On Civilization S Edge

Earl Hollsopple lived on the edge of civilization in a deserted shack for nearly forty years. His life was one beautiful night of stargazing after another, until a helicopter flies overhead, and exposing his meager world. It is a sign; it is time for him to return to civilization Unknowingly, Earl's journey parallels another he had deeply repressed, and that is his return from the Vietnam War. The lone survivor of a plane crash, Earl waits for rescue that never comes. He is left to find his way home alone. On his quests, old Earl and young Earl learn lessons of survival, overcoming isolation and handling conflicts; his travels teach him not just about himself, but humankind. Reaching pivotal points in both journeys, Earl meets fateful loves, leading to destinies that are ultimately intertwined. Everything in life circles until we are able to answer the riddles that plaque man and humanity. Only until we take the journey, solve the problems of our own existence, do we find our way home.

As a resurgent Poland emerged at the end of World War I, an eclectic group of Polish border guards, state officials, military settlers, teachers, academics, urban planners, and health workers descended upon Volhynia, an eastern borderland province that was home to Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. Its aim was not simply to shore up state power in a place where Poles constituted an ethnic minority, but also to launch an ambitious civilizing mission that would transform a poor Russian imperial backwater into a region that was at once civilized, modern, and Polish. Over the next two decades, these men and women recast imperial hierarchies of global civilization-in which Poles themselves were often viewed as uncivilized-within the borders of their supposedly anti-imperial nation-state. As state institutions remained fragile, long-debated questions of who should be included in the nation re-emerged with new urgency, turning Volhynia's mainly Yiddish-speaking towns and Ukrainian-speaking villages into vital testing grounds for competing Polish national visions. By the eve of World War II, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union growing in strength, schemes to ensure the loyalty of Jews and Ukrainians by offering them a conditional place in the nation were replaced by increasingly aggressive calls for Jewish emigration and the assimilation of non-Polish Slavs. Drawing on research in local and national archives across four countries and utilizing a vast range of written and visual sources that bring Volhynia to life, On Civilization's Edge offers a highly intimate story of nation-building from the ground up. We eavesdrop on peasant rumors at the Polish-Soviet border, read ethnographic descriptions of isolated marshlands, and scrutinize staged photographs of everyday life. But the book's central questions transcend the Polish case, inviting us to consider how fears of national weakness and competitions for local power affect the treatment of national minorities, how more inclusive definitions of the nation are themselves based on exclusions, and how the very distinction between empires and nation-states is not always clear-cut.

Civilizations and World Order: Geopolitics and Cultural Difference examines the role of civilizations in the context of the existing and possible world order(s) from a cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary perspective. Contributions seek to clarify the meaning of such complex and contested notions as “civilization,” “order,” and “world order”; they do so by taking into account political, economic, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of social life. The book deals with its main theme from three angles or vectors: first, the geopolitical or power-political context of civilizations; secondly, the different roles of civilizations or cultures against the backdrop of “post-coloniality” and “Orientalism”; and thirdly, the importance of ideological and regional differences as factors supporting or obstructing world order(s). All in all, the different contributions demonstrate the impact of competing civilizational trajectories on the functioning or malfunctioning of contemporary world order.

Ancient Civilizations offers a comprehensive and straightforward account of the world’s first civilizations and how they were discovered, drawing on many avenues of inquiry including archaeological excavations, surveys, laboratory work, highly specialized scientific investigations, and both historical and ethnohistorical records. This book covers the earliest civilizations and the great powers in the Near East, moving on to the first Aegean civilizations, the Mediterranean world in the first millennium, Imperial Rome, northeast Africa, the divine kings in southeast Asia, and empires in East Asia, as well as early states in the Americas and Andean civilization. Ancient Civilizations includes a number of features to support student learning: a wealth of images, including several new illustrations; feature boxes which expand on key sites, finds and written sources; and an extensive guide to further reading. With new perceptions of the origin and collapse of states, including a review of the issue of sustainability, this fourth edition has been extensively updated in the light of spectacular new discoveries and the latest theoretical advances. Examining the world’s pre-industrial civilizations from a multidisciplinary perspective and offering a comparative analysis of the field which explores the connections between all civilizations around the world, Scarre and Fagan, both established authorities on world prehistory, provide a valuable introduction to pre-industrial civilizations in all their brilliant diversity.

The lost world is a subgenre of the fantasy or science fiction genre that involves the discovery of a new world out of time or place. King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard is sometimes considered the first lost-world narrative. Haggard's novel shaped the form and influenced later lost-world books, including Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot, A. Merritt's The Moon Pool, and H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. James Hilton's Lost Horizon used the genre as a takeoff for popular philosophy and social comment and it introduced the name Shangri-La, a meme for the idealization of the lost world as a paradise. The Lost World (Arthur Conan Doyle) A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Jules Verne) The Mysterious Island The Man Who Would Be King (Rudyard Kipling) At the Mountains of Madness (H. P. Lovecraft) King Solomon's Mines (Henry Rider Haggard) She: A History of Adventure The People of the Mist When the World Shook The Yellow God The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (Edgar Allan Poe) Lost Horizon (James Hilton) The Moon Pool (Abraham Merritt) The Lost Lemuria (W. Scott-Elliot) The Lost Continent of Mu - Motherland of Man (James Churchward) Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) The Caspak Trilogy (E. Rice Burroughs) The Moon Trilogy The Pellucidar Series The Man-Eater The Cave Girl The Eternal Lover Jungle Girl The Return of Tarzan Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar The Atlantis Books: The Original Myth of Atlantis (Plato) New Atlantis (F. Bacon) Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World (I. Donnelly) The Lost Continent (C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne) The Story of Atlantis (W. Scott-Elliot)

This second part of volume IV deals with the cultural achievements of the various peoples of this immense region: arts and crafts, literature, architecture, music, science, medicine and technology.