Life in Rome was relentlessly public, and oratory was at its heart. Orations were dramatic spectacles in which the speaker deployed an arsenal of rhetorical tricks and strategies aimed at arousing the emotions of the audience, and spectators responded vigorously and vocally with massed chants of praise or condemnation. Unfortunately, many aspects ......
In Petrolia, Brian Black offers a geographical and social history of a region that was not only the site of America's first oil boom but was also the world's largest oil producer between 1859 and 1873. Against the background of the growing demand for petroleum throughout and immediately following the Civil War, Black describes Oil Creek Valley's ......
Colonial experience was profoundly structured by disease, as expansion brought people into contact with new and deadly maladies. Pathogens were exchanged on a scale far greater than ever before. Native populations were decimated by wave after wave of Old World diseases. In turn, colonists suffered disease and mortality rates much higher than in ......
How did academic and literary writers living in rural Britain in the 1680s establish their careers and find audiences for their work? What factors influenced the choices of essayists and dramatists who lived outside London and the university cities? Who read the works of regional poets and natural scientists and how were they circulated?In this ......
When we speak of the English Renaissance, what is it that we are naming, what are we recognizing reborn? As the essays in this latest collection from the English Institute demonstrate, our basic notions of the period have themselves been reconceived. In Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce, seven critics defamiliarize the images of the Renaissance ''to ......
How can we explain the process by which a literary text refers to another text? For the past decade and a half, intertextuality has been a central concern of scholars and readers of Roman poetry. In Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman Poetry, Lowell Edmunds proceeds from such fundamental concepts as ''author,'' ''text,'' and ''reader,'' which ......
Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, technology transformed the entertainment industry as much as it did such heavy industries as coal and steel. Among those most directly affected were musicians, who had to adapt to successive inventions and refinements in audio technology -- from wax cylinders and gramophones to radio and sound ......
Oak Forest Ecosystems focuses on the relationship between an oak forest's acorn yield and species of wildlife that depend on it. It begins by treating factors such as oak distribution, forest fires, tree diseases and pests, dynamics of acorn production, and acorn dispersal by birds and mammals. Special consideration is given to the phenomenon of ......
Comparative Policy and Performance--Chile, Cuba, and Costa Rica
How can we determine which economic model best provides for economic development and social welfare? In this major comparative work, noted economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago analyzes three Latin American countries with divergent economic systems: Chile (a market economy), Cuba (socialist), and Costa Rica (mixed). He examines their economic and social ......
