The first book is his study of events leading to the war and represents the earliest surviving account 1 THUCYDIDES, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the . Whereas, if Athens were to suffer the same misfortune, I suppose that any This was what really enabled the Trojans to keep the field for ten years .
Table of contents
Katya also talked about getting the families to trust her enough to talk about their past. Old Joe is still on could nine from the win over Florida, but he still punched down at U of Smellers, their no-count football team, and Slick Rick. Governor Matt Bevin talked about a lot of topics: L stands for losers! Cats are cool and Cards are stool! He started by explain why he rejected Lt. Suicide prevention through free QPR training and 2.
Get the lowdown on PeteFest and how you can take advantage of free QPR Training to help some who is thinking about suicide. After Saturday night, you knew Old Joe would call. College football is back and Schoolboy Sam Frey has the knowledge you need to make smart wagers. With a little help from Scott Fitzgerald, they break down all of the big college football matchups of the weekend.
If you lose your money, you were the guy taking betting advice from a high school kid and a radio guy. How smart was that? Congressional candidate Hank Linderman came by to talk about some of his ideas for Kentucky. Tackling corruption, the drug problem in the Commonwealth, de-criminalizing drugs, building communities in schools, bullying, and more were discussed.
I teased him when he left for Churchill Downs. I will miss his hearty laugh, humble smile, and his passion for his family. He was crazy in love with his wife Dee, their We discussed why the requirements were put into place, how states got around the federal work requirements, the costs to monitor these requirements, and more. Why it is happening, different service options available, health care, and more.
For some reason, Old Joe called out of season. James Pritchard updates us on the possible movements of both the Castleman and Prentice statues. I appreciated the major theme of regret in the California promise over the centuries - the shadow along with the sunshine - the diversity and the xeonphobia. There was some material about the process of becoming a state of which I'd not heard.
The close links between the military and California development and economy are also new items to me. Aug 18, Wavey Cowpar rated it it was amazing. To understand a people you have to understand their history. This book is compelling and interesting and unfolds that history first era by era and then in the last century topic by topic. Finally an afterword on the first decade and a half of the 21st century brings California out of its crippling recession and debt and back to being one of the largest economies on earth!
Jul 18, Susan Johnson rated it it was ok. I gave this book two stars for two reasons. First, it was an easy read for a book of history. Second, as a California native I did learn a few things that I did not know before Some of the content felt more like a social commentary rather than the presenting of historical facts. Aug 02, Angie rated it liked it Shelves: I was born and raised in California.
This is a great and quick summary of a pretty remarkable history.
I'm biased, of course, but Starr covers a lot in relatively few pages. There were some chapters that were tedious and tiresome, but I learned some new and interesting things. Jul 28, Marcia Kreutzmann rated it really liked it. Kevin Starr's style of writing a just a bit overly verbose for me but otherwise, a very informative book. I'm a native so I have a high interest in learning the history both the good, the bad and the tragic of this state.
Fairly academic as one should expect from a history book but also written in a narrative way that gives story-like quality to the subject matter.
Highly recommend for anyone pursuing an all encompassing, yet not daunting, portrait of California history. And because he loved his state so much. A good jumping point, and a nice read to have as a course book. Nov 01, Asya rated it it was amazing Shelves: Captivating synthesis of Starr's 7-volume history of the state, told through colorful, accessible, fast-paced narrative. Popular history at its best, and an inspired and opinionated history of a fascinating state. Aug 26, Alex rated it liked it. Ambitious telling of the history of the worlds 5th largest economy from native inhabitants to the gold rush.
From Reagan to Arnold. Gets thin at times. Dry and history bookish at times. Despite its faults I would recommend the audiobook to accompany your commute. A good general history of California that gives just enough detail that you feel satisfied while being quite readable. Nov 16, Jason Tudor rated it it was amazing. A really fantastic, detailed accounting of my home state with so many wonderful discoveries.
Winter 2015
Must read for anyone claiming California home! Sep 13, N. Savarani rated it it was amazing. Really easy to read, lots of great information! I would highly recommend if you are interested in learning more about CA history. Nov 05, Aaron Calvert rated it really liked it. This an admirable effort for such a short book.
Jan 10, Amanda rated it really liked it. This state is nuts. Jul 07, Jess rated it liked it Shelves: Mar 14, Warren rated it really liked it Shelves: Exactly what I'd been looking for. A comprehensive history of CA in a digestible size. Really enjoyed reading this book. Like the state he writes about Kevin Starr is a remarkable figure. I first became acquainted with a book he wrote a long time ago called Americans and the California Dream Americans and the California Dream, - That morphed into a five volume intellectual history of the state.
