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Making Marvels
Featuring more than 150 treasures from several of the world’s most prestigious collections, Making Marvels explores the vital intersection of art, technology, and political power at the courts of early modern Europe. It was there, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, that a remarkable outpouring of creativity and learning gave rise to exquisite objects that were at once beautiful works of art and technological wonders. By amassing vast, glittering collections of these ingeniously crafted objects, princes flaunted their wealth and competed for mastery over the known world. More than mere status symbols, however, many of these marvels ushered in significant advancements that have had a lasting influence on astronomy, engineering, and even international politics. Incisive texts by leading scholars situate these works within the rich, complex symbolism of life at court, where science and splendor were pursued with equal vigor and together contributed to a culture of magnificence.
The Game Changers
Why is playing games a universal human instinct? And how can those games make your life happier, healthier and more fulfilled? In this fascinating look at games through the ages, Tim Clare explores how, through play, we become fully ourselves. From Roman anti-cheating devices to organised crime card syndicates, from Pokémon’s world domination to the combative domestic bonding ritual of Monopoly, The Game Changers explains why games are more popular now than ever, and how playing them helps us learn to be better losers, make smarter decisions and become more human.
Making Worlds
Taking into account the destructive powers of globalization, Making Worlds considers the interconnectedness of the world in the early modern period. This collection examines the interdisciplinary phenomenon of making worlds, with essays from scholars of history, literary studies, theatre and performance, art history, and anthropology. The volume advances questions about the history of globalization by focusing on how the expansion of global transit offered possibilities for interactions that included the testing of local identities through inventive experimentation with new and various forms of culture. Case studies show how the imposition of European economic, religious, political, and military models on other parts of the world unleashed unprecedented forces of invention as institutionalized powers came up against the creativity of peoples, cultural practices, materials, and techniques of making. In doing so, Making Worlds offers an important rethinking of how early globalization inconsistently generated ongoing dynamics of making, unmaking, and remaking worlds.
Across the Board
Across the Board is a rollicking journey through the history and culture of tabletop games and the unparalleled way that they bring people together "Rich with enticing origin stories, and a shining treatise on why games are so universal, so important, and so foundational to the human experience. This book beautifully explores their rich and textured legacy as everything from simple play to divine ritual. An exceptional read." —Tom Brewster, Shut Up & Sit Down "The best book on games I've read in years." —G.T. Karber, bestselling author of Murdle Tabletop games are ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because they’re everywhere: played in bars and cafés, churches and casinos, through s...
Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th-17th Centuries
This collection of essays examines the vogue for games and game playing as expressed in art and literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Focusing on games as a leitmotif of creative expression, these scholarly inquiries are framed as a response to two main questions: how were games used to convey special meanings in art and literature, and how did games speak to greater issues in European society? In chapters dealing with chess, playing cards, board games, dice, gambling, and outdoor and sportive games, essayists show how games were used by artists, writers, game makers and collectors, in the service of love and war, didactic and moralistic instruction, commercial enterprise, politics and diplomacy, and assertions of civic and personal identity. Offering innovative iconographical and literary interpretations, their analyses reveal how games“played, written about, illustrated and collected“functioned as metaphors for a host of broader cultural issues related to gender relations and feminine power, class distinctions and status, ethical and sexual comportment, philosophical and religious ideas, and conditions of the mind.
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Improving Education
Stimulated by current debate on the quality, effectiveness, and usefulness of educational research, this book shows how to improve research by combining theory, practice, and case studies. Topics include: the crisis of method, testing policy, and reconsidering the prescribed curriculum.
The Secrets of Rue St Roch
Spring 1917 on the Western Front: how were the Allies to discover where the Germans were going to make their next push, which parts of the line they were reinforcing? In this first full account of an Allied spying operation behind enemy lines during the First World War, Morgan describes how British military intelligence set up its Paris office in 1917 and persuaded a Luxembourg woman of remarkable courage to return as a spy to her native country to watch over the crucial railway marshalling yards there. To join her they sent Albert Baschwitz Meau, one of the most dashing, brave and colourful characters of this or any other war, who was floated one dark night in spring 1918 in an unpowered balloon over German lines... Morgan reveals how the Allies recruited agents in Europe and ran their operations in enemy-controlled territory. But as well as the espionage story, she also tells the personal stories of the individual men and women who worked under such intense pressure and in such exceptional circumstances. This is one of the most significant, as well as one of the most exciting, contributions to the literature of the First World War for many years.
