The mechanical clock was one of the technologial advances that brought Western civilization to a position of world leadership. This book details how and why this breakthrough occured through a historical journey that takes in the 14th-century mechanical revolution, Elizabeth I's finger watch, the success of Swiss watchmakers, fakes and smuggling, and how the quartz revolution brought Swiss supremacy to an end.

A National Book Award Finalist A Coretta Scott King Author Award Honor Book A Michael L. Printz Honor Book A Walter Dean Myers Honor Book With passion and precision, Kekla Magoon relays an essential account of the Black Panthers—as militant revolutionaries and as human rights advocates working to defend and protect their community. In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces readers to the Panthers’ community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers’ story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary socialist movement that drew thousands of members—mostly women—and became the target of one of the most sustained repression efforts ever made by the U.S. government against its own citizens. Revolution in Our Time puts the Panthers in the proper context of Black American history, from the first arrival of enslaved people to the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Kekla Magoon’s eye-opening work invites a new generation of readers grappling with injustices in the United States to learn from the Panthers’ history and courage, inspiring them to take their own place in the ongoing fight for justice.

More than a decade after the publication of his dazzling book on the cultural, technological, and manufacturing aspects of measuring time and making clocks, David Landes has significantly expanded "Revolution in Time." In a new preface and scores of updated passages, he explores new findings about medieval and early-modern time keeping, as well as contemporary hi-tech uses of the watch as mini-computer, cellular phone, and even radio receiver or television screen. While commenting on the latest research, Landes never loses his focus on the historical meaning of time and its many perceptions and uses, questions that go beyond history, that involve philosophers and possibly, theologians and literary folk as well.

Stephen Hanson traces the influence of the Marxist conception of time in Soviet politics from Lenin to Gorbachev. He argues that the history of Marxism and Leninism reveals an unsuccessful revolutionary effort to reorder the human relationship with time and that this reorganization had a direct impact on the design of the central political, socioeconomic, and cultural institutions of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. According to Hanson, westerners tend to envision time as both rational and inexorable. In a system in which 'time is money,' the clock dominates workers. Marx, however, believed that communist workers would be freed of the artificial distinction between leisure time and work time. As a result, they would be able to surpass capitalist production levels and ultimately control time itself. Hanson reveals the distinctive imprint of this philosophy on the formation and development of Soviet institutions, arguing that the breakdown of Gorbachev's perestroika and the resulting collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrate the failure of the idea.

Richard Feynman once quipped that "Time is what happens when nothing else does." But Julian Barbour disagrees: if nothing happened, if nothing changed, then time would stop. For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive occurring all around us, not time. Put simply, time does not exist. In this highly provocative volume, Barbour presents the basic evidence for a timeless universe, and shows why we still experience the world as intensely temporal. It is a book that strikes at the heart of modern physics. It casts doubt on Einstein's greatest contribution, the spacetime continuum, but also points to the solution of one of the great paradoxes of modern science, the chasm between classical and quantum physics. Indeed, Barbour argues that the holy grail of physicists--the unification of Einstein's general relativity with quantum mechanics--may well spell the end of time. Barbour writes with remarkable clarity as he ranges from the ancient philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides, through the giants of science Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, to the work of the contemporary physicists John Wheeler, Roger Penrose, and Steven Hawking. Along the way he treats us to enticing glimpses of some of the mysteries of the universe, and presents intriguing ideas about multiple worlds, time travel, immortality, and, above all, the illusion of motion. The End of Time is a vibrantly written and revolutionary book. It turns our understanding of reality inside-out.

Describes conditions for the civilians in both North and South during and immediately after the war.

Migration in the Time of Revolution explores the complex relationship between China and Indonesia from 1945 to 1967, during a period when citizenship, identity, and political loyalty were in flux. Taomo Zhou examines the experiences of migrants, including youths seeking an ancestral homeland they had never seen and economic refugees whose skills were unwelcome in a socialist state. Zhou argues that these migrants played an active role in shaping the diplomatic relations between Beijing and Jakarta, rather than being passive subjects of historical forces. By using newly declassified documents and oral history interviews, Migration in the Time of Revolution demonstrates how the actions and decisions of ethnic Chinese migrants were crucial in the development of post-war relations between China and Indonesia. By integrating diplomatic history with migration studies, Taomo Zhou provides a nuanced understanding of how ordinary people's lives intersected with broader political processes in Asia, offering a fresh perspective on the Cold War's social dynamics.

The Revolution in Time explores the idea that people in Western Europe changed the way they thought about the concept of time over the early modern period, by examining reactions to the 1688-1689 revolution in England. The study examines how those who lived through the extraordinary collapse of James II's regime perceived this event as it unfolded, and how they set it within their understanding of history. It questions whether a new understanding of chronology - one which allowed fundamental and human-directed change - had been widely adopted by this point in the past; and whether this might have allowed witnesses of the revolution to see it as the start of a new era, or as an opportunity to shape a novel, 'modern', future for England. It argues that, with important exceptions, the people of the era rejected dynamic views of time to retain a 'static' chronology that failed to fully conceptualise evolution in history. Bewildered by the rapid events of the revolution itself, people forced these into familiar scripts. Interpreting 1688-1689 later, they saw it as a reiteration of timeless principles of politics, or as a stage in an eternal and pre-determined struggle for true religion. Only slowly did they see come to see it as part of an evolving and modernising process - and then mainly in response to opponents of the revolution, who had theorised change in order to oppose it. The volume thus argues for a far more complex and ambiguous model of changes in chronological conception than many accounts have suggested; and questions whether 1688-1689 could be the leap toward modernity that recent interpretations have argued.

Presents a perspective of world history between 1700 and 1800 including developments in Russia, Prussia, America and France.

'The coming revolution in physics' is the authors latest monograph expanding his concepts and arguments about the misunderstanding and misuse of time in physics. Blankson argues that since most of us accept that the earth-year is a valid unit of time, we have to accept, also, that time is necessarily discrete, since the year is only one unit of time that has to be repeated for time to continue. Discrete time cannot march, so history is not the march of time but of events. Also discrete time cannot curve, therefore the concept of 'curved space-time' by which time travel is said to be a 'scientific possibility' is false. By discrete time, the Minkowski 4-D geometry cannot reflect physical reality; and since his equation s=ct has sunk deep into physics, the philosopher thinks physics is heading for another revolution in the very near future.