Simon Schama

Historian Simon Schama offers an essential historical perspective on the 2008 presidential election and its importance for reclaiming America's original ideal. Cultural hostilities more irreconcilable than any since the Civil War have divided America in two. In November 2008, the American people elected a new president, feeling more anxious about the future of the nation than at any time since Watergate. Our omnipotent military, the cornucopia of material comforts available, the security of our borders, and the global economy can no longer be taken for granted. Schama takes a long look at the multiple crises besetting the United States and asks how these problems look in the mirror of time. In four crucial debates--on wars, religion, race and immigration, and the relationship between natural resources and prosperity--Schama looks back to find lost insights into the future.--From publisher description.

In response to a declaration by the last royal governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancipated, tens of thousands of slaves--Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom--escaped from farms, plantations and cities to try to reach the British camp. This mass movement lasted as long as the war did, and a military strategy originally designed to break the plantations of the American South had unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history. Schama details the odyssey of the escaped blacks through the fires of war and the terror of potential recapture at the war's end, into inhospitable Nova Scotia, where thousands who had served the Crown were betrayed and, in a little-known hegira of the slave epic, sent across the broad, stormy ocean to Sierra Leone.--From publisher description.̓

Pre-eminent author and art historian Simon Schama has written widely on art for many years to great acclaim. In Hang-Ups, a personal selection of his articles from, amongst others, The New Yorker, appears in Britain for the very first time. Brilliantly and lucidly written by one of the most singular voices in non-fiction, this volume of provocative and often idiosyncratic essays makes hugely satisfying reading for lovers of both art and social history. In contains pieces on artists as diverse as David Hockney, Rembrandt and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and on such subjects as the unforgettable peculiarity of Stanley Spencer. From the author whose writing has been called sublime and whose ability to bring art and history vividly to life has earned him admiration worldwide, Hang-Ups is Schamas rallying cry for the art lover to look at familiar works of art and their artists and embrace a new way of seeing.

This dazzling, unconventional biography shows us why, more than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt continues to exert such a hold on our imagination. Deeply familiar to us through his enigmatic self-portraits, few facts are known about the Leiden miller's son who tasted brief fame before facing financial ruin (he was even forced to sell his beloved wife Saskia's grave). The true biography of Rembrandt, as Simon Schama demonstrates, is to be discovered in his pictures. Interweaving of seventeenth-century Holland, Schama allows us to see Rembrandt in a completely fresh and original way.

Opening a radically new and original path into history, Simon Schama explores the scenery of our Western culture, both real landscapes and landscapes of the mind that have given us our sense of homeland, the dark woods of our imagined origins. What unfolds is a series of compelling journeys through space and time: from the ancient woodland of Poland, a symbol over the centuries of national endurance, through the forest birthplace of the German psyche, to the Big Trees of Yosemite that gave a new nation its holy past. Through all of history, from pre-classical antiquity to the Third Reich and beyond, Schama uncovers the myths and memories that have stamped themselves on our most basic social instincts and institutions: territorial identity, the wild and domestic, mortality and immortality.

An experiment in historical narration: two true "tales"--Each involving a violent death, each linked to a great, tragic Boston dynasty, that of General James Wolfe, killed at the battle of Quebec in 1759 and the second, the death of George Parkman, eccentric Boston luminary. Both tales are linked by the fate of the dynasty of the Parkmans of Boston and by Schama's sense of the irrecoverable distance between events and their narration, of the death of certainty--Jacket.

This text explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity. Examines seventeenth-century Dutch life, history, and culture.

