David Bindman. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca, NY: Co... more David Bindman. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. 264 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8014-4085-8.-Teo-2004-Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences-Wiley Online Library
More and more we are challenged by today’s learning environment – students are different, digital... more More and more we are challenged by today’s learning environment – students are different, digital tools are evolving, and instructors are continually asked to do more with less yet show greater results. With the creation of Many Europes, Choice & Chance in Western Civilization, an entirely integrated program, we recognize this changing environment and set out with the goal of better meeting the western civilization course challenges of improving student performance, critical analysis skills, and overall comprehension in a continually evolving teaching and learning environment. What does it mean – integrated program? Rather than a traditional narrative text that then has ancillary support material or supplements tacked onto it, Many Europes was constructed as a program. Each narrative section has clearly stated learning objectives that are tied to the digital tools which drive the program’s assessment. A key tool in driving knowledge is McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart, an adaptive assessmen...
This article treats the reception history of Herodotus—reputed to be both “the father of history”... more This article treats the reception history of Herodotus—reputed to be both “the father of history” and “the father of lies”—between about 1670 and 1850. It focuses attention on book 2 of The Histories, in which Herodotus offers an extensive, and ostensibly firsthand, account of the monuments, geography, customs, flora, and fauna of Egypt. Most arrestingly for modern European readers, book 2 also contains descriptions of Egyptian religious practices and a chronology of Egyptian kings. Crucially, however, much of what Herodotus reports on these two subjects he learned not directly, but by listening to accounts of men whom he labeled “Egyptian priests.” In the eighteenth century in particular, I argue, these “priests” and their indirect testimony began to pose a serious historiographical problem: had Herodotus, naively, trusted them too much? If so, was his credibility with respect to the other contents of the “oriental” prelude to The Histories (books 1–4) impugned? The essay shows tha...
In the period between about 1800 and 1930, Europeans engaged in what is called in this essay an “... more In the period between about 1800 and 1930, Europeans engaged in what is called in this essay an “antiquities rush”. Napoleon’s extractions of antiquities from Rome generated reaction from the Romans, however, who began to think of their antiquities as national, rather than personal property, and imposed a series of new export bans on artefacts. From this time forward, European nations competed to fill their museums with authentic classical and Egyptian artefacts, generating in turn a series of new antiquities export bans that travelled eastward, in the wake of the “rush”. The essay concludes with a brief account of a final, rapacious “antiquities rush” in Chinese Turkestan, and its gradual closing down by the 1930s. The aim of the piece is to show how the “antiquities rush” involved both Europeans and local officials, and concluded by making archaeology a more sessile discipline, in which excavators are no longer driven by the dialectics of the rush
David Bindman. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca, NY: Co... more David Bindman. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. 264 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8014-4085-8.-Teo-2004-Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences-Wiley Online Library
More and more we are challenged by today’s learning environment – students are different, digital... more More and more we are challenged by today’s learning environment – students are different, digital tools are evolving, and instructors are continually asked to do more with less yet show greater results. With the creation of Many Europes, Choice & Chance in Western Civilization, an entirely integrated program, we recognize this changing environment and set out with the goal of better meeting the western civilization course challenges of improving student performance, critical analysis skills, and overall comprehension in a continually evolving teaching and learning environment. What does it mean – integrated program? Rather than a traditional narrative text that then has ancillary support material or supplements tacked onto it, Many Europes was constructed as a program. Each narrative section has clearly stated learning objectives that are tied to the digital tools which drive the program’s assessment. A key tool in driving knowledge is McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart, an adaptive assessmen...
This article treats the reception history of Herodotus—reputed to be both “the father of history”... more This article treats the reception history of Herodotus—reputed to be both “the father of history” and “the father of lies”—between about 1670 and 1850. It focuses attention on book 2 of The Histories, in which Herodotus offers an extensive, and ostensibly firsthand, account of the monuments, geography, customs, flora, and fauna of Egypt. Most arrestingly for modern European readers, book 2 also contains descriptions of Egyptian religious practices and a chronology of Egyptian kings. Crucially, however, much of what Herodotus reports on these two subjects he learned not directly, but by listening to accounts of men whom he labeled “Egyptian priests.” In the eighteenth century in particular, I argue, these “priests” and their indirect testimony began to pose a serious historiographical problem: had Herodotus, naively, trusted them too much? If so, was his credibility with respect to the other contents of the “oriental” prelude to The Histories (books 1–4) impugned? The essay shows tha...
