scholarly journals Giants or Geniuses? Monumental Building at Mycenae

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-184
Author(s):  
Barbro Santillo Frizell

ln this paper I will focus on some aspects of the history of building technology, a neglected field in archaeology. The related subject is the monumental tholos tombs of Bronze Age Mycenae, and I will argue that a fuller understanding of the building procedure is necessary to interpret the monuments in their historical context. A new interpretation of their function and role in the royal propaganda is proposed.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Theodore Nash

<p>The Late Minoan (LM) II period at Knossos, c. 1470-1420 BC, represented a pivotal point in the history of the Aegean Bronze Age, but the full extent to which it shaped the following centuries has yet to be fully appreciated or studied. During this period, Mycenaeans from the mainland gained control of the palace of Knossos, an administrative centre hitherto unparalleled in their world. From the necessity of maintaining political control over an often hostile island, these Mycenaean dynasts were thrust into new roles, rulers of a palatial administration for the first time. Thus LM II Knossos can be viewed in its neglected aspect as a period of Mycenaean history, and the foundational phenomenon of the florescent Late Helladic III period – the birth of the Mycenaean palaces – can be placed within its proper historical context. The first Mycenaean experiment in palatial administration at LM II Knossos provided the model followed shortly after by the mainland polities, who in following this path to power dominated the Aegean for the next 200 years.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Theodore Nash

<p>The Late Minoan (LM) II period at Knossos, c. 1470-1420 BC, represented a pivotal point in the history of the Aegean Bronze Age, but the full extent to which it shaped the following centuries has yet to be fully appreciated or studied. During this period, Mycenaeans from the mainland gained control of the palace of Knossos, an administrative centre hitherto unparalleled in their world. From the necessity of maintaining political control over an often hostile island, these Mycenaean dynasts were thrust into new roles, rulers of a palatial administration for the first time. Thus LM II Knossos can be viewed in its neglected aspect as a period of Mycenaean history, and the foundational phenomenon of the florescent Late Helladic III period – the birth of the Mycenaean palaces – can be placed within its proper historical context. The first Mycenaean experiment in palatial administration at LM II Knossos provided the model followed shortly after by the mainland polities, who in following this path to power dominated the Aegean for the next 200 years.</p>


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
Clyde Forsberg Jr.

In the history of American popular religion, the Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, have undergone a series of paradigmatic shifts in order to join the Christian mainstream, abandoning such controversial core doctrines and institutions as polygamy and the political kingdom of God. Mormon historians have played an important role in this metamorphosis, employing a version (if not perversion) of the Church-Sect Dichotomy to change the past in order to control the future, arguing, in effect, that founder Joseph Smith Jr’s erstwhile magical beliefs and practices gave way to a more “mature” and bible-based self-understanding which is then said to best describe the religion that he founded in 1830. However, an “esoteric approach” as Faivre and Hanegraaff understand the term has much to offer the study of Mormonism as an old, new religion and the basis for a more even methodological playing field and new interpretation of Mormonism as equally magical (Masonic) and biblical (Evangelical) despite appearances. This article will focus on early Mormonism’s fascination with and employment of ciphers, or “the coded word,” essential to such foundation texts as the Book of Mormon and “Book of Abraham,” as well as the somewhat contradictory, albeit colonial understanding of African character and destiny in these two hermetic works of divine inspiration and social commentary in the Latter-day Saint canonical tradition.


Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.


This first-ever history of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) is told through the reflections of its eight chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Coeditors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. The historic mission of this remarkable but little-understood organization is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. It has been at the center of every critical foreign policy issue during the period covered by this volume: helping shape America’s post–Cold War strategies, confronting sectarian conflicts around the world, meeting the new challenge of international terrorism, and now assessing the radical restructuring of the global order. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC’s history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. With the creation of the director of national intelligence in 2005, the NIC’s mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the main policymaking committees in the government. The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but may have come at the expense of weakening its historic role of providing over-the horizon strategic analysis.


Author(s):  
Stephen R. Barley

The four chapters of this book summarize the results of thirty-five years dedicated to studying how technologies change work and organizations. The first chapter places current developments in artificial intelligence into the historical context of previous technological revolutions by drawing on William Faunce’s argument that the history of technology is one of progressive automation of the four components of any production system: energy, transformation, and transfer and control technologies. The second chapter lays out a role-based theory of how technologies occasion changes in organizations. The third chapter tackles the issue of how to conceptualize a more thorough approach to assessing how intelligent technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can shape work and employment. The fourth chapter discusses what has been learned over the years about the fears that arise when one sets out to study technical work and technical workers and methods for controlling those fears.


Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.


Author(s):  
Ellen Reese ◽  
Ian Breckenridge-Jackson ◽  
Julisa McCoy

This chapter explores the history of maternalist mobilization and women’s community politics in the United States. It argues that both “maternalism” and “community” have proved to be highly flexible mobilizing frames for women. Building on the insights of intersectionality theory, the authors suggest that women’s maternal and community politics is shaped by their social locations within multiple, intersecting relations of domination and subordination, as well as their political ideologies and historical context. The chapter begins by discussing the politically contradictory history of maternalist mobilization within the United States from the Progressive era to the present. It then explores other forms of women’s community politics, focusing on women’s community volunteerism, self-help groups, and community organizing. It discusses how these frames have been used both to build alliances among women and to divide or exclude women based on perceived differences and social inequalities based on race, nativity, class, or sexual orientation.


Author(s):  
Eugenia Roldán Vera ◽  
Susana Quintanilla

The Mexican policy of state provision of standardized textbooks for all was instituted in 1959 and still ongoing. This is an overview of the previous history of state intervention in the production and distribution of school textbooks, an examination of the particular circumstances in which the 1959 policy was figured and implemented, and a description of the characteristics of the different generations of textbooks that have since been published, corresponding with several educational reforms. The arguments for and against standardized textbooks mobilized by different sectors of society throughout sixty years are discussed in their historical context. Far from this being a debate about the authoritarian intervention of the state in education, issues of social equality and teaching quality have been central.


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