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Vestiges of Grandeur: Plantations of Louisiana's River Road
In an evocative sequel to the acclaimed New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence, author and photographer Richard Sexton returns with an in-depth visual journey through the hidden mansions—some inhabited, many now long abandoned—of Louisiana's River Road. Bordering the Mississippi, these antebellum landmarks were once the epitome of gracious living in the Deep South. Over the past century, these grand dwellings have slowly succumbed to time, humidity, and the reclamation of the land: first by nature, then by real-estate developers who built subdivisions, oil refineries, and strip malls where curtains of Spanish moss once swayed from the live oaks. This collection—featuring over 200 haunting color photographs with extensive captions explaining the architectural significance and history of each structure—is a beautiful elegy for a rapidly disappearing landscape and its ghosts..
Price: $12.94
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Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc
Bits of late Roman coinage, the mutilated torso of a marble Venus, blue debris from an early medieval glassworks, and the powder rasped from the reputed tomb of Mary Magdalene--these tantalizing mementos of human history found scattered throughout the landscape of southeastern France are the points of departure for Gustaf Sobin's lyrical narrative. A companion volume to his acclaimed Luminous Debris, Ladder of Shadows picks up where the former left off: with late antiquity, covering a period from roughly the third to the thirteenth century. Here Sobin offers brilliant readings of late Roman and early Christian ruins in his adopted region of Provence, sifting through iconographic, architectural, and sacramental vestiges to shed light on nothing less than the existential itself..
Price: $19.95
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Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings
Originally published anonymously in 1844, Vestiges proved to be as controversial as its author expected Integrating research in the burgeoning sciences of anthropology, geology, astronomy, biology, economics, and chemistry, it was the first attempt to connect the natural sciences to a history of creation. The author, whose identity was not revealed until 1884, was Robert Chambers, a leading Scottish writer and publisher. Vestiges reached a huge popular audience and was widely read by the social and intellectual elite. It sparked debate about natural law, setting the stage for the controversy over Darwin's Origin. In response to the surrounding debate and criticism, Chambers published Explanations: A Sequel, in which he offered a reasoned defense of his ideas about natural law, castigating what he saw as the narrowness of specialist science. With a new introduction by James Secord, a bibliography of reviews, and a new index, this volume adds to Vestiges and Explanations Chambers's earliest works on cosmology, an essay on Darwin, and an autobiographical essay, raising important issues about the changing meanings of popular science and religion and the rise of secular ideologies in Western culture. .
Price: $20.00
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Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Fiction or philosophy, profound knowledge or shocking heresy? When V estiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously in 1844, it sparked one of the greatest sensations of the Victorian era. More than a hundred thousand readers were spellbound by its startling vision—an account of the world that extended from the formation of the solar system to the spiritual destiny of humanity. As gripping as a popular novel, Vestiges combined all the current scientific theories in fields ranging from astronomy and geology to psychology and economics. The book was banned, it was damned, it was hailed as the gospel for a new age. This is where our own public controversies about evolution began. In a pioneering cultural history, James A. Secord uses the story of Vestiges to create a panoramic portrait of life in the early industrial era from the perspective of its readers. We join apprentices in a factory town as they debate the consequences of an evolutionary ancestry. We listen as Prince Albert reads aloud to Queen Victoria from a book that preachers denounced as blasphemy vomited from the mouth of Satan. And we watch as Charles Darwin turns its pages in the flea-ridden British Museum library, fearful for the fate of his own unpublished theory of evolution. Using secret letters, Secord reveals how Vestiges was written and how the anonymity of its author was maintained for forty years. He also takes us behind the scenes to a bustling world of publishers, printers, and booksellers to show how the furor over the book reflected the emerging industrial economy of print. Beautifully written and based on painstaking research, Victorian Sensation offers a new approach to literary history, the history of reading, and the history of science. Profusely illustrated and full of fascinating stories, it is the most comprehensive account of the making and reception of a book (other than the Bible) ever attempted. Winner of the 2002 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society .
Price: $20.22
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Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc
Interpreting vestige with the eloquence of a poet and the knowledge of a field archaeologist, Gustaf Sobin explores his elected terrain: the landscapes of Provence and Languedoc. Drawing on prehistory, protohistory, and Gallo-Roman antiquity, the twenty-six essays in this book focus on a particular place or artifact for the relevance inherent in each. A Bronze Age earring or the rippling wave pattern in Massiolite ceramic are more than archival curiosities for Sobin. Instead they invite inquiry and speculation on existence itself: Artifacts are read as realia, and history as an uninterrupted sequence of object lessons. As much travel writing as meditative discourse, Luminous Debris is enhanced by a prose that tracks, questions, and reflects on the materials invoked. Sobin engages the reader with precise descriptions of those very materials and the messages to be gleaned from their examination, be they existential, ethical, or political. An American expatriate living in Provence for the past thirty-five years, Gustaf Sobin shares his enthusiasm for his adopted landscape and for a vertical interpretation of its strata. In Luminous Debris he creates meaning out of matter and celebrates instances of reality, past and present..
Price: $9.50
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Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream 1899-1999
"[An] undercurrent of urgency is still true today and it runs through the pages of this anthology, brilliantly organized by Shaw and Francia It is truly an anthology that "breathes." And I too hope that Vestiges of War will inspire others to engage in similar projects and expand on what the editors have initiated." American Studies International "An extraordinary collection of literary, artistic, and historical work which fills the huge gap in what Americans know about their nation's relationship to the Philippines, in war and peace."Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States "Through forceful poems, archival phots, art, visual essays, plays and memoirs, three dozen contributors. . .weigh in against the glossed over or repressed history of the war and its aftermath in the Philippines. . . . If more textbooks were written like this, there might be fewer wars."
The Japan Times "It is the rich variety of sources, the many ways of expressing the dilemma and duality of the "special relationship," that is the strength in this volume."
H-Net "The collection illuminates Filipinos' long and complicated relationship with the United States through the successive tragedies of paleo-, neo-, and postcolonialism."
The Journal of American History U.S. intervention in the Philippines began with the little-known 1899 Philippine-American War. Using the war as its departure point in analyzing U.S.-Philippine relations, Vestiges of War retrieves this willfully forgotten event and places it where it properly belongs—as the catalyst that led to increasing U.S. interventionism and expansionism in the Asia Pacific region. This seminal, multidisciplinary anthology examines the official American nationalist story of "benevolent assimilation" and fraternal tutelage in its half century of colonial occupation of the Philippines. Integrating critical and visual art essays, archival and contemporary photographs, dramatic plays, and poetry to address the complex Philippine and U.S. perspectives and experiences, the essayists compellingly recount the consequences of American colonialism in the Philippines. Vestiges of War will force readers to reshape their views on what has been a deliberately obscure but significant phase in the histories of both countries, one which continues to haunt the present. Contributors include: Genara Banzon, Santiago Bose, Ben Cabrera, Renato Constantino, Doreen Fernandez, Eric Gamalinda, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jessica Hagedorn, Reynaldo Ileto, Yong Soon Min, Manuel Ocampo, Paul Pfeiffer, Christina Quisumbing, Vicente Rafael, Daniel Boone Schirmer, Kidlat Tahimik, Mark Twain, and Jim Zwick. .
Price: $24.69
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Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
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