When Money Talks

Author(s):  
Frank L. Holt

This book tells the story of numismatics, the study of coins, as part of the larger history of money. It explains why and where coinage was invented and how this monetary revolution spread around the world. By examining sources ranging from Aristotle and the Gospels to modern novels and TV sitcoms, this book highlights how historians, philosophers, poets, and religious leaders have used coinage to investigate, teach, and preach about human societies. It uses new ideas about memes and object agency to ask whether coins can act as though independent of human oversight. It details how numismatists have become more scientific since the Renaissance, although misuses of physiognomy and phrenology still hamper the field. Coins are studied not solely as individual works of art, but also as meaningful groups brought together as treasures called hoards. The analysis of buried hoards offers many interesting insights into human behavior, particularly in times of political turmoil and natural disaster. Although numismatics shares a common origin with archaeology, these disciplines have clashed in recent history, particularly over the disputed rights of amateurs to collect artifacts of historical importance. This book explores the ethics of coin collecting and considers whether paleontology might provide a model for the future of numismatics. New forms of numismatic investigation, such as Cognitive Numismatics, also pave a novel path for one of the oldest and most respected contributors to the arts and humanities.

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-287
Author(s):  
Bill Luckin

Non-controversially, the full version of this article argues that the crisis in British higher education will impoverish teaching and research in the arts and humanities; cut even more deeply into these areas in the post-1992 sector; and threaten the integrity of every small sub-discipline, including the history of medicine. It traces links between the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s and the near-privatisation of universities proposed by the Browne Report and partly adopted by the coalition. The article ends by arguing that it would be mistaken to expect any government-driven return to the status quo ante. New ideas and solutions must come from within. As economic and cultural landscapes are transformed, higher education will eventually be rebuilt, and the arts and social sciences, including medical history, reshaped in wholly unexpected ways. This will only happen, however, if a more highly politicised academic community forges its own strategies for recovery.


2021 ◽  
pp. 204382062098639
Author(s):  
Aya Nassar

In this engagement with Eric Magrane’s article, ‘Climate Geopolitics (The Earth is a Composted Poem)’, I follow two provocations: first, geopoetics as travelling through disciplinary turfs, and second, geopoetics as storytelling. Coming from a disciplinary trajectory that spent a long stop at international relations (IR), these provocations attach me to geopoetics as practice and a growing field. My engagement here is oriented to geopoetics not only at the threshold of geography and the arts and humanities, but also the intersections of geography and politics. I primarily propose that viewing geopoetics as an open space for experimenting allows for disrupting masterful understandings of the academic self and counters a univocal, universal narrative of the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-421
Author(s):  
Partha Bhattacharjee ◽  
Priyanka Tripathi

Argha Manna is a cancer-researcher-turned cartoonist. He worked as a research fellow at Bose Institute, India. After leaving academic research, he joined a media-house and started operating as an independent comics artist. He loves to tell stories from the history of science, social history and lab-based science through visual narratives. His blog, Drawing History of Science (https://drawinghistoryofscience.wordpress.com), has been featured by Nature India. Argha has been collaborating with various scientific institutes and science communicator groups from India and abroad. His collaborators are from National Centre for Biological Science (NCBS, Bangalore), Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB, Hyderabad), Jadavpur University (Kolkata), Heidelberg Center for Transcultural Studies (University of Heidelberg, Germany) and a few others. Last year, he received STEMPeers Fellowship for creating comics on the history of vaccination and other aspects of medical histories, published in Club SciWri, a digital publication wing of STEMPeers Group. Currently, Argha is collaborating in a project, ‘Famine Tales from India and Britain’ as a graphic artist. This is a UK-based project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, led by Dr Ayesha Mukherjee, University of Exeter. In this interview, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi speak with Indian ‘alternative’ cartoonist Argha Manna to trace his journey from a cancer researcher to a cartoonist. Manna is a storyteller of history of science, in visuals. Recently, his works reflect social problems under the light of historical and scientific theories. Bhattacharjee and Tripathi trace Manna’s shift from a science-storyteller in a visual medium to a medical-cartoonist who is working on issues related to a global pandemic, its impact on life and literature vis-à-vis social intervention. They also focus on Manna’s latest comics on COVID-19.


Author(s):  
Ellen Lockhart

This book considers the history of aesthetics by taking into account not only theories of the arts but also the rich fabric of practices relating to the world of performing bodies onstage and the music that sounded alongside them and was made by them—the works of art, music, and theater that were conspicuously about art-objecthood. The introduction sketches the broader fashion for animated statues described in the book, asking what readers can hope to gain from a detailed account of this historical phenomenon that was situated at (or near) the emergence of modern aesthetic thought, as well as the birth of a musical canon.


2011 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 347-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fair

