of controversial issues, and transcripts of crucial Supreme Court decisions.

Book Description

Visions of the City is a dramatic history of utopian urbanism in the twentieth century. It explores radical demands for new spaces and ways of living, and considers their effects on planning, architecture and struggles to shape urban landscapes. The author critically examines influential utopian approaches to urbanism in western Europe associated with such figures as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, uncovering the political interests, desires and anxieties that lay behind their ideal cities. He also investigates avant-garde perspectives from the time that challenged these conceptions of cities, especially from within surrealism. At the heart of this richly illustrated book is an encounter with the explosive ideas of the situationists. Tracing the subversive practices of this avant-garde group and its associates from their explorations of Paris during the 1950s to their alternative visions based on nomadic life and play, David Pinder convincingly explains the significance of their revolutionary attempts to transform urban spaces and everyday life. He addresses in particular Constant's New Babylon, finding within his proposals a still powerful provocation to imagine cities otherwise. The book not only recovers vital moments from past hopes and dreams of modern urbanism. It also contests current claims about the 'end of utopia', arguing that reconsidering earlier projects can play a critical role in developing utopian perspectives today. Through the study of utopian visions, it aims to rekindle elements of utopianism itself.

"A superb critical exploration of the underside of utopian thought over the last hundred years and its continuing relevance in the here and now for thinking about possible urban worlds. The treatment of the Situationists and their milieu is a revelation."

David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate School

Visions of Utopia (New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities)

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Visions of Utopia (New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities)
Edward Rothstein , Herbert Muschamp , and Martin E. Marty
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0195171616

Book Description

From the sex-free paradise of the Shakers to the worker's paradise of Marx, utopian ideas seem to have two things in common--they all are wonderfully plausible at the start and they all end up as disasters. In Visions of Utopia, three leading cultural critics--Edward Rothstein, Martin Marty, and Herbert Muschamp--look at the history of utopian thinking, exploring why they fail and why they are still worth pursuing. Rothstein contends that every utopia is really a dystopia-- one that overlooks the nature of humanity and the impossibilities of paradise. He traces the ideal in politics and technology and suggests that only in art--and especially in music--does the desire for utopia find satisfaction. Marty examines several models of utopia--from Thomas More's to a 1960s experimental city that he helped to plan--to show that, even though utopias can never be realized, we should not be too quick to condemn them. They can express dimensions of the human spirit that might otherwise be stifled and can plant ideas that may germinate in more realistic and practical soil. Muschamp looks at Utopianism as exemplified in two different ways: the Buddhist tradition and the work of visionary Viennese architect Adolph Loos. Utopian thinking embodies humanity's noblest impulses, yet it can lead to horrors such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Regime. In Visions of Utopia, these leading thinkers offer an intriguing look at the paradoxes of paradise.

Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space

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Envisioning a Wonderful Future in Space

Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space
De Witt Douglas Kilgore
Manufacturer: University of Pennsylvania Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Futurology | Technology | Science | Subjects | Books

History & Criticism | Fantasy | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books

History & Criticism | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0812218477

Book Description

""Kilgore demonstrates not only how to read nonfiction with the same analytic eye as one reads fiction but also how to read all texts without the cultural filter of whiteness as the default perceptual mode.""--Science Fiction Studies Astrofuturis

Customer Reviews:

Envisioning a Wonderful Future in Space.......2005-09-17

In so many ways this is a stunning book. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, an English professor at Indiana University, employs the tools of post-modern analysis to pro-space advocacy from David Lasser in the 1920s and 1930s to Robert Zubrin at the end of the twentieth century. He suggests that advocates of spaceflight have long believed that it is human destiny to become a multi-planetary species, but not just as an end in itself but because of the desire to create a utopian society free from the constraints of cultures on Earth. His term for this is "astrofuturism," an extension of the American tradition of technological utopianism that has been so much a part of the political upheavals of the twentieth century.