So I am admittedly a biased reviewer. This volume is the survey course of a history of California. But unlike most survey courses, even for someone who h Like the state he writes about Kevin Starr is a remarkable figure. But unlike most survey courses, even for someone who has read a lot of California history, this one also packs some meat. It follows the story from first recorded history to about the time of the recall of Governor Davis.
But you would also learn about the self-consciousness of Californians almost from the early days. If you haven't read a history of California - this is a great place to start. If you are like I am someone who is very interested in the subject - this is a great refresher.
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Mar 23, Marcia rated it really liked it Shelves: I'm currently at the point where some techy guys are inventing semiconductor technology. That's really as far as I am interested in reading. Everything from that point is fairly familiar to me. I don't think I'll finish the book. But natural events are not inherently disasters; disasters are made.
As Haruno Ogasawara poignantly notes, the designation of disaster is predicated on a moral and sociological interpretation of an event that perceives it as disrupting society with negative repercussions. Disruptions, of course, can be bad or good, depending on the interpreter's status or position.
In Japan, earthquakes historically have been considered transformative, even numinous events associated with contemporary social and political circumstances. They could be both devastating and renewing. And as Kitahara Itoko, one of the foremost scholars of disaster in Japan, has emphasized, the study of disaster should not be just a historical chronicling of damage and loss; it should be an interdisciplinary exploration of the dialectical relationship between destruction and reconstruction in the context of social formations.
Disaster is a defining feature of Japan's cultural landscape, and, consequently, the country's general belief system has integrated the cyclicality of destruction and renewal. In this chapter, I focus on the deep-seated belief in the moral connections between human action and disaster natural or man-made and the role of spiritual activities, particularly a range of imaging practices, in helping to prevent or ameliorate such circumstances. These imaging practices reveal the humorous and playful amalgamation of horror and parody and highlight the amusing fusion of the moralistic and the macabre that produced spectacular forms of visual entertainment.
The common jocular aphorism for the four most powerful forces of nature, "earthquake, thunder, fire, and father" jishin, kaminari, kaji, oyaji suggests that earthquakes are one of the most feared natural phenomena in Japan-comparable to the wrath of the stern Japanese patriarch.
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The earliest texts in classical Japanese, such as the Nihon shoki Chronicles of Japan , dating to the sixth century, use the term nai to describe a tremor of the earth na refers to the land, and i indicates the verb to be. Most Japanese people from the premodern period before up through the nineteenth century believed that natural disasters were the result of imbalances in the five elements of nature caused by social impurities directly linked to human behavior; therefore, they thought that appropriate actions could be taken to ameliorate the situation.
On the occasion of major disasters, rulers took extreme measures such as moving the capital and changing the imperial reign name of the period to dissociate themselves from previous rulership. This reflected the Confucian belief in the mandate of heaven that linked equilibrium in the cosmos with proper governance, a set of beliefs that had a pervasive influence in Japan along with Buddhism and Shinto.
Throughout the medieval period in Japan, earthquakes figured prominently in didactic historical texts to articulate causal links between natural disasters and the moral turpitude of the current rulership or the immoral behavior of the general populace, notions that continued to have resonance up through the modern period.
A story of the internecine Genpei warfare, the Heike monogatari similarly features the earthquake, among others. The tale evinces an overwhelming pessimism as it chronicles the downfall of the Heike Taira clan. Reading the rumblings of one quake for the emperor, the chief of the Board of Divination ominously predicts terrible destruction in the future because of moral lapses: Traditionally, a range of Buddhist sutras enumerated various misfortunes brought on by improper adherence to the Buddhist law.
In it, he coined the term "three calamities and seven misfortunes" sansai shichinan to describe the result when both rulers and their people turned against the true teaching of the Buddhist law. The three calamities had greater and lesser versions. The greater calamities that would destroy the world were fire, wind, and water; the lesser that would cause human society to perish were high grain prices or inflation due to famine, warfare, and pestilence. The additional seven misfortunes were pestilence and epidemics; foreign invasion and aggression; internal strife; extraordinary changes in the heavens, such as those signaled by the appearance of comets and meteors; solar, lunar, and stellar irregularities; abnormal weather, such as unseasonable storms; and abnormal climatic conditions, such as prolonged droughts.
