Burning the Books
Title | Burning the Books PDF eBook |
Author | Richard Ovenden |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Total Pages | 321 |
Release | 2020-10-13 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0674241207 |
The director of the famed Bodleian Libraries at Oxford narrates the global history of the willful destruction—and surprising survival—of recorded knowledge over the past three millennia. Libraries and archives have been attacked since ancient times but have been especially threatened in the modern era. Today the knowledge they safeguard faces purposeful destruction and willful neglect; deprived of funding, libraries are fighting for their very existence. Burning the Books recounts the history that brought us to this point. Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts—political, religious, and cultural—and the broader themes that shape this history. He also looks at attempts to prevent and mitigate attacks on knowledge, exploring the efforts of librarians and archivists to preserve information, often risking their own lives in the process. More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries and archives inspire and inform citizens. In preserving notions of statehood recorded in such historical documents as the Declaration of Independence, libraries support the state itself. By preserving records of citizenship and records of the rights of citizens as enshrined in legal documents such as the Magna Carta and the decisions of the US Supreme Court, they support the rule of law. In Burning the Books, Ovenden takes a polemical stance on the social and political importance of the conservation and protection of knowledge, challenging governments in particular, but also society as a whole, to improve public policy and funding for these essential institutions.
Burning Books
Title | Burning Books PDF eBook |
Author | M. Fishburn |
Publisher | Springer |
Total Pages | 239 |
Release | 2008-05-21 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0230583660 |
This provocative new work examines the years between the Nazi book fires and the publication of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), a period when book burning captured the popular imagination. It explores how embedded the myths of book burning have become in our cultural history, and illustrates the enduring appeal of a great cleansing bonfire.
Burning Book
Title | Burning Book PDF eBook |
Author | Jessica Bruder |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Total Pages | 376 |
Release | 2007-08-07 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1416928243 |
Jessica Bruderis a reporter for theOregonian.Her writing has also appeared in theNew York Times,theWashington Post,and theNew York Observer.She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity
Title | Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity PDF eBook |
Author | Dirk Rohmann |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Total Pages | 364 |
Release | 2016-07-25 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 3110485559 |
It is estimated that only a small fraction, less than 1 per cent, of ancient literature has survived to the present day. The role of Christian authorities in the active suppression and destruction of books in Late Antiquity has received surprisingly little sustained consideration by academics. In an approach that presents evidence for the role played by Christian institutions, writers and saints, this book analyses a broad range of literary and legal sources, some of which have hitherto been little studied. Paying special attention to the problem of which genres and book types were likely to be targeted, the author argues that in addition to heretical, magical, astrological and anti-Christian books, other less obviously subversive categories of literature were also vulnerable to destruction, censorship or suppression through prohibition of the copying of manuscripts. These include texts from materialistic philosophical traditions, texts which were to become the basis for modern philosophy and science. This book examines how Christian authorities, theologians and ideologues suppressed ancient texts and associated ideas at a time of fundamental transformation in the late classical world.
Culture in the Third Reich
Title | Culture in the Third Reich PDF eBook |
Author | Moritz Föllmer |
Publisher | Oxford University Press, USA |
Total Pages | 331 |
Release | 2020-05-25 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0198814607 |
'It's like being in a dream', commented Joseph Goebbels when he visited Nazi-occupied Paris in the summer of 1940. Dream and reality did indeed intermingle in the culture of the Third Reich, racialist fantasies and spectacular propaganda set-pieces contributing to this atmosphere alongside more benign cultural offerings such as performances of classical music or popular film comedies. A cultural palette that catered to the tastes of the majority helped encourage acceptance of the regime. The Third Reich was therefore eager to associate itself with comfortable middle-brow conventionality, while at the same time exploiting the latest trends that modern mass culture had to offer. And it was precisely because the culture of the Nazi period accommodated such a range of different needs and aspirations that it was so successfully able to legitimize war, imperial domination, and destruction. Moritz F�llmer turns the spotlight on this fundamental aspect of the Third Reich's successful cultural appeal in this ground-breaking new study, investigating what 'culture' meant for people in the years between 1933 and 1945: for convinced National Socialists at one end of the spectrum, via the legions of the apparently 'unpolitical', right through to anti-fascist activists, Jewish people, and other victims of the regime at the other end of the spectrum. Relating the everyday experience of people living under Nazism, he is able to give us a privileged insight into the question of why so many Germans enthusiastically embraced the regime and identified so closely with it.
Burning Books and Leveling Libraries
Title | Burning Books and Leveling Libraries PDF eBook |
Author | Rebecca Knuth |
Publisher | Praeger |
Total Pages | 0 |
Release | 2006-05-30 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0275990079 |
In her previous book Libricide, Knuth focused on book destruction by authoritarian regimes: Nazis, Serbs in Bosnia, Iraqis in Kuwait, Maoists during the Cultural Revolution in China, and the Chinese Communists in Tibet. But authoritarian governments are not the only perpetrators. Extremists of all stripes--through terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other forms of mass violence--are also responsible for widespread cultural destruction, as she demonstrates in this new book. Whether the product of passion or of a cool-headed decision to use ideas to rationalize excess, the decimation of the world's libraries has occurred throughout the 20th century, and there is no end in sight. Cultural destruction is, therefore, of increasing concern to the library community, educators, human rights and civil rights activists, and caring citizens.
Book Burning
Title | Book Burning PDF eBook |
Author | Cal Thomas |
Publisher | |
Total Pages | 168 |
Release | 1983 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN |
Argues that schools, public libraries, book stores, and the media censor the religious and politically conservative points of view.