Kilgore asserts that the pro-space utopian impulse was founded in the imperial politics and utopian schemes of the nineteenth century, but envisions outer space as an endless frontier that offers solutions to the economic and political problems that dominate the modern world. Its advocates used the conventions of technological and scientific conquest to express the ideals and contradictions endemic to American culture. Astrofuturists, according to Kilgore, imagined space frontiers that could extend the reach of the human species and heal its historical wounds. Their efforts both replicated dominant social presuppositions and supplied the technologies necessary for the critical utopian projects that emerged in the latter twentieth century.

Kilgore's scintillating narrative explores how this has played out in the writings of several pro-space advocates. He begins with David Lasser, an American who worked as an editor on two of Hugo Gernsback's science fiction magazines. Lasser wrote "The Conquest of Space" in 1930, laying out a leftist agenda for societies in space. He later went on to work as a union organizer but never abandoned his commitment to spaceflight as a way in which the oppressed might achieve an egalitarian society. From there Kilgore explores the work of science fiction authors Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ben Bova. He also offers an in-depth exploration of the thinking of Princeton University scientist Gerard O'Neill, who excited numerous counterculture refugees in the 1970s with his vision of colonies in space. Finally, Kilgore extends this search for a perfect society to current explanations of colonies on Mars and other planets.

Throughout this book Kilgore is concerned with the envisioning of futures that are inherently better in space than what exists on Earth. The novelists that he discusses always display a strong sense of justice, meritocracy, and, at least in the case of Heinlein, not a little libertarianism. A special theme that he investigates in this study is how the astrofuturists dealt with the racism so prevalent in American society, showing that in the science fiction discussed here it is overcome by a belief in the worth of all persons and an acceptance of others based on their capabilities. As Kilgore demonstrates, all of the astrofuturists, whether science fiction writers or not, always posit an open, boundless future for all humanity in space. It would be a place in which justice ruled and all had enough of every necessity of life. Space exploration would bring that, the astrofuturists believed, helping people to live together in greater harmony than ever before by ending the need to compete for resources. Kilgore maintains that this is a very important aspect of a positive future. He insists that "It is through this kind of imaginative work that we develop the tools we need to change the future" (p. 238).

"Astrofuturism" is a provocative discussion of how we have looked at a positive future in space. Kilgore notes that those involved in promulgating the astrofuturist ideology have emphasized the synergy between human and machines, social concerns and possibilities. Highly recommended.

Utopian Visions (Mysteries of the Unknown)

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Utopian Visions (Mysteries of the Unknown)

Manufacturer: Time Life Education
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0809463768

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Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon
Candace Slater
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0520226429

Book Description

Candace Slater takes us on a journey into the Amazon that will forever change our ideas about one of the most written-about, filmed, and fought-over areas in the world. In this book she deftly traces a rich and marvelous legacy of stories and images of the Amazon that reflects the influence of widely different groups of people--conquistadors, corporate executives, subsistence farmers --over the centuries. A careful, passionate consideration of one of the most powerful environmental icons of our time, Entangled Edens makes clear that we cannot defend the Amazon's dazzling array of plants and animals without comprehending its equally astonishing human and cultural diversity.
Early explorers describe encounters with fearsome warrior women and tell of golden cities complete with twenty-four-carat kings. Contemporary miners talk about a living, breathing gold. TV documentaries decry deforestation and mercury poisoning. How do these disparate visions of the Amazon relate to one another? As she fits the pieces of the puzzle together, Slater shows how today's widespread portrayal of the region as a fragile rain forest on the brink of annihilation is every bit as likely as earlier depictions to obscure important aspects of this immense and complicated region.
In this book, Slater draws on her fifteen years of experience collecting stories and oral histories among many different groups of people in the Amazon. Throughout Entangled Edens, the voices of contemporary Amazonians mingle with the analyses of such writers as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Theodore Roosevelt, and nineteenth-century naturalist Henry Walter Bates. Slater convinces us that these stories and ideas, together with an understanding of their origins and ongoing impact, are as critical as scientific analyses in the fight to preserve the rain forest.

