Popular History

The 1960s were a time of huge transformation, sustained and amplified by the music of that era: Rock and Roll. During the 19th and 20th centuries visionary and esoteric spiritual traditions influenced first literature, then film. In the 1960s they entered the realm of popular music, catalyzing the ecstatic experiences that empowered a generation. Exploring how 1960s rock and roll music became a school of visionary art, Christopher Hill shows how music raised consciousness on both the individual and collective levels to bring about a transformation of the planet.

How can art help us make sense of the world? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all. Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins's mastery of poetry and popular music shines in Equipment for Living. His singular ability to illustrate points with seemingly disparate examples will change the way you listen to music and read poetry.

What would it be like to live the life of a popular song? "My Life as a Song" is the story of a popular song, which takes readers on a journey that began near the end of the 19th Century, 1892 to be exact. The journey takes a reader through the history of recorded music by continuing up to the present with a determined reach into the future. The main character of the story, as the title suggests, is a song. The song was much more than a century old when “My Life as a Song” was written. It was older than any living human being. While the song has witnessed many historical changes via the...

Conspiracy theories, and particularly the belief that elements of the world are secretly controlled by individuals or groups, have been around for as long as people have lived in groups. Perhaps that’s inevitable—after all, those who are excluded from power are very likely to be inclined to see their position not as an outcome of their own choices or situation but because of the secret machinations of shadowy groups. One of the most widely discussed conspiracy theories concerns what has become known as the New World Order.

In 1977 a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in a house in Ithaca, New York to work on the most important mixtape ever conceived. It wasn’t from one person to another - it was from Earth to the cosmos. When NASA sent Voyagers 1 and 2 on a grand tour of the outer planets, they knew the ultimate fate of these plucky probes would be to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space.

In this timely, entertaining, and inspiring audiobook, Jedediah Bila chronicles her chaotic, confusing, and all-consuming love-hate relationship with - her cell phone. Stepping back from the whirlwind of texting, social media, and an endless sea of apps, Bila questions how our relationships, character, and sanity have suffered from our deep dive into the digital abyss. Exploring the toll that tech addiction took on her life, Bila reveals her missteps and mistakes, including several upending, life-altering months swirling in an ex-boyfriend’s cell-phone-enabled double life.

Texas legend has it that James Stephen Hogg, Governor of Texas from 1890 to 1894, named his daughters Ima and Ura, but that is only half-true: there never was a Ura. Ima had three brothers, Will, Mike, and Tom. Ima Hogg, who was born in 1882 and died in 1975 at age 93, became a legend in her own right, and this book is her story. It is also the story of the extraordinary bond between a father and a daughter.

Heralded as the most significant technological innovation since the smartphone, virtual reality is poised to transform our very notions of life and humanity. Though this tech is still in its infancy, to those on the inside, it is the future. VR will change how we work, how we experience entertainment, how we feel pleasure and other emotions, how we see ourselves, and most importantly, how we relate to each other in the real world. And we will never be the same. Peter Rubin, senior culture editor for Wired and the industry's go-to authority on the subject, calls it an "intimacy engine".

We may not often think of our clothes as having a function beyond covering our naked bodies and keeping us a little safer from the elements. But to discount the enormous influence of clothing on anything from economic cycles to the future of water scarcity is to ignore the greater meaning of the garments we put on our backs. Disrobed vividly considers the role that clothing plays in everything from natural disasters to climate change to terrorism to geopolitics to agribusiness.

From parsing Silicon Valley personal ads, hanging out with high tech gurus, attending conferences-cum-rallies or exposing the flaws in technolibertarian thinking, Borsook's observations, mordant wit, and furious passion awakens you to the social and political consequences of having computer geeks run the world.

Among all life on Earth, we alone experience rich moral emotions, follow complex rules governing how we treat one another, and engage in moral dialogue. But how did human morality evolve? And can humans become morally evolved? In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell draw on the latest research in the biological and social sciences to explain the key role that morality has played in human evolution.

Of all the white American pop music groups that hit the charts before the Beatles, only the Beach Boys continued to thrive throughout the British Invasion to survive into the 1970s and beyond. The Beach Boys helped define both sides of the era we broadly call the sixties, split between their early surf, car, and summer pop and their later hippie, counterculture, and ambitious rock.

"In nome della mia ormai pluridecennale consuetudine con le piante, ho immaginato che queste care compagne di viaggio, come genitori premurosi, dopo averci reso possibile vivere, vengano a soccorrerci osservando la nostra incapacità a garantirci la sopravvivenza. Come? Suggerendoci una vera e propria costituzione su cui costruire il nostro futuro di esseri rispettosi della Terra e degli altri esseri viventi.

Boomer tells the story of a generation born in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and whose members, the Baby Boomers, are now in their mid to late seventies. It is a generation that has experienced more technological, social, and cultural changes than any other in history.

In Stop Being Reasonable, philosopher and journalist Eleanor Gordon-Smith tells six lucid, gripping stories that show the limits of human reason. From the woman who realised her husband harboured a terrible secret, to the man who left the cult he had been raised in since birth, and the British reality TV contestant who, having impersonated someone else for a month, discovered he could no longer return to his former identity, all of the people interviewed radically altered their beliefs about the things that matter most.

China tiene un territorio inmenso, una historia milenaria y un variado ambiente natural y humano, por lo que la diversidad de sus viviendas populares es rara vez vista en la historia mundial de arquitectura. En el presente libro, se presenta los patios cuadrángulo profundos de Pekín con muros altos, y la teoría de suerte y beneficios, así como las viviendas finas, elegantes y simples en el sur de Anhui.

La milenaria, compleja y convulsa historia de China, acaso uno de los procesos históricos más llamativos de todo el planeta, estudiada con precisión y detalle en un período que comprende desde las Guerras del Opio, a la lucha entre Mao Zedong y Chang Kai-Shek y la posterior proclamación del comunismo y el nacimiento de la nueva República Popular China.

The study of classic and contemporary films can provide a powerful avenue to understand the experience of mental illness. In Madness at the Movies, James Charney, MD, a practicing psychiatrist and long-time cinephile, examines films that delve deeply into characters’ inner worlds, and he analyzes moments that help define their particular mental illness.

Celebrate the impact women have made in our culture: This feminist book is a beacon of brilliance. It is the perfect gift for artists, intellectuals, and anyone who seeks to be inspired by words and profound lives. Most of all, it is a celebration of the journeys and accomplishments of women who have worked to have their voices heard in black and white letters across the world.

The national debate over popular music's effect on character is both furious and confused. Conservatives complain primarily about lyrics, appealing to public decency and safety. Liberals, swift to the defense of any self-expression, simultaneously celebrate rock's liberating ethos and deny its cultural influence.