When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.

Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible. The Parthenon’s full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze’s dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other. This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.

Provides a comprehensive overview for both beginning and advanced students of satiric forms from ancient poetry to contemporary digital media.

Focusing on a period neglected by scholars, Higgins reconstructs how during the colonial period criollos - individuals identified as being of Spanish descent born in America - elaborated a body of knowledge, an "archive," in order to establish their intellectual autonomy within the Spanish colonial administrative structures." "This book opens up an important area of research that will be of interest to scholars and students of Spanish American colonial literature and history."--BOOK JACKET.

A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists brings together three engaging essays – by Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett and Mark Leonard, and Shearer West – that recreate the eventful life, both on and off the stage, of the great eighteenth-century actress Sarah Siddons. Siddons was renowned for her bravura performances in tragic roles, and her fame was enhanced by the many portraits of her painted by the leading artists of the day. The greatest of these was Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, a painting now in the Huntington Art Collections and recently studied at the Getty Center. A Passion for Performance places this magnificent portrait within the context of Siddons’s career as an actress and cultural icon. Includes a chronology of Siddons’s life by volume editor Robyn Asleson.

This set covers over 400 archaeological sites in Israel, Jordan, and Sinai. Written by 180 leading archaeologists, The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land is an essential reference tool for archaeologists, historians, Bible scholars, and explorers. Arranged alphabetically by site name, the volumes cover all periods of human settlement in the Holy Land from the Stone Age to modern times. - Publisher.