Bøger udgivet af University of Pennsylvania Press

Unlike most metrological systems throughout W. Europe, the Italian developed during the Middle Ages (MA) & Early Modern era without any ref. to a commonly accepted set of nat.-ethnic standards. Italy, with its many kingdoms, duchies, communes, etc., was never able to attain any level of metrological standardization outside the confines of severely restricted, small, independent, political jurisdictions. Not until unification in 1871, were Italian weights & measures (W&M) given a totally nat. character. And it was the metric system, & not a conglomerate of units from the old, that finally accomplished the task. This book presents a quantitative compilation, synthesis, & analysis of the principal pre-metric W&M employed throughout Italy & in those areas controlled or influenced by Italy from the Later MA to the age of metrication in the later 19th cent. Tables.

For the people of Chuuk and for students of religion and Micronesian culture, this book pulls together and makes available in English the somewhat scattered published accounts (largely in German), along with Goodenough's own (as yet unpublished) information about religious beliefs and ritual practices in pre-Christian Chuuk. The materials are presented in a way that seeks to document and illustrate a particular approach, a functional one, to understanding the kinds of human concerns that give rise to religious behavior. Simply to describe traditional beliefs and rituals without the relevant social background information leaves the reader without any feeling for what were the emotional concerns, engendered by life in Chuukese society, that ritual practices helped people address. Ward Goodenough offers a theoretical introduction, the necessary background information about Chuuk and the ways in which members of Chuukese society experienced themselves and their fellows, the world view and overall set of beliefs providing the intellectual framework within which ritual practices were formulated and understood, and the various bodies of ritual practices. He concludes the book with a summary that pulls together how the rituals described appear to related to the emotional concerns that growing up and living in Chuuk tended to create.

Frank Norris (1870-1902) has long been recognized by cultural historians as a "touchstone" figure, clearly signaling in 1899 the emergence of an Amer. school of Literary Naturalism. "McTeague: A Story of San Francisco" secured this honor for him that year as it registered more fully than any previous Amer. novel the Darwinian view of life that is the essential characteristic of all subsequent Naturalistic fictions. It thus marked as well the rejection of the Victorian Era's habitually idealistic representations of human nature and its basically religious world-view, offering instead a post-metaphysical portrait of the human condition that has remained popular in 20th-cent. literary and intellectual circles. Includes all of the known writings of Norris published between 11 April 1896 and 1897. Illus.

A woman of letters and the first woman member of the Amer. Philos. Soc., Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (nee Vorontsova) was also the first modern stateswoman in Russia. Dashkova was appointed director of the Acad. of Sciences by Catherine II and she founded and became Pres. of the Russian Acad. For 12 years, she headed both these prestigious academic institutions. She was a leading figure in 18th-cent. Russian culture as she strove to institute reforms, to adapt and apply the ideas of the Enlightenment, and to establish new approaches to the educ. of Russia's youth. This biography focuses on Dashkova's efforts in her life and works to isolate, clarify, and define patterns of action, identity, and gender for herself as well as for other women. Illus.

This is a print on demand publication. Tells a fascinating story about the trade relationship between the English East India Co. and the powerful Armenian merchant community of New Julfa that lasted over 100 years (17th and early 18th cent.). This relationship revolved around the Co's. continual efforts to break into the Armenian held silk and cloth markets. This trade relationship epitomizes the age of competitive partnership that existed then. Addresses the question "What was the key to the Armenian merchants' success during the pre-modern period?". Their "fabulous success" may be attributed to the rare atmosphere of trust that prevailed among the Armenian merchant community which, in turn, led to two significant benefits: organizational cost savings; and organizational innovations.

This is a print on demand publication. An annotated translation based on a collation of the Selestat and Phillipps-Corning (PC) manuscripts, with a reproduction of the two manuscripts. Contents: (1) The manuscripts and their background: The Selestat manuscript; The PC manuscript; Sir Thomas Phillips's pub. in "Archaeologia," 1847; Note on chap. enumeration; Table of concordance between manuscripts; A note on the translation; The "Mappae Clavicula" as a source for the history of technology; and The background and place of the "Mappae Clavicula" in the history of art; (2) The translation; (3) Appendices: Photorepro. of the Selestat manuscript; Photorepro. of the PC manuscript; and A note on the runes; and (4) Bibliography. This is not an original: it is copied on-demand.

