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One of the earliest sources of humanity's religious impulse was severe weather, which ancient peoples attributed to the wrath of storm gods. Enlightenment thinkers derided such beliefs as superstition and predicted they would pass away as humans became more scientifically and theologically sophisticated. But in America, scientific and theological hubris came face-to-face with the tornado, nature's most violent windstorm. Striking the United States more than any other nation, tornadoes have consistently defied scientists' efforts to unlock their secrets. Meteorologists now acknowledge that even the most powerful computers will likely never be able to predict a tornado's precise path. Similarl...
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Commemorative practices are revised and rebuilt based on the spirit of the time in which they are re/created. Historians sometimes imagine that commemoration captures history, but actually commemoration creates new narratives about history that allow people to interact with the past in a way that they find meaningful. As our social values change (race, gender, religion, sexuality, class), our commemorations do, too. We Are What We Remember: The American Past Through Commemoration, analyzes current trends in the study of historical memory that are particularly relevant to our own present – our biases, our politics, our contextual moment – and strive to name forgotten, overlooked, and deni...
From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publi...
December 7, 1941—the date of Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor—is "a date which will live" in American history and memory, but the stories that will live and the meanings attributed to them are hardly settled. In movies, books, and magazines, at memorial sites and public ceremonies, and on television and the internet, Pearl Harbor lives in a thousand guises and symbolizes dozens of different historical lessons. In A Date Which Will Live, historian Emily S. Rosenberg examines the contested meanings of Pearl Harbor in American culture. Rosenberg considers the emergence of Pearl Harbor’s symbolic role within multiple contexts: as a day of infamy that highlighted ...
How do individuals inscribe their spiritual identities and diasporic ethnicities in the city? Through a series of sociological and photographic essays, Terence Heng maps the various rituals, collectives, individuals and events that characterise Chinese religion practices in Singapore. From spirit mediums to the Hungry Ghost Festival, each chapter engages with the social, the spatial and the ephemeral, and in so doing it will explore the significance and relevance of Chinese religion in a secular nation-state; reveal the strategies and tactics used by diasporic individuals to perform and retain their identities; uncover the importance of flow and fluidity in the making of sacred space; and evidence the value and efficacy of the use of photographs in social research. Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts is a ground-breaking exploration into the intersections between visual sociology, cultural geography and creative photographic practice. A visual monograph that gives equal importance to image and text, it interrogates the tensions between sacred and profane, official and unofficial, state and individual, physical and spiritual, peeling away the myriad layers of the spiritual imagination.