"A tour de force, the first work of a young English scholar that is already attracting the highest acclaim..., Patriots and Liberators captures the disintegration of a great European power--the Dutch Republic--into military impotence, economic ruin and near terminal eclipse as a nation state. Drawing on a mass of previously untouched archival material from several countries, Simon Schama gives us a brilliant portrait of an extraordinary nation at the point of no return. The moment is the ominous pause before the political cataclysm that will engulf the Old World in 1789. ... For more than a hundred years, the Dutch have been admired and envied as the miracle of a continent: affluent, urbane and tolerant, the masters of a global maritime empire, providers of Europe's ships, grain, cloth and spices, bankers to its monarchs, pioneers in science and printing, they have placed their stamp upon Western civilisation. But now their splendour is decaying, their Golden Century at an end.^ As grandeur sinks towards catastrophe (an incapable ruler, chaos in government, famine and poverty spreading across the land, an army and fleet pathetically inadequate to safeguard the Republic's independence), we see a people in extremis: they must either resign themselves to the total erosion of their power or else embark--deliberately--upon their own revolution. They choose the second course (three years before revolution erupts in France), but the brave attempt at regeneration--their enterprise: to create a democracy of citizens in arms--ends in disaster. Schama's book graphically documents the succession of calamities--civil war, invasion, occupation, economic strangulation and political sabotage--that befalls the Dutch from this moment on in their desperate efforts to avert obliteration as an independent state.^ Attacked by greedy enemies on all sides (first Prussia, then Britain, then Napoleonic France exporting "Liberty" and revolutionary imperialism on the points of bayonets), the country is tom apart. Livelihoods are ruined, crops destroyed; the fishermen of the deltas are driven to destitution by hostile privateers; beggars and academics in Leiden are caught up in a gunpowder explosion that rips their city apart; all across the land, people are subjected to financial extortion as agents and spies, generals and ambassadors, conspire to wreck the government and exploit every weakness to satisfy the limitless demands of the French war machine. Even Louis Bonaparte, installed by his brother as puppet king of the Dutch, joins his "subjects" in their concerted resistance; ultimately, he will contemplate breaking the dykes that protect his people from the seas and flooding the country rather than surrender. Patriots and Liberators is the anatomy of a satellite state in a time of total war.^ How the Dutch miraculously survived is the drama of this monumental, driving book, whose revelations mark a major contribution to our understanding of the shaping of modern Europe."--Dust jacket.

Twombly's photographic oeuvre, which did not achieve recognition until late, spans more than sixty years of his career. In this catalogue around a hundred unpublished photographs selected,(just before his death), by the artist himself, he also did the book design. The photographs are accompanied by an essay written by Hubertus V. Amelunxen.00Exhibition: Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels. February/April 2012.

Provides an authoritative overview of the artist's work, including his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs.

"Starting with the grim Britain of the Civil War era, with its punishing sense of the body as a corrupt vessel for the soul, Roy Porter charts how, through figures as diverse as Locke, Swift, Johnson, and Gibbon, ideas about medicine, politics, and religion fundamentally changed notions of self. He shows how the Enlightenment (with its explosion or rational thinking and scientific invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) provided a lens through which we can best see the profound shift from the theocentric, otherwordly, Dark Ages to the modern, earthly, body-centered world we live in today. As man made in God's image gave way to the Enlightenment's notion of the Self-made man, the body moved center stage. Porter writes brilliantly on the ways in which men and women flaunted, decorated, tanned, and dieted themselves: activities that we find familiar but that a Puritan divine would have considered satanic. And he explores how, at the end of the century, the human soul took on a new significance in the works of Godwin, Blake, and Byron."--BOOK JACKET.

'The British Wars' is a compelling chronicle of the changes that transformed every strand and strata of British life, faith and thought from 1603 to 1776. It explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change.

Details the story of the Jewish experience, tracing it across three millennia, from their beginnings as an ancient tribal people to the opening of the New World in 1492 to the modern day. A tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews. Details the story of the Jewish experience, tracing it across three millennia, from their beginnings as an ancient tribal people to the opening of the New World in 1492 to the modern day. A tie-in to the PBS and BBC series The Story of the Jews. It is a story like no other: an epic of endurance against destruction, of creativity in oppression, joy amidst grief, the affirmation of life against the steepest of odds. It spans the millennia and the continents, from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford. It takes you to unimagined places: to a Jewish kingdom in the mountains of southern Arabia; a Syrian synagogue glowing with radiant wall paintings; the palm groves of the Jewish dead in the Roman catacombs. And its voices ring loud and clear, from the severities and ecstasies of the Bible writers to the love poems of wine bibbers in a garden in Muslim Spain. And a great story unfolds. Not, as often imagined, of a culture apart, but of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians. Which makes the story of the Jews everyone's story, too. -- From publisher's description.