From the summer of 1842 through the fall of 1843, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne kept a common journal of their daily lives in a notebook. The journal records the ordinary events and activities that occupied them as newlyweds: walks through the countryside around Concord, appraisals of their new home, encounters with neighbors (among them Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau), descriptions of the weather and the changing seasons -- all material that Hawthorne would later draw on for the preface to his second collection of tales, "Mosses from an Old Manse" (1846). Its most persistent note, however, is the mutual expression of marital happiness. This volume makes available for the first time a full facsimile edition of the journal.

Following in the succession of his 25 predecessors, Leon Abbett twice served as governor of New Jersey in the late 19nth century. A lifelong Democrat, he was a dynamic and visionary party leader who guided the citizens of New Jersey into a new urban industrial age. While he was a machine politician and party boss, he was also a notable reformer. That was a formidable combination for his time. Grappling with a series of hot political issues and braving the passions and divisions spawned by the Civil War, Abbett was one of the ablest and most intriguing men ever to be governor. Several new ideas were transformed into public policy during his tenure. Both in style and strategy, Abbett represented a sharp break from his predecessors. He was a prime example of a governor who both in crisis and in ordinary times broadened gubernatorial authority. He became both a policy and party leader. In this context, he was an important forerunner to a type of governor that had not yet appeared on the American political stage.

The need for these tables became pressing when hundreds of astronomical cuneiform tables in the British Museum became available for study, partly through the copies made in the 1880s and 1890s. All these texts originally came from some archive in Babylon which was discovered by Arabs in the middle of the 19th century. Most of the texts were written from about 330 B.C. to the first century A.D. Many of the texts are fragments of the original clay tables which have broken. In many cases, a fragment contains only parts of a few legible lines. Much of the information is of an astronomical character. It is evident that for investigations of these tablets the possibility of rapid scanning of accurately dated planetary positions is of primary importance.

In the mid-19th century, Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes was a member of the Amer. arctic expedition under the command of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane in search of the lost British explorer Sir John Franklin. Through his own hard fought experiences, combined with the knowledge learned from Polar Eskimos, he successfully influenced the course of Arctic discovery. As an elected politician in New York State during its Gilded Age, Hayes served the 'public good' for a decade, with accomplishments as far reaching as his Arctic service. In this book, the story emerges of a remarkable but forgotten explorer, writer, politician, and humanitarian who epitomized the rugged and restless spirit of adventure and individualism of 19th-century America. Illustrations.

The Todas are a small community who live on the isolated Nilgiri plateau in S. India. They lived there in aboriginal days, i.e. prior to the early 19th cent., in coexist. with other jungle communities. The local social org. was a cast-like system in which the Todas were the top-ranking community. Their population is a minuscule group within the enormous population of India or of the Dravidian part of India. However, the Todas have attracted a disproportionate amount of attention because of their difference from their neighbors in appearance, manners & customs. This study was based on linguistic data collected in a year of contact with the Todas in the 3-year period from mid-1935 to mid-1938. Contents: Grammar; Texts with Translation; & Commentary.

This is a print on demand publication. This correlation analysis of the cultural data in the Driver-Massey sample includes both tribe by tribe (Q-type) & trait by trait (R-type) comparisons of 392 culture traits among 245 tribes. The tribes were chosen to match the North American part of Murdock's (1967) sample. In addition, both groups of tribes & individual traits were correlated with the Voegelins' (1966) genetic language classification & with Georg Neumann's classification of physical types. Perhaps the most important finding is that most of the intertrait correlations cannot be explained or interpreted in functional or causal terms, but rather must be attributed to unknown causes, events, accidents, & agents of history. The principal methods used are the matrix ordering & tree diagram computer programs of Jorgensen (1969). The authors have intentionally avoided factor analysis & other matrix reduction techniques because they believe that such methods tend to obscure more than they reveal, by compacting the data into too small a number of factors. Their purpose has been to display all of the intertribal relationships in the largest tree diagram in anthropology to date, & also to exhibit the highest individual intertrait correlations in clusters & macroclusters. Illus.

