The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics. Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal. This beautifully written, deeply researched book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898 into a family of artists--his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist--Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to the free-spirited Louisa James--she was a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story, related here with a wealth of detail and nuance. Calder's life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York's Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder's lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. More than 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white--including little-known works and many archival photographs that have never before been seen--further enrich the story.

The Conquest of Bread is a political treatise written by the anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Written after a split between anarchists and Marxists at the First International (a 19th-century association of left-wing radicals), The Conquest of Bread advocates a path to a communist society distinct from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, rooted in the principles of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation. Since its original publication in 1892, The Conquest of Bread has immensely influenced both anarchist theory and anarchist praxis. As one of the first comprehensive works of anarcho-communist theory published for wide distribution, it both popularized anarchism in general and encouraged a shift in anarchist thought from individualist anarchism to social anarchism. It was also an influential text among the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and the late anarchist theorist and anthropologist David Graeber cited the book as an inspiration for the Occupy movement of the early 2010s in his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

David Lasser stands as one of the least-known but extraordinary pioneers of spaceflight. In 1930 he founded the American Interplanetary Society (AIAA) -- the same year he wrote this book -- the first book ever written in the English language to address the notion of spaceflight as a serious possibility. The book has not been in print since 1931 and yet it still stands up to scrutiny. The lucid style with which Lasser explains the basic concepts of rocketry make it a delight for anyone to read.

For more than one hundred years, the Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885) has marked Argentina’s historical passage between eras, standing at the gateway to the nation’s “Golden Age” of progress, modernity, and—most contentiously—national whiteness and the “invisibilization” of Indigenous peoples. This traditional narrative has deeply influenced the ways in which many Argentines understand their nation’s history, its laws and policies, and its cultural heritage. As such, the Conquest has shaped debates about the role of Indigenous peoples within Argentina in the past and present. The Conquest of the Desert brings together scholars from across disciplines to offer an interdisciplinary examination of the Conquest and its legacies. This collection explores issues of settler colonialism, Indigenous-state relations, genocide, borderlands, and Indigenous cultures and land rights through essays that reexamine one of Argentina’s most important historical periods.

When a comet appears in the sky over England in 1066, Ailith, a young Saxon wife, feels sure that it can only bode well, in spite of her husband's fears. With a child on its way, the couple are prosperous and content. Yet, within a year, Ailith's joy turns to heartache as her husband and her child are taken from her and the conquering Normans advance. Ailith's grief turns to love for a brief period with Rolf de Brize, a handsome and womanising Norman invader. She bears him one daughter, but in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings she discovers a betrayal she cannot forgive . . . Years later, the spirited and strong-willed Julitta is determined to find happiness, and yet her life has been filled with pain: from surviving life in a brothel in Southwark to suffering the pain of a forbidden love and a bitter, loveless marriage. Her quest takes her on a Pilgrimage to Compostella to a colourful horse fair in Bordeaux, to the terrors of piracy on the open sea.

Studies of the Spanish conquest in the Americas traditionally have explained European-Indian encounters in terms of such factors as geography, timing, and the charisma of individual conquistadores. Yet by reconsidering this history from the perspective of gender roles and relations, we see that gender ideology was a key ingredient in the glue that held the conquest together and in turn shaped indigenous behavior toward the conquerors. This book tells the hidden story of women during the missionization of California. It shows what it was like for women to live and work on that frontierÑand how race, religion, age, and ethnicity shaped female experiences. It explores the suppression of women's experiences and cultural resistance to domination, and reveals the many codes of silence regarding the use of force at the missions, the treatment of women, indigenous ceremonies, sexuality, and dreams. Virginia Bouvier has combed a vast array of sourcesÑ including mission records, journals of explorers and missionaries, novels of chivalry, and oral historiesÑ and has discovered that female participation in the colonization of California was greater and earlier than most historians have recognized. Viewing the conquest through the prism of gender, Bouvier gives new meaning to the settling of new lands and attempts to convert indigenous peoples. By analyzing the participation of womenÑ both Hispanic and IndianÑ in the maintenance of or resistance to the mission system, Bouvier restores them to the narrative of the conquest, colonization, and evangelization of California. And by bringing these voices into the chorus of history, she creates new harmonies and dissonances that alter and enhance our understanding of both the experience and meaning of conquest.

The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913) is a novel by Oscar Micheaux. Before he became the first Black movie mogul in American history, Micheaux was a homesteader-turned novelist whose passion for storytelling and business acumen were born from a youth of hard work and struggle. The son of a former slave, Micheaux dedicated his life to countering the dominant narratives of American history while inspiring and empowering Black people around the world. “The heavy rains washed the loam from the hills and deposited it on these bottoms. Years ago, when the rolling lands were cleared, and before the excessive rainfall had washed away the loose surface, the highlands were considered most valuable for agricultural purposes, equally as valuable as the bottoms now are.” A Black homesteader named Oscar Devereaux reflects on a life of perseverance. Raised alongside twelve siblings in rural Illinois, he leaves home and family behind to seek a life of fortune and independence. Never one to set limits, Devereaux discovers that no dream is beyond his reach. Dedicated to educator and orator Booker T. Washington, The Conquest was described by its author as the “true story of a negro who was discontented and [of] the circumstances that were the outcome of that discontent.” With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Oscar Micheaux’s The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

The concluding volume to the first biography of one of the most important, influential, and beloved twentieth-century sculptors, and one of the greatest artists in the cultural history of America--is a vividly written, illuminating account of his triumphant later years. The second and final volume of this magnificent biography begins during World War II, when Calder--known to all as Sandy--and his wife, Louisa, opened their home to a stream of artists and writers in exile from Europe. In the postwar decades, they divided their time between the United States and France, as Calder made his first monumental public sculptures and received blockbuster commissions that included Expo '67 in Montreal and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Jed Perl makes clear how Calder's radical sculptural imagination shaped the minimalist and kinetic art movements that emerged in the 1960s. And we see, as well, that through everything--their ever-expanding friendships with artists and writers of all stripes; working to end the war in Vietnam; hosting riotous dance parties at their Connecticut home; seeing the "mobile," Calder's essential artistic invention, find its way into Webster's dictionary--Calder and Louisa remained the risk-taking, singularly bohemian couple they had been since first meeting at the end of the Roaring Twenties. The biography ends with Calder's death in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight--only weeks after an encyclopedic retrospective of his work opened at the Whitney Museum in New York--but leaves us with a new, clearer understanding of his legacy, both as an artist and a man.

Offers a history of the philosophy of time and a comparison of the ways of conceiving the temporal, concentrating on European philosophy and its impact the connection between time and money in Western civilization. Analyzes the social and political processes involved in conceptions of time in ancien