Watching Vesuvius

This work explores the question of Vesuvius as an object of study in the early modern science of volcanism from the investigations and opinions of humanists and naturalists in the late Renaissance to the early 18th-century philosophizing on volcanoes and the development of geology later in the century.

The calamity that proved lethal for Pompeii inhabitants preserved the city for centuries, leaving behind a snapshot of Roman daily life that has captured the imagination of generations, including Renoir, Freud, Hirohito, Mozart, Dickens, Twain, Rossellini, and Ingrid Bergman. Interwoven is the thread of Ingrid Rowland's own impressions of Pompeii.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. It is the first book in a series of three which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War, moving from a focus on London to a global perspective. Serial Forms sets out the theoretical and historical basis for all three volumes. It suggests that, as a serial news culture and a stadial historicism developed together between 1815 and 1848, seriality became the dominant form of the nineteenth century. Through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, and shows, the past and the contemporary moment enter into public visibility together. Serial Forms argues that it is through seriality that the social is represented as increasingly politically urgent. The insistent rhythm of the serial reorganizes time, recalibrates and rescales the social, and will prepare the way for the 1848 revolutions which are the subject of the next book. By placing their work back into the messy print and performance culture from which it originally appeared, Serial Forms is able to produce new and exciting readings of familiar authors such as Scott, Byron, Dickens, and Gaskell. Rather than offering a rarefied intellectual history or chopping up the period into 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', Clare Pettitt tracks the development of communications technologies and their impact on the ways in which time, history and virtuality are imagined.

A team of specialists addresses a foundational concept as central to early modern thinking as to our own: that the past is always an important part of the present.

While volcanoes spew golden lava around the world, djinn twins John and Philippa, with their parents, Uncle Nimrod, and Groanin, face evil more powerful than ever before when they try to stop the wicked djinn trying to rob the grave of Genghis Khan.

This volume considers Italy's history and examines how Italians became fascinated with the New World in the early modern period.

HIS STORY IS HERE, but Tom Treanor, the young correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, is off to the wars again. Meanwhile, of the present book, he says: “Alice never saw more different things in Wonderland than I’ve seen since June 13, 1942. I’ve rung the changes from Chungking to Anzio and written 1,000 words a day about it. Because it’s all too new and confusing, I can’t explain any of the riddle. I can only give you the world all disconnected, just as I saw it in travelling, a sequence of separate worlds, nearly as crazy, independent, and self-centered as they were in Columbus’ time. “I have no theme but only a pocketful of pictures.” That’s what he thinks. Well, he may not have a theme, but he has an astounding knack for being in places where things happen, a high-octane sense of the ludicrous, and a zest and zip in his writing that make his book tops in entertainment. It is emphatically the “war book with a difference.”

"Volcanologist and filmmaker Clive Oppenheimer offers here a seemingly impossible tour, showing readers places difficult to access, even before one considers climbing a volcano. Oppenheimer worked closely with North Korean researchers in a scientific mission to study Mount Paektu, a volcano name sung in national anthems on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone. He ventured through Chad to the Tibesti Mountains; their most emblematic volcano, Emi Koussi, is the highest point in the Sahara and has a caldera colossal enough to enclose a city the size of Boston. He has voyaged south to the hottest place on the coldest continent, studying gases emitted from Antarctica's Mount Erebus. This geographic range is matched by the diversity of subjects that Oppenheimer examines to reveal how entangled volcanic activity is with our climate and environment, as well as our economy, politics, culture, and beliefs. These adventures and investigations make clear the dual purpose of volcanology--both to understand volcanoes for science's sake and to serve the communities endangered and entranced by these mountains of fire. Readers learn of historic voyages to these enigmatic places and travel alongside Oppenheimer, peering from the crater's edge with assorted monitoring devices, climbing toward the summit to compare the volcano itself to images captured safely from space, hunting for the far-flung deposits of Earth's greatest eruptions, and meeting with others who live with volcanoes. With each measurement and conversation, Oppenheimer shows the importance of listening to experts, communities, and the Earth"--