Past Things And Present

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which holds a complete collection of Johns' prints, conceived the exhibition held in 2004, for which this is the catalogue (the exhibition traveled to South Carolina, Scotland, Ireland, and Spain). There are three essays, including a lengthy essay by senior art historian Richard Shiff. The works are presented, without commentary, on full-page color plates. The volume is not indexed. The dust jacket is a folded print of Johns' "Untitled, 2001". Distributed by Distributed Art Publishers. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Theodore Draper is one of America's most trenchant and informed critics. A Present of Things Past gathers together ten of his most recent and most powerful selected essays, in which Draper, with his customary acuity and wit, tackles a host of issues that define America's political culture. A Present of Things Past is concerned with a reexamination of the Second World War in both its military and its political aspects; the trajectory of American conservatism as it manifested itself during the Reagan years; the rise of Gorbachev and the history of "reform" in the Soviet Union; the revisionist debate over the origins and history of American communism; and the persistent mystery of a man named Max Eitingon, who was, depending on one's reading of the sources, either an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis or an agent of the Soviet secret police, or both. In "American Hubris," Draper illuminates the assumptions that have guided American foreign policy in the postwar period, and concludes that our costly misadventures--in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, and elsewhere--cannot be considered a string of aberrations. They were, he argues, a consequence of the Truman Doctrine. In "Reagan's Junta," Draper observes: "This is supposed to have been the era of the imperial presidency. It has turned out to be the era of presidencies that have tried to make themselves imperial-and failed." Throughout these compelling essays, Draper demonstrates the uses and abuses to which history has been put by ideologues of both the left and the right. He finds unacceptable, for example, the practice of many journalists of fictionalizing their sources. The New York Times has called Draper "one of the clearer-eyed observers of the issues that torment us." A Present of Things Past enhances that reputation.

"I've had thousands of problems in my life, most of which never actually happened." Mark Twain. As never before, our lives are bombarded with daily events that stir fear - real or imagined - in both our individual and collective psyches. From financial worries to social anxiety, from public speaking to personal safety, "Free Yourself From Fears" show us how to 'unlearn' our unreal fears and find emotional freedom. Applying the power of psychology, O'Connor goes inside the mind and shows you how to deal not only with such common anxieties as fear of heights and flying but also fear of other people's opinions and even of our own success. This immensely practical, hands-on book will help you: know when to trust and when not to trust, develop your intuition to stay safe when there is real danger, defeat socially created fears in this age of anxiety, deal with change and worries about an uncertain future, and be in the here and now - true emotional freedom. One of the first books to address how to help children deal with fear and to deal with the all-pervasive and insidious feeling of "social anxiety," "Free Yourself From Fears" includes dozens of helpful exercises and practical techniques to help you achieve your best without anxiety and live without worry.

Time capsules offer unexpected insights into how people view their own time, place, and culture, as well as their duties to future generations. Remembrance of Things Present traces the birth of this device to the Gilded Age, when growing urban volatility prompted doubts about how the period would be remembered—or if it would be remembered at all. Yablon details how diverse Americans – from presidents and mayors to advocates for the rights of women, blacks, and workers – constructed prospective memories of their present. They did so by contributing not just written testimony to time capsules but also sources that historians and archivists considered illegitimate, such as photographs, phonograph records, films, and everyday artifacts. By offering a direct line to posterity, time capsules stimulated various hopes for the future. Remembrance of Things Present delves into these treasure chests to unearth those forgotten futures.

The Realness of Things Past proposes a new paradigm of historical practice. It questions the way we conventionally historicize the experiences of non-modern peoples, western and non-western, and makes the case for an alternative. It shows how our standard analytical devices impose modern, dualist metaphysical conditions upon all non-modern realities, thereby authorizing us to align those realities with our own modern ontological commitments, fundamentally altering their contents in the process. The net result is a practice that homogenizes the past's many different ways of being human. To produce histories that are more ethically defensible, more philosophically robust, and more historically meaningful, we need to take an ontological turn in our practice. The book works to formulate a non-dualist historicism that will allow readers to analyse each past reality on its own ontological terms, as a more or less autonomous world unto itself. To make the case for this alternative paradigm, the book engages with currents of thought in many different intellectual provinces, from anthropology and postcolonial studies to the sociology of science and quantum physics. And to demonstrate how the new paradigm might work in practice, it uses classical Athens as its primary case study. The Realness of Things Past is divided into three parts. To highlight the limitations of conventional historicist analysis and the need for an alternative, Part I critically scrutinizes our standard modern accounts of "democratic Athens." Part II draws on a wide range of historical, ethnographic, and theoretical literatures to frame ethical and philosophical mandates for the proposed ontological turn. To illustrate the historical benefits of this alternative paradigm, Part III then shows how it allows us to produce an entirely new and more meaningful account of the Athenian politeia or "way of life." The book is expressly written to be accessible to a non-specialist, cross-disciplinary readership.