OVT – VPRO ~ Het spoor terug, de koloniale kater St. Eustatius
Sint Eustatius was de belangrijkste doorvoer- en handelshaven van de West Indische Compagnie. Het eiland werd in de achttiende eeuw ook wel de Gouden Rots genoemd. Het was verreweg het rijkste koloniale bezit in de west en via Sint Eustatius hielp Nederland de Amerikanen in 1776 met hun oorlog tegen de Engelsen. Een Amerikaans schip werd er zelfs begroet met elf saluutschoten, die door Amerika prompt werden geïnterpreteerd als de eerste erkenning van hun onafhankelijkheid.
Maar hoe kijken de Sint Eustatianen aan tegen hun fiere koloniale verleden. Pieter-Bas van Wiechen ging naar het eiland en maakte de documentaire ‘De koloniale kater van Sint Eustatius’.
Luister: http://m.radio1.nl/Eustatius.html
TEDTalk – Lisa Bu ~ How Books Can Open Your Mind
What happens when a dream you’ve held since childhood … doesn’t come true? As Lisa Bu adjusted to a new life in the United States, she turned to books to expand her mind and create a new path for herself. She shares her unique approach to reading in this lovely, personal talk about the magic of books.
Harvard Classics (Bookshelf)
The Harvard Classics, originally known as Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, is a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature, compiled and edited by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, that was first published in 1909.
Dr. Eliot, then President of Harvard University, had stated in speeches that the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf. (Originally he had said a three-foot shelf.)
The publisher P. F. Collier and Son saw an opportunity, and challenged him to make good on this statement by selecting an appropriate collection of works; the Harvard Classics was the result. Eliot worked for one year together with William A. Neilson, a professor of English; Eliot determined the works to be included and Neilson selected the specific editions and wrote introductory notes (Kirsch 2001). Each volume had 400 to 450 pages or so; and the included texts are “so far as possible, entire works or complete segments of the world’s written legacies” (Going 2006).
The collection was widely advertised by Collier and Son, in Collier’s Magazine and elsewhere, with great success. As Adam Kirsch, writing in 2001 Harvard magazine, notes, “It is surprisingly easy, even today, to find a complete set of the Harvard Classics in good condition. At least one is usually for sale on eBay, the Internet auction site, for $300 or so, a bargain at $6 a book. The supply, from attics or private libraries around the country, seems endless—a tribute to the success of the publisher, P.F. Collier, who sold some 350,000 sets within 20 years of the series’ initial publication” (Kirsch 2001). A separate 20-volume selection by Eliot, the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, was published in 1917.
Collier’s was a major publisher of sets in the early 1900s and throughout the century issued many multi-volume sets of authors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, John Steinbeck, P. G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Currently, a hardcover set of the Harvard Classics (now in the public domain) is published by Easton Press and a paperback version by Kessinger Publishing.
See: https://www.gutenberg.org/Harvard_Classics_(Bookshelf)
The University of Chicago Press ~ The History Of Cartography
The first volume of the History of Cartography was published in 1987 and the three books that constitute Volume Two appeared over the following eleven years. In 1987 the worldwide web did not exist, and since 1998 book publishing has gone through a revolution in the production and dissemination of work. Although the large format and high quality image reproduction of the printed books (see right column) are still well-suited to the requirements for the publishing of maps, the online availability of material is a boon to scholars and map enthusiasts.
On this site the University of Chicago Press is pleased to present the first three volumes of the History of Cartography in PDF format. Navigate to the PDFs from the left column. Each chapter of each book is a single PDF. The search box on the left allows searching across the content of all the PDFs that make up the first six books.
“An important scholarly enterprise, the History of Cartography … is the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken …. People come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their perceptions of how its elements are connected and of how they should move among them. This is precisely what the series is attempting by situating the map at the heart of cultural life and revealing its relationship to society, science, and religion…. It is trying to define a new set of relationships between maps and the physical world that involve more than geometric correspondence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times
“It is permitted to few scholars both to extend the boundaries of their field of study and to redefine it as a discipline. Yet that is precisely what The History as a whole is doing.”—Paul Wheatley, Imago Mundi
“A major scholarly publishing achievement.… We will learn much not only about maps, but about how and why and with what consequences civilizations have apprehended, expanded, and utilized the potential of maps.”—Josef W. Konvitz, Isis
Go to: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/index.html