When Frank Lambrecht arrived in Africa in 1945 he came with a 3 years' contract with the Congo Red Cross. What he found in the Belgian Congo was an old colonial system steeped in its traditions right down to the garb colonials wore & the separate class structure for Europeans & natives. When he left 14 years later Africa was on the verge of divesting itself of foreign rule & influence. Lambrecht's story is of the beauty of Africa & its people as well as a description of the many diseases that decimated its populations. His responsibility in the beginning, with a diploma in tropical medicine, was to care for the lepers. But it was on the tsetse fly that Lambrecht concentrated most of his research. The book describes his attempts to capture tsetse fly species & then to train his native staff to help him in his research. A fascinating glimpse into the earlier stages of public health in the 20th century, through the diaries & letters of a dedicated medical scientist. Illustrations.

Ancient Greek city-states typically administered themselves through more or less permanent divisions of their populations or territories. The Athenian system of phylai ("tribes"), trittyes ("Thirds") & demes ("villages") is the familiar example, but something is known of the arrangements of about 200 other states representing all regions of the Greek world. Drawing upon the predominantly epigraphic record, Dr. Jones provides the first comprehensive analysis, arranged on a state-by-state basis, of these organizations. The book documents the widespread tendency of the public units, quite apart from their state-wide administrative roles, to be organized internally as self-sustaining associations. Constituting a public social organization, these "new communities" addressed the problem of the persistence within the state of inherited regional or political pluralism. Precisely because of their artificiality, the public associations offered an innocuous alternative to the old, divisive loyalties. Thereby a degree of stability might be secured for these often deeply fragmented societies.

In 1847-48 Florence Nightingale, at that time a young woman of 27 and unknown to the world, accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bracebridge, who were wintering in Rome for health reasons. During that time she wrote over 50 letters to her family & friends describing the sights she had seen, the people she had met, & the political changes which were exciting Rome at this springtime of the risorgimento. She had actually been born in Florence, Italy (for which she was named) in 1820, while her family was spending several years on the Continent. This volume presents Florence's letters in four sections: en route to Italy; Rome; Paris, on the way home; & letters to Mr. Colyar. 16 illustrations.

The complexity of medieval & modern pre-metric weights & measures (W&M) in Britain presents an obstacle to scholarly research on Western European econ. history. The problem is: the approx. dimensions of many non-standardized measuring units, used by both the Crown & the regional & local markets, varied from time to time & from place to place; & the dimensions even of standard W&M used in any period are poorly understood. This book will clarify the confusion & bring a new focus to the field of metrology & a new understanding of the units. It includes: tables for rapid identification of all ruling English, Scottish, Irish, or Welsh sovereigns; current English Imperial, Amer. Customary, & metric units; & the basic equiv. for these W&M; & A Dict. of Brit. W&M.

""The Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of Jefferson" explores the history of science in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries"--

"This volume includes the original Latin text of Della Porta's "De Refractione" with English translation. Della Porta's volume explored optics at the time of the late Renaissance."--

This is the professional memoir of an ethnologist, who studies the cultures and languages of ethnic groups, in the present and in the past. Bricker's journeys -- from Hong Kong to Shanghai during World War II, to the U.S. after the war, to Germany, Harvard, southeastern Mexico, and eventually to New Orleans -- influenced her choice of ethnology as a career and shaped that career over 50 years. Ethnology served as the stepping stone for intellectual forays into other related fields, such as linguistics, ethnohistory, epigraphy, and astronomy, all focused on the Maya people of southern Mexico and Central America. Bricker, a Professor Emerita, is the author, with her husband, Harvey Bricker (1940-2017), of "Astronomy in the Maya Codices." Illus.