When it opened in March 1958, the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, was the first new professional theatre to be constructed in Britain for nearly two decades and the country’s first all-new civic theatre (Figs 1 and 2). Financially supported by Coventry City Council and designed in the City Architect’s office, it included a 910-seat auditorium with associated backstage facilities. Two features of the building were especially innovative, namely its extensive public foyers and the provision of a number of small flats for actors. The theatre, whose name commemorated a major gift of timber to the city of Coventry from the Yugoslav authorities, was regarded as the herald of a new age and indeed marked the beginning of a boom in British theatre construction which lasted until the late 1970s. Yet its architecture has hitherto been little considered by historians of theatre, while accounts of post-war Coventry have instead focused on other topics: the city’s politics; its replanning after severe wartime bombing; and the architecture of its new cathedral, designed by Basil Spence in 1950 and executed amidst international interest as a symbol of the city’s post-war recovery. However, the Belgrade also attracted considerable attention when it opened. The Observer’s drama critic, Kenneth Tynan, was especially effusive, asking ‘in what tranced moment did the City Council decided to spend £220,000 on a bauble as superfluous as a civic playhouse?’ For him, it was ‘one of the great decisions in the history of local government’. This article considers the architectural implications of that ‘great decision’. The main design moves are charted and related to the local context, in which the Belgrade was intended to function as a civic and community focus. In this respect, the Labour Party councillors’ wish to become involved in housing the arts reflected prevailing local and national party philosophy but was possibly amplified by knowledge of eastern European authorities’ involvement in accommodating and subsidizing theatre. In addition, close examination of the Belgrade’s external design, foyers and auditorium illuminates a number of broader debates in the architectural history of the period. The auditorium, for example, reveals something of the extent to which Modern architecture could be informed by precedent. Furthermore, the terms in which the building was received are also significant. Tynan commented: ‘enter most theatres, and you enter the gilded cupidacious past. Enter this one, and you are surrounded by the future’. Although it was perhaps inevitable that the Belgrade was thought to be unlike older theatres, given that there had been a two-decade hiatus in theatre-building, the resulting contrast was nonetheless rather appropriate, allowing the building to connote new ideas whilst also permitting us to read the Belgrade in terms of contemporary debates about the nature of the ‘modern monument’.


Antiquity ◽  
1928 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 26-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Randall-MacIver

The standard Roman histories, especially when written by authors who have an undisguised contempt for archaeology, give very little idea of the civilization and development of Italy before the later days of the Republic. They are histories of Rome but not of Italy. And so the reader is subconsciously led to suppose that the Romans were the most important and the most advanced people on the peninsula, who gradually extended the benefits of their superior civilization over a series of more or less barbarous neighbours. This is a complete inversion of the real facts. The Romans of the Republic were a rather backward people, and it was hardly before the second century B.C. that they could begin to rank as the equals of the Italian provincials in general refinement and culture. Incessantly occupied with the wars which were essential to their very existence, the Romans had no leisure, even if they possessed the inclination, to cultivate the arts and humanities. But, while the future head of the world was struggling for bare life, a rich Italian civilization had been born and developed in the independent territories which had not yet fallen under her sway. Before ever they came under the organizing and levelling domination of the central capital, Etruria, Venetia, Lombardy and Picenum had each evolved its own distinct and very valuable local culture; while the whole south from Naples to Brindisi had been civilized by Corinthian and Ionic influence. Rome when she conquered and annexed these territories in due sequence fell heir to a fully finished product. Italy had been created, but not by Rome; the task that fell to the Romans was much more suited to their peculiar abilities—they had to organize and administer the country.


Giuseppe Mazzini – Italian patriot, humanist, and republican – was one of the most celebrated and revered political activists and thinkers of the 19th century. This volume compares and contrasts the perception of his thought and the transformation of his image across the world. Mazzini's contribution to the Italian Risorgimento was unparalleled; he stood for a ‘religion of humanity’; he argued against tyranny, and for universal education, a democratic franchise, and the liberation of women. The chapters in this book reflect the range of Mazzini's political thought, discussing his vision of international relations, his concept of the nation, and the role of the arts in politics. They detail how his writings and reputation influenced nations and leaders across Europe, the Americas, and India. The book links the study of political history to the history of art, literature and religion, modern nationalism, and the history of democracy.


1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-365
Author(s):  
Donald R. Kelley

AbstractChristophe Milieu's De Scribenda Vniversitatis rervm historia libri qvinqve (Basel, 1551) interprets the "universe of things" (universitas return) within an evolutionary and historical framework consisting of five connected and progressive "grades" (gradus) of existence accessible to human understanding: nature (natura), the world of God's creation and man's animal aspect; prudence (prudentia), including the arts of survival; government (principatus), the stage of civil society and political history; wisdom (sapientia), equivalent to civilization and including the higher sciences and philosophy; and literature (litetatura), in which knowledge of the preceding phases of "progress" (progressio) is expressed in writing. Milieu's "narrative" constitutes a pioneering and comprehensive history of western culture.


1875 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. v-xcvii

IT is a mere truism in the history of revolutions to assert that they are seldom brought to a close by the persons or political parties with whom they originate. Men whose existence was perhaps scarcely known to the world at large when the onward movement took its origin rise in succession to the surface, acquire the government, and carry forward the work to lengths and heights which their predecessors never contemplated. It is in tracing this sequence of political parties, the gradual growth of what was looked upon in the first instance as a contemptible and almost senseless faction, its struggles for the mastery, the arts (too often unworthy) by which it acquired the ascendancy, its acts whilst in a condition of dominancy, and finally the errors by which it forfeited power and made way for the next in turn, that much of the interest of historical narrative is found.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-112
Author(s):  
Marlene Schäfers

Now running in its seventh year, Kurdish Studies has established itself as the leading venue for the publication of innovative, cutting-edge research on Kurdish history, politics, culture and society. According to Scopus scores, our journal is now positioned among the top publications within the History category of the Arts and Humanities, ranking 170 out of 1138 (84th percentile). In Cultural Studies, we stand at rank 193 out of 890 (78th percentile). This year’s second issue of Kurdish Studies brings to you yet another collection of thought-provoking pieces of original scholarship. Gerald Maclean provides us with a literary history of British literary accounts of Kurds and Kurdistan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Allan Hassaniyan investigates a similar geography, though within the context of contemporary fragmentation by national borders. Our third article shifts the focus from Iran to Iraq. Samme Dick examines the recent turn to Zoroastrianism amongst a growing number of Kurds living in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. 


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document