This authoritative study by a distinguished scholar presents a brilliant panorama of Italian Renaissance life, explaining how and why the period constituted a cultural revolution. Author Jacob Burckhardt chronicles the transition from the medieval concept of society as a conglomeration of classes and communities to the Renaissance focus on individual spirit and creativity. Burckhardt's comprehensive view of art, government, and aspects of d ...
As a young Florentine envoy to the courts of France and the Italian principalities, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was able to observe firsthand the lives of people strongly united under one powerful ruler. His fascination with that political rarity and his intense desire to see the Medici family assume a similar role in Italy provided the foundation for his «primer for princes.» In this classic guide to acquiring and maintai ...
One of the most influential books in the history of Western thought, The Consolation of Philosophy was written in a prison cell by a condemned man. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 480–524) was a Roman scholar, theologian, philosopher, and statesman. Imprisoned by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, probably on trumped-up subversion charges, he was thrown into a remote prison where he was eventually executed.While awaiting his fate, ...
Roger Sale’s Seattle, Past to Present has become a beloved reflection of Seattle’s history and its possible futures as imagined in 1976, when the book was first published. Drawing on demographic analysis, residential surveys, portraiture, and personal observation and reflection, Sale provides his take on what was most important in each of Seattle’s main periods, from the city’s founding, when settlers bu ...
Murray Morgan’s classic history of the Olympic Peninsula, originally published in 1955, evokes a remote American wilderness “as large as the state of Massachusetts, more rugged than the Rockies, its lowlands blanketed by a cool jungle of fir and pine and cedar, its peaks bearing hundreds of miles of living ice that gave rise to swift rivers alive with giant salmon.”Drawing on historical research and personal tales collected from docks, forest tr ...
With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of Tacoma, �the City of Destiny,� and southern Puget Sound, where many major events of Washington�s history took place. Drawing upon original journals and reports, Morgan builds Puget�s Sound around individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known hist ...
Skid Road tells the story of Seattle �from the bottom up,� offering an informal and engaging portrait of the Emerald City�s first century, as seen through the lives of some of its most colorful citizens. With his trademark combination of deep local knowledge, precision, and wit, Murray Morgan traces the city�s history from its earliest days as a hacked-from-the-wilderness timber town, touching on local ...
�Company town.� The words evoke images of rough-and-tumble loggers and gritty miners, of dreary shacks in isolated villages, of wages paid in scrip good only at price-gouging company stores of paternalistic employers. But these stereotypes are outdated, especially for those company towns that flourished well into the twentieth century. This new edition updates the status of the surviving towns and how they have changed in t ...