In the period between about 1800 and 1930, Europeans engaged in what is called in this essay an “... more In the period between about 1800 and 1930, Europeans engaged in what is called in this essay an “antiquities rush”. Napoleon’s extractions of antiquities from Rome generated reaction from the Romans, however, who began to think of their antiquities as national, rather than personal property, and imposed a series of new export bans on artefacts. From this time forward, European nations competed to fill their museums with authentic classical and Egyptian artefacts, generating in turn a series of new antiquities export bans that travelled eastward, in the wake of the “rush”. The essay concludes with a brief account of a final, rapacious “antiquities rush” in Chinese Turkestan, and its gradual closing down by the 1930s. The aim of the piece is to show how the “antiquities rush” involved both Europeans and local officials, and concluded by making archaeology a more sessile discipline, in which excavators are no longer driven by the dialectics of the rush
Die Beziehung aschkenasischer Juden zum Orient ist spannungsgeladen. Spätestens ab der zweiten Hä... more Die Beziehung aschkenasischer Juden zum Orient ist spannungsgeladen. Spätestens ab der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts bedeutete „Orient“ ein fremdkulturelles Konzept, gegen das man sich abgrenzen wollte. Man versuchte, der zunehmenden Ausgrenzung mittels jenes Orientalismus, der oft den europäischen „Osten“ einschloss, entgegenzutreten. Die Reaktionen reichten von der Besiedelung der neuen/alten Heimat über die Vermittlung zwischen „Ost“ und „West“ bis hin zum Aufgehen in der Welt des Islam. Mit der Gründung des Staates Israel im Jahr 1948 änderte sich die Grundlage dieses Verhältnisses zwischen Orient und Okzident, in dem Juden bis heute eine Sonderstellung einnehmen. Der Band beleuchtet dieses Verhältnis anhand ausgesuchter Einzelbiographien.
Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton Universit... more Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Porcelain balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Rather than a history of art or aesthetics per se—though it certainly touches style and artists— Porcelain is at once a business history of mercantile productions, a history of chemistry at the dawn of modern industry, and a history of aristocratic consumption of porcelain as these stories open into an economic history of globalized markets, as well as a social history of sorts of Central Europe’s fledgling bourgeois and lower-class consumer public. Marchand traces these interlocking stories across three centuries, from the first European firing of porcelain in 1708 under the supervision of Johann Friedrich Böttger to the present day, where contemporary tastes threaten to consign the white tableware of Europe’s past to the flea markets of today. Porcelain in Marchand’s hands acts as something like an objet de mémoire, to think of Pierre Nora and other scholars’ work on national histories. One of the book’s many virtues is the sense of Professor Marchand reassembling a continental pattern out of several shards.
Porcelain, as Professor Marchand writes, “is a rich and complicated adventure, in which we not only visit lavishly decorated palaces but also linger in blisteringly hot craft workshops and spartan working-class homes. Though actual porcelain objects in all their splendor and strangeness play a central role, the focus is really on the people who made, marketed, and purchased them, whether they were princes, or peddlers, or middle-class housewives.” It is also an attempt to write Central European history in a new way, one that the author hopes will be taken up by other scholars of history and material culture.
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Porcelain, as Professor Marchand writes, “is a rich and complicated adventure, in which we not only visit lavishly decorated palaces but also linger in blisteringly hot craft workshops and spartan working-class homes. Though actual porcelain objects in all their splendor and strangeness play a central role, the focus is really on the people who made, marketed, and purchased them, whether they were princes, or peddlers, or middle-class housewives.” It is also an attempt to write Central European history in a new way, one that the author hopes will be taken up by other scholars of history and material culture.