Classical Biographies

Building on the strengths of the first edition, the second edition of Latin American Classical Composers: A Biographical Dictionary presents expanded and updated coverage of its topic with an aim to be comprehensive. The authors have conducted exhaustive research to fill in gaps and correct minor errors in the first edition, adding young composers and documenting deaths since 1996, when the first edition appeared. Hundreds of composers are represented in this volume, which presents biographical data, including dates of birth and death, personal information about composers' background and training, and a selective listing of each composer's works. Sources for further study are noted within each entry. An index of composers by country rounds out this work.

The Roman writer Cornelius Nepos was a friend of Cicero and Catullus and other first-century BCE authors, and portions of his encyclopedic work On Famous Men are the earliest surviving biographies written in Latin. In The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos, Rex Stem presents Nepos as a valuable witness to the late Republican era, whose biographies share the exemplary republican political perspective of his contemporaries Cicero and Livy. Stem argues that Nepos created the genre of grouped political biographies in order to characterize renowned Mediterranean figures as role models for Roman leaders, and he shows how Nepos invested his biographies with moral and political arguments against tyranny. This book, the first to regard Nepos as a serious thinker in his own right, also functions as a general introduction to Nepos, placing him in his cultural context. Stem examines Nepos' contributions to the growth of biography, and he defends Nepos from his critics at the same time that he lays out the political significance and literary innovation of Nepos' writings. Accessible to advanced undergraduates, this volume is addressed to a general audience of classicists and ancient historians, as well as those broadly interested in biography, historiography, and political thought.

Discusses the causes and possible results of fifteen major riots that have occurred in the United States from the Stamp Act Riots of 1765 to the Columbia University Riots of 1968.

This book sheds new light on the biographical approach in the history of physics by including the biographies of scientific objects, institutions, and concepts. What is a biography? Can biographies also be written for non-human subjects like scientific instruments, institutions or concepts? The respective chapters of this book discuss these controversial questions using examples from the history of physics. By approaching biography as metaphor, it transcends the boundaries between various perspectives on the history of physics, and enriches our grasp of the past.