Thomas Osborne delivers a gripping account of 1870s Ontario pioneer life.
The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some free land in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.
For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, an undiscovered Canadian classic.
Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.
Exploring ancient Greece's history is spectacularly inspiring. The Greeks gave us our foundational concepts of geometry, our first astronomical models, the beginnings of modern medicine, and our understanding of democracy. Greek sculptures, paintings, and mosaics captured the human form realistically and movingly - like nothing ever seen before. The ancient Greeks were a powerhouse of all things new this book unlocks the door to an ancient past reaching through time to touch all parts of our lives.
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This easy-to-read, comprehensive, and engaging history of the Toltec Civilization brings you into the world of little-known, inspiring - and sometimes surprising - stories and culture of this legendary people delves into every aspect of the Toltecs, bringing light to bear on this ancient and interesting civilization. After all, the Aztecs were found enough to claim Toltecs as their direct ancestors; they must have been greatly influenced by this amazing culture!
What is the point of cultural theory? Do we even know what it is? This book is at once an introduction to, and, broadly, a defence of modern cultural theory understood as a particular constellation of inquiry, one that may be all the more important in our postmodern times the more seemingly irrelevant it is to current fashions.
Focusing on the work of Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault the book argues that in spite of their differences these authors shared particularly 'modern' understandings of culture, creativity and human agency; understandings centred on the ideas of critical autonomy and creativity of thought. Even though all three were committed to scholarly empirical research, for them the function of cultural theory was not just to describe the world positivistically 'as it is' (or was) but to cultivate the conditions for ethical autonomy in their readerships by opening up ways for thinking differently and exposing the fetishisms and blockages that hinder that task.