This Buddhist worldview did not distinguish natural and man-made disasters from each other, as they all were linked to human moral rectitude. The Buddhist notion of ritual impurity, kegare, which was absorbed into Shinto belief as well, views things that are unclean as an offense to the gods and redolent of human guilt and sin and is associated with death, disaster, and disease. A major function of religious practitioners was to enact rituals to cleanse this pollution, and they developed a host of purification and apotropaic rituals that they performed regularly to divest communities of perceived contamination and prevent the recurrence of disasters.
The tsuina ceremony or, demon exorcism , for example, is still conducted all over Japan at the end or beginning of every year to expel demons from the community and thereby avert misfortune. For most of Japanese history, people have believed that the dead and the living are connected.
As historians of religion Jacqueline Stone and Mariko Walter have amply demonstrated, "Buddhism was the pre-eminent spiritual technology for consoling and pacifying the dead," and the Buddhist doctrine of an ethicized afterlife-where deeds were rewarded or punished by pleasant and painful circumstances and in which worldly bonds persisted beyond death-enjoined the living to dispose of bodies properly.
This was particularly important after the untimely deaths caused by disasters, when the "feeding of hungry ghosts," the important ritual of segaki, had to be performed. This was a joint memorial service conducted for the souls of disaster victims in which offerings were made to appease the tormented souls of unattended wandering spirits muen botoke and hungry ghosts gaki residing in a liminal purgatory; the segaki guarded the spirits of the dead from the malevolent hungry ghosts and protected them from entering into this purgatory.
While the imaging of disaster in Japan, if you include warfare, dates back to Japan's earliest pictorial traditions, two visual genealogies coalesced in the mid-nineteenth century to form the backbone of earthquake imagery that was transmitted into the modern period.
The scroll dialectically ties together misfortune and fortune within the Buddhist cyclical notion of reincarnation and provides a powerful visual polemic for righteous behavior in accordance with Buddhist principles.
THUCYDIDES
His mission was to proselytize righteous behavior by instilling fear of realistic divine punishment and the incentives of earthly rewards. These expressive representations of suffering beings in infernal landscapes became stylistically codified over time, although they never lost their evocative potential to instill fear in viewers. The cyclonic fires are rendered with a combination of black ink sumi and vermilion red mineral pigment to express the dynamism and searing intensity of the blaze. Burning, bloody bodies writhe in agony in the whirling conflagration, only inches from fleeing, terrified mothers clasping infants to their breasts.
The violent nature of the tragic events is conveyed in exquisite detail. All of the misfortune images-which include torrential floods and rainstorms, dramatically zigzagging lightning bolts striking people fig.
This spectacularized and macabre mode of visualizing the cautionary tales of disaster continued unabated into the modern period. Such imagery is evident in the important visual chronicle of firsthand accounts of the devastating Ansei earthquake, Ansei kenmonshi Ansei-Era Observations, March , which appeared soon after the quake hit on 11 November The images in Ansei-Era Observations, combined with the vividly descriptive text, clearly provided visual entertainment as well as moral lessons. Stylistically, they drew heavily from the explicitly rendered gruesome scenes of the supernatural and macabre that were enormously popular in late Edo visual culture.
Renowned print designers such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Kuniyoshi produced extensive corpora of these images. This predilection for the macabre was also abundantly evident in the increasing focus on gruesome stories of criminality in the news. Disaster imagery could not be separated from visual entertainment, even when it conveyed strong moralistic messages.
The merging of the moral and the macabre is apparent in the depiction of the segaki purification ritual in a double-page illustration in the first volume of the Ansei-Era Observations; it shows a mob of disfigured blue corpses clustering before a group of Buddhist priests who are behind an altar performing the rituals fig. The text reads, "The many horrid deaths of people in the recent earthquake, though it was a natural disaster [therefore they deserve their own suffering], were so piteous that Segaki services were held on 2 December at the following temples The grisly features of individual figures rendered by the artist Utagawa Yoshitsuna include one with half his skin missing to reveal the skull beneath, one completely charred from fire, a pregnant woman with her distended blue belly, and another woman gripping her dead infant.
These sufferers all look beseechingly toward the clergy for their salvation. While the service protected both the dead and the living, the spectacularly ghastly scenes frightened and titillated the public. One unique and enduring motif in Japanese disaster imagery is the catfish. The catfish image emerged out of talismanic maps, known as dai Nihonkoku jishin no zu great Japan earthquake maps , which were designed to prevent earthquakes and foretell their future consequences.
These maps originated in the fourteenth century but were popularized in the mid-seventeenth century on the covers of yearly almanacs and were sometimes used in tsuina demon-expelling ceremonies.