William Gurstelle begins his remarkable journey through history with this volume, Early Makers. Each chapter examines a remarkable individual or group of people from the past whose insights and inventions helped create the world we live in. What sets this series apart from other history books - including other histories of technology - is that each chapter also includes step-by-step instructions for making your own version of the historical invention. History comes to life in a way you have never experienced before when you follow the inventors' steps and recreate the groundbreaking devices of the past with your own hands. In this volume you will discover: The Cave Dwellers of Lascaux and the Oil Lamp Pythagoras and the Tantalus Cup Heron and the Gin Pole Egypt's Bag Press Otto von Guerke and the Magdeburg Hemispheres Levi ben Gershon and the Jacob's Staff Juliana Berners and the Fishing Lure Archimedes and the Water Screw China's Differential Windlass Be sure to also check out ReMaking History, Volume 2: Industrial Revolutionaries and ReMaking History Volume 3:Makers of the Modern World.

This book offers a provocative rereading of the early history of Chan Buddhism (Zen). Working from a history-of-religions point of view that asks how and why certain literary tropes were chosen to depict the essence of the Buddhist tradition to Chinese readers, this analysis focuses on the narrative logics of the early Chan genealogies—the seventh-and eighth-century lineage texts that claimed that certain high-profile Chinese men were descendents of Bodhidharma and the Buddha. This book argues that early Chan's image of the perfect-master-who-owns-tradition was constructed for reasons that have little to do with Buddhist practice, new styles of enlightened wisdom, or "orthodoxy," and much more to do with politics, property, geography, and, of course, new forms of writing.

Makers of the Modern World is the third volume of William Gurstelle's unique, hands-on journey through history. Each chapter examines a remarkable character from the past, one of the people whose insights and inventions helped create our modern world. What sets this series apart from other history books - including other histories of technology - is that each chapter also includes step-by-step instructions for making your own version of the historical invention. History comes to life in a way you have never experienced before when you follow the inventors' steps and recreate the groundbreaking devices of the past with your own hands. This volume brings you to the early modern era and the invention of the electric light, the movie projector, and the automobile. Inside, you will discover: Alessandro Volta and Electroplating Humphrey Davy and the First Electric light George Cayley and the Aeronautical Glider The Lumiere Brothers and the Movie Projector Rudolf Diesel and the Automobile Engine Hans Goldschmidt and the Thermite Reaction August Mobius and the Mobius Strip Louis Poinsot's Loads, Moments, and Torques Be sure to also check out ReMaking History, Volume 1: Early Makers and ReMaking History Volume 2 :Industrial Revolutionaries.

Industrial Revolutionaries is the second volume in William Gurstelle's unique exploration of history's great inventors. Each chapter revisits the life and times of one of the forward-thinking revolutionaries who helped create the world we live in. You will not only learn about their great inventions, you'll also get step-by-step instructions for recreating them yourself. History will come to life as you have never experienced it before when you build it with your own hands. Inside this volume, you will discover: Joseph McKibben and the Air Muscle Squire Whipple and the Iron Bridge Abe Lincoln and the Campaign Torch Samuel Morse and the Telegraph J.F. Daniell and the Storage Battery Ben Franklin and the Leyden Jar Charles Goodyear and the Vulcanization of Rubber Be sure to also check out ReMaking History, Volume 1: Early Makers and ReMaking History, Volume 3: Makers of the Modern World.

Remaking History considers the ways that historical fictions of all kinds enable a complex engagement with the past. Popular historical texts including films, television and novels, along with cultural phenomena such as superheroes and vampires, broker relationships to ‘history’, while also enabling audiences to understand the ways in which the past is written, structured and ordered. Jerome de Groot uses examples from contemporary popular culture to show the relationship between fiction and history in two key ways. Firstly, the texts pedagogically contribute to the historical imaginary and secondly they allow reflection upon how the past is constructed as ‘history’. In doing so, they provide an accessible and engaging means to critique, conceptualize and reject the processes of historical representation. The book looks at the use of the past in fiction from sources including Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn, along with the work of directors such as Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, to show that fictional representations enable a comprehension of the fundamental strangeness of the past and the ways in which this foreign, exotic other is constructed. Drawing from popular films, novels and TV series of recent years, and engaging with key thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Remaking History is a must for all students interested in the meaning that history has for fiction, and vice versa.

Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of the interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618–907), arguing that the period is notable not only for religious and diplomatic exchanges but also for the process through which China emerged as a center of Buddhist learning, practice, and pilgrimage. Before the seventh century, the Chinese clergy—given the spatial gap between the sacred Buddhist world of India and the peripheral China—suffered from a “borderland complex.” A close look at the evolving practice of relic veneration in China (at Famen Monastery in particular), the exposition of Mount Wutai as an abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, and the propagation of the idea of Maitreya’s descent in China, however, reveals that by the eighth century China had overcome its complex and successfully established a Buddhist realm within its borders. The emergence of China as a center of Buddhism had profound implications on religious interactions between the two countries and is cited by Sen as one of the main causes for the weakening of China’s spiritual attraction toward India. At the same time, the growth of indigenous Chinese Buddhist schools and teachings retrenched the need for doctrinal input from India. A detailed examination of the failure of Buddhist translations produced during the Song dynasty (960–1279), demonstrates that these developments were responsible for the unraveling of religious bonds between the two countries and the termination of the Buddhist phase of Sino-Indian relations. Sen proposes that changes in religious interactions were paralleled by changes in commercial exchanges. For most of the first millennium, trading activities between India and China were closely connected with and sustained through the transmission of Buddhist doctrines. The eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, witnessed dramatic changes in the patterns and structure of mercantile activity between the two countries. Secular bulk and luxury goods replaced Buddhist ritual items, maritime channels replaced the overland Silk Road as the most profitable conduits of commercial exchange, and many of the merchants involved were followers of Islam rather than Buddhism. Moreover, policies to encourage foreign trade instituted by the Chinese government and the Indian kingdoms contributed to the intensification of commercial activity between the two countries and transformed the China-India trading circuit into a key segment of cross-continental commerce.

..". an important and valuable collection... the essays are at the cutting edge of post modernism." -- Maggie Humm, Women's Studies International Forum "This well-written, carefully edited anthology provides an excellent overview of the thicket of contemporary feminist literary theory... No library should be without it." -- Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, Syracuse University, Religious Studies Review "In all, this is a rich and varied collection." -- Journal of Modern Literature Explores the aesthetic and political issues inherent in feminist critical theory and practice. Contributors include Shari Benstock, Elaine Showalter, Nina Baym, Paula A. Treichler, Jane Marcus, Josephine Donovan, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Judith Newton, Lillian S. Robinson, Nina Auerbach, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Hortense J. Spillers, and Susan Stanford Friedman.

People have been playing music on homemade instruments for thousands of years. But creating new instruments is much more than an art form. When you want to make a note sound higher or lower, you have to change the sound waves coming out of the instrument. That's science! When you explore the way different materials produce different sounds, that's engineering. When you speed up or slow down a song, you're counting beats -- using math. And technology makes electronic instruments and devices to record and play back music possible.

For better or worse, E.P. Thompson’s monumental book The Making of the English Working Class has played an essential role in shaping the intellectual lives of generations of readers since its original publication in 1963. This collected volume explores the complex impact of Thompson’s book, both as an intellectual project and material object, relating it to the social and cultural history of the book form itself—an enduring artifact of English history.