A Walk Through History is a Russian publishing house specializing in children’s nonfiction. Since 2011 it has created and designed about 50 titles on various periods of history and other subjects such as mathematics, sport, plants and animals.
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The dream of the ideal city is as old as the city itself. Since real cities often develop chaotically, the idea of perfecting them, even tearing them down if necessary, and rebuilding them according to the prevailing patterns of thought is an obvious one. The latest manifestation of this utopia is the smart city - the intelligent city, packed with the latest technology and extensively digitised. But will air taxis and hyperloops, ubiquitous sensors, access control systems and data-driven management really make the city of the future a better place to live? Are they the answer to the enormous challenges facing today's fast-growing metropolises? Or will the supposed administrative paradise ultimately mutate into a digital juggernaut?
From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, Liverpool was frequently referred to as the 'second city of the empire'. Yet, the role of Liverpool within the British imperial system and the impact on the city of its colonial connections remain underplayed in recent writing on both Liverpool and the empire. However, 'inconvenient' this may prove, this specially-commissioned collection of essays demonstrates that the imperial dimension deserves more prevalence in both academic and popular representations of Liverpool's past. Indeed, if Liverpool does represent the 'World in One City' - the slogan for Liverpool's status as European Capital of Culture in 2008 - it could be argued that this is largely down to Merseyside's long-term interactions with the colonial world, and the legacies of that imperial history. In the context of Capital of Culture year and growing interest in the relationship between British provincial cities and the British empire, this book will find a wide audience amongst academics, students and history enthusiasts generally.
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As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.
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The streetscape - the closely observed, faithfully rendered view of the city's streets, squares, canals, buildings and people - was a new artistic genre of the early modern era, a period in which the city itself was assuming new forms and taking on new roles in Europe and America. This unique book reopens the window of the early city view makers by tracing earlier forms of urban representation in European art into the sudden coalescence of the new genre in Italy and the Low Countries during the middle years of the seventeenth century. It explores the rapid expansion and diffusion of the genre through the eighteenth century, its appeal to such artists as Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Francesco Guardi, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and its embrace of a culture of secular improvement more commonly understood through the writings of Enlightenment philosophes. To examine the long history of the genre is to learn much about the early modern city, and to rediscover many beautiful and long-forgotten works of art. ;
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The book provides a 'flâneur's eye view' of Parisian life in the first half of the nineteenth century: dress, cafés and restaurants, but also shops and passages, the omnibus, bals publics and carnival. The author provides general conclusions about the private and public spheres in 'le vieux Paris'. Like the flâneur, the author concentrates less on factual information for its own sake - which may be found in the secondary works cited in the text and footnotes - than on the 'semiological' or anthropological significance of the cultural forms in question. Links are drawn between cultural institutions and class relations in pre-1850 Paris, with particular emphasis on cultural inequality, on the persistence of cross-class contacts, and the growing differences between classes as reflected in behaviour and attitudes. ;
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This book offers the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine, an author best known for his monumental book of saints' lives, the Golden legend. Jacopo's Chronicle presents a coherent vision of Genoa's place in history, the cosmos and Creation as written by the city's own archbishop - mixing eyewitness accounts with scholarly research about the city's origins and didactic reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life. Accompanied by an extensive introduction, this complete translation provides a unique perspective on a dynamic medieval city-state from one of its most important officials, broadening the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life.
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This book offers the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine, an author best known for his monumental book of saints' lives, the Golden legend. Jacopo's Chronicle presents a coherent vision of Genoa's place in history, the cosmos and Creation as written by the city's own archbishop - mixing eyewitness accounts with scholarly research about the city's origins and didactic reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life. Accompanied by an extensive introduction, this complete translation provides a unique perspective on a dynamic medieval city-state from one of its most important officials, broadening the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life.
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This book offers the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine, an author best known for his monumental book of saints' lives, the Golden legend. Jacopo's Chronicle presents a coherent vision of Genoa's place in history, the cosmos and Creation as written by the city's own archbishop - mixing eyewitness accounts with scholarly research about the city's origins and didactic reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life. Accompanied by an extensive introduction, this complete translation provides a unique perspective on a dynamic medieval city-state from one of its most important officials, broadening the available literature in English on medieval Italian urban life.
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This book examines the television serials created by influential showrunner David Simon. The book argues that Simon's main theme is the state of the contemporary American city and that all of his serials (barring one about the Iraq War) explore different facets of the metropolis. Each series offers distinctly different visions of the American city, but taken together they represent a sustained and intricate exploration of urban problems in modern America. From deindustrialisation in The Wire and residential segregation in Show Me a Hero to post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme and the transformation of the urban core in The Deuce, David Simon's American city traces the urban through-line in Simon's body of work. Based on sustained analysis of these serials and their engagement with contemporary politics and culture, David Simon's American city offers a compelling examination of one of television's most arresting voices.
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The imperatives of public health shaped our understanding of the cities of the global north in the first industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are doing so again today, reflecting new geographies of the urban age of the twenty-first. Emergent cities in parts of the globe experiencing most profound urban growth face major problems of economic, ecological and social sustainability when making sense of new health challenges and designing policy frameworks for public health infrastructures. The rapid evolution of complex 'systems of systems' in today's cities continually reconfigure the urban commons, reshaping how we understand urban public health, defining new problems and drawing on new data tools for analysis that work from the historical legacies and geographical variations that structure public health systems.