"One of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American political culture is what became of the United States Congress's state portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette during the British invasion of the Capitol, Washington, D.C., on the night of 24-25 August 1814. Conceived by Benjamin Franklin during a diplomatic mission, requested by the American delegates at the height of the War of Independence, and granted by the French king after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, these official full-length images of the French monarchs arrayed in ceremonial magnificence were recently identified as atelier copies after Antoine-Franðcois Callet's Louis XVI and âElisabeth Vigâee Le Brun's Marie-Antoinette (both 1783) and traced through Congress's successive assembly rooms at New York City (1785), Philadelphia (1790), and Washington (1800). The fate of the royal portraits has been difficult to determine due to the incomplete documentary record and conflicting eyewitness accounts. Larkin initially takes a telescopic approach to the problem, moving from British and French production of state portraits to assert political claims in North America and despoliation of Western European countries of their art treasures, to show British and American interests at stake in the practice of looting and incendiary warfare waged across the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay prior to the destruction of the public buildings in Washington, D.C. He then pursues a microscopic approach, analyzing period documents, letters, images, and plans to test the viability of two theories-that the royal portraits were burned by British troops during their occupation of the capital or looted by American scavengers during the chaotic aftermath. While physical evidence of the portrait artifacts remains elusive, this study of the images as objects of desire, danger, and loss breaks new ground for scholars desirous of constituting an art and material history for the War of 1812"--

Papers from a conference held at the American Philosophical Society, October 26-28, 2017. Cosponsored by the American Philosophical Society, the Museum of the American Revolution, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Topics: Prints, Performance, and Patriots in the Garden; Art in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions; Iconoclasts and Vandals; The Revolutionary Politics of Everyday Life; Remembering Revolution in Material Culture; Performance and Public Displays of Culture. Illus.

The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. This volume catalogs nearly 500 discrete accounts and more than 2,500 printings of them over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages. Short biographies of each African, print histories of the complete or partial life story, URL, and QR code links to the full text, maps, images, and more makes this volume an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, students, and others wishing to study transatlantic slavery using African voices. Illus.

Includes: Unpacking the Meaning of Maps, Power, & Boundaries; The Legacy of Major Sebastian Bauman's Map of the Siege of Yorktown; Mapping Old & New Empires in the Early U.S.; Cherokee Boundaries; Cherokee Territoriality, Anglo-Amer. Surveying, & the Creation of Borders in the Early 19th-Cent. West; Chickasaw & Cherokee Resistance to Amer. Colonization, 1785-1816; Hydrography, Natural History, & the Sea in the 19th Cent.; William Darby's "A Map of the State of Louisiana" & the Extension of Amer, Sovereignty over the "Neutral Ground" in the Louisiana-Texas Borderland, 1806-1819; Initiating the World's Longest Unfortified Boundary; Mapping Inequality, Resistance, & Solutions in Early National Phila.. Illus.

"An exploration of the classical text, Biblioteca Angelica Manuscript 1551, including explanations and theories on how it came to be"--

"This volume considers historical networks of knowledge creation and dissemination in early America"--

In October 2018, the Amer, Philosophical Soc. (APS) gathered a group of scholars, library professionals, & thought leaders to discuss the past, present, & future of the library. This also marked the 275th ann'y. of the APS, founded by Benjamin Franklin & several friends. Topics include: The Female Mind & the Art of Reading across the Color Line; Academic Libraries Supporting Change in Amer. Higher Educ., 1860-1920; Building the Native Amer. Collection at Amherst College; Toward Authentic Accessibility in Digital Libraries; Changing Attitudes Toward Access to Special Collections; Preservation of Electronic Gov't. Info.; Speculation on the Future of Library Curation; The Collection Is the Network; Future Frontiers for Special Collections Libraries. Illus.

"In view of the value placed in Scotland on education, reading, and self-improvement and the enterprise and inventiveness with which the inhabitants of the far poorer northern kingdom responded to the opportunities opened up to them by the Union with England, it is not surprising that Scotsmen were heavily represented in the printing and publishing trades. An altogether disproportionate number of the great publishing houses of the English-speaking world, whose names were to become household words - Blackie, Blackwood, Collins, Constable, Macmillan, Millar, Murray, Nelson, Smith and Elder, Strahan -- were founded by men, often enough of quite humble origin, from "north of the border."--

This volume considers the March 1560 conspiracy of Amboise and subsequent plots devised later that year to remove the young King Francis II from the sway of his chief advisors of the house of Guise and improve the legal situation of France's Protestant movement. New and rediscovered evidence reveals the conspiracies to have been more closely linked to the network of Reformed churches within France and to John Calvin in Geneva than previously understood. The results compel a reconsideration not only of events that are often said to have constituted the first act of the French Wars of Religion, but also of Calvin's political engagement and sagacity.

"This book reprints the scientific articles published by the American Philosophical Society in 1843 in celebration of its centennial"--