The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction

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The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction
Jonathan Beecher , and Richard Bienvenu
Manufacturer: Univ of Missouri Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living Around the Globe

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An inside view of fifteen communities world-wide.

Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living Around the Globe
Bill Metcalf
Manufacturer: Findhorn Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Customs & Traditions | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1899171010

Book Description

15 communards from all corners of the globe give a very frank and personal accounts of what it is like to live communally today, to be born and reared, to have children, and to face death within a communal.

Customer Reviews:

An inside view of fifteen communities world-wide........1997-09-16

In this work, Dr. Metcalf adopts a new and refreshing approach, placing the main emphasis on the interior perspectives of his subjects, but without abandoning his academic objectivity. Long-time members of fifteen communities on five continents tell their own stories, responding to a set of questions prepared by Dr. Metcalf. We are given an insider's view of the different motives which inspire people to live in communities, and the various outcomes. The result is a fascinating snapshot of this unusual aspect of human nature as people confront the clash between ideal and reality. Their responses, as they struggle to find a 'modus vivendi', are as different as their original motives. Some of the communities are religious, some spiritual not tied to a creed, and some are secular. Most are rural, but two are urban. In a few, government is paternalistic, but most are democratic, some consensual, yet others an eclectic blend. A few embrace gender roles, others determinedly eschew them. All fifteen are open to the outside world and in that important respect avoid the charge of cultism.

Like the wider world, these communities face ongoing challenges of personality, governance, growth and maturity. Strong personalities may provoke conflict, alternatively the loss of a leader can be devastating. Growth produces bureaucracy which may stifle the inspiration of the community's original ideals. Techniques to resolve conflict and circumvent an arthritic maturity are as essential to the enduring community as they are to a city or country. There is instruction for all of us in the ways these social microcosms meet the challenges. One common feature, often neglected by our wider society, is that they seem to have fun together.

Book Description

Cartan geometries were the first examples of connections on a principal bundle. They seem to be almost unknown these days, in spite of the great beauty and conceptual power they confer on geometry. The aim of the present book is to fill the gap in the literature on differential geometry by the missing notion of Cartan connections. Although the author had in mind a book accessible to graduate students, potential readers would also include working differential geometers who would like to know more about what Cartan did, which was to give a notion of "espaces généralisés" (= Cartan geometries) generalizing homogeneous spaces (= Klein geometries) in the same way that Riemannian geometry generalizes Euclidean geometry. In addition, physicists will be interested to see the fully satisfying way in which their gauge theory can be truly regarded as geometry.

Customer Reviews:

Great Book.......2007-01-03

I was fortunate enough to have Sharpe as my supervisor at University of Toronto just when his book was published. His highly abstract thinking is very impressive and I have enjoyed immensely his first chapter on differential topology, which is my specialized area. Though his book branches off into realms that don't particularly suit me, the beginnings of his book had given me great inspiration in my discipline in differential topology

Differential Geometry: Cartan's Generalization of Klein's Erlangen Program .......2006-11-10

This is definitely a graduate school text. Though I believe the text can be read by a eager undergraduate. The text is about Differential Geometry.
The subject matter demands that the reader read more than 1 book on the subject. This is a good introduction to a difficult but useful mathematical discipline.

Everything via principal bundles........2000-07-27

Sharpe's book is a detailed argument supporting the assertion that most of differential geometry can be considered the study of principal bundles and connections on them, disguised as an introductory differential geometry textbook.

Some standard introductory material (e.g. Stokes' theorem) is omitted, as Sharpe confesses in his preface, but otherwise this is a truly wonderful place to read about the central role of Lie groups, principal bundles, and connections in differential geometry. The theme is that what one can do for Lie groups, one can do fiberwise for principal bundles, to yield information about the base.

The informal style (just look at the table of contents) and wealth of classical examples make this book a pleasure to read. While its somewhat nonstandard approach and preference for classical terminology might confuse those who have never been introduced to the concepts, this is a perfect *second* place to read and marvel about differential geometry.

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