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Food is both a material system of nourishment, necessary for human survival, and a communicative system that signifies multiple meanings across human cultures. This book explores the cultural politics of food in the South African context, bringing together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the links between media, nourishment, and inequality. The chapters all highlight the multiplicity of meanings that food has in South African society. These include historical perspectives on the impact of colonialism, migration and apartheid had on food and foodways in South Africa; sociological interventions on food and society; aesthetic practices in relation to food; and mediated food cultures in South Africa. Taken together, the book critically explores the multiple ways in which food is never just food, and always linked to complex and shifting modalities of meaning and knowledge in the South African context.
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In the decades following the USSR's collapse, the US has gone from unrivalled hegemon to a position of relative decline. With America 'triumphant' after 1991, its culture, like its diplomatic, military and economic power, remained unmatched. Such favourable circumstances seemed to undercut the need for cultural diplomacy. Why should the US government sell a product that was already selling so well? After 9/11, however, it was apparent the US image was less popular than previously assumed. To reverse this negative image, cultural diplomacy was revived. Despite being beset by internal and external challenges, US officials supported various cultural initiatives and partnerships to promote the American brand globally. Along the way, cultural diplomacy has made use of new forms of expression to promote American culture and build positive foreign relations. The arrival of the second Trump administration in 2025 has clearly signalled an end to using cultural diplomacy to further causes of empowerment and diversity, making the future uncertain for this field of activity.
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This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we 'see like a city' in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.
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Celebrating the city goes behind the scenes of early modern celebrations. Moving from splendid coronations to courtyard bonfires, it offers the first comparative, interdisciplinary study of festivals in London and Paris. In a major departure from existing scholarship, it uses the widest range of textual, visual and material evidence to demonstrate the importance of designing, making and organising to how and why festivals were meaningful. Mining evidence of the active processes by which events were made, it argues that urban festival politics cannot be understood without incorporating its material world into our analysis. The book's unique methodology, combining the tools of design history and the concerns of political history, will shed new light on how political publics were formed in early modern European cities. In showing how cities made festivals - and festivals made cities - this wide-ranging study makes a significant contribution to histories of festivals, political culture and urban life.
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This book brings together studies of cultural institutions in Manchester from 1850 to the present day, giving an unprecedented account of the city's cultural evolution. These bring to light the remarkable range of Manchester's contribution to modern cultural life, including the role of art education, popular theatre, religion, pleasure gardens, clubs and societies. The chapters show the resilience and creativity of Manchester's cultural institutions since 1850, challenging any simple narrative of urban decline following the erosion of Lancashire's industrial base, at the same time illustrating the range of activities across the social classes. This book will appeal to everyone interested in the cultural life of the city of Manchester, including cultural historians, sociologists and urban geographers, as well as general readers with interests in the city. It is written by leading international authorities, including Viv Gardner, Stephen Milner, Mike Savage, Bill Williams and Janet Wolff.
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Brazil has one of the most significant and productive film industries in Latin America. This ground-breaking study provides an entertaining insight into the Brazilian films that have most captured the imagination of domestic audiences over the years. The recent international success of films such as Central Station and City of God, has stimulated widespread interest in Brazilian film, but studies written in English focus on the 'auteur' cinema of the 1960s. This book focuses on individual films in their socio-historical context, drawing on extensive fieldwork in Brazil and Latin America. It argues that Brazilian cinema has almost always been grounded in intrinsically home-grown cultural forms, dating back to the nineteenth century, such as the Brazilian music-hall, the travelling circus, radio shows, carnival, and, later, comedy television. Combining a chronological structure with groundbreaking research and a lively approach, Popular cinema in Brazil is the ideal introduction to Brazilian cinema.
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Living with water brings together sociologists, geographers, artists, writers and poets to explore the ways in which water binds, immerses and supports us. Drawing from international research on river crossings, boat dwelling, wild swimming, sea fishing, and drought impacts, and navigating urban waters, glacial lagoons, barrier reefs and disappearing tarns, the collection illuminates the ways that we live with and without water, and explores how we can think and write with water on land. Water offers a way of attending to emerging and enduring social and ecological concerns and making sense of them in lively and creative ways. By approaching Living with water from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, and drawing on research from around the world, this collection opens up discussions that reinvigorate and renew previously landlocked debates. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6, Clean water and sanitation
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Contemporary focus, right up to date with material from 1980s and 90s. Wide-ranging analyses of major directors, themes, genres and issues, including historical film, genre cinema, women in film and autonomies.
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The tragic history of a cosmopolitan city: Beirut and the fate of LebanonOn August 4, 2020, the port of Beirut is shaken by a massive explosion that was to have an impact on the entire city: Hundreds of thousands of houses are destroyed, more than 200 people killed and thousands injured. This was not to be the first and last catastrophe for a country shaken by multiple crises. In this book, ten people tell their stories from their city - a city that has been the hub of the Middle East region for many decades. They live in the once glamorous district of Hamra or in the south of the city, which is controlled by Hezbollah. They are devout Muslims or atheists, come from the upper classes or have been struggling to survive for a long time.
