Search results for ""Author Peter Ward""

This is a history of domestic space in Canada. Peter Ward looks at how spaces in the Canadian home have changed over the last three centuries, and how family and social relationships have shaped – and been shaped by – these changing spaces. A fundamental element of daily life for individuals and families is domestic privacy, that of individuals and that of the family or household.There are also two facets of privacy – privacy from and privacy to. Personal privacy sets the individual apart from the group, creating opportunities for seclusion. Family privacy draws boundaries between the household and the community, defending the solidarity of the home and providing a basis for family relationships. In both ways, privacy is intimately involved with the history of the house.Over time, the changing size, shape, and location of the home have created widely different opportunities for family and personal privacy. Together with major shifts in household composition, family size, and domestic technology, they have gradually altered the conditions of everyday domestic life.But the pattern of change has been far from uniform, for the nature, meaning, and experience of privacy in Canadian have varied widely over the past 300 years. This book explores some of those experiences and meanings, reflecting on their impllications for family and social life historically as well as in the recent past.

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How often did our ancestors bathe? How often did they wash their clothes and change them? What did they understand cleanliness to be? Why have our hygienic habits changed so dramatically over time? In short, how have we come to be so clean? The Clean Body explores one of the most fundamental and pervasive cultural changes in Western history since the seventeenth century: the personal hygiene revolution. In the age of Louis XIV bathing was rare and hygiene was mainly a matter of wearing clean underclothes. By the late twentieth century frequent - often daily - bathing had become the norm and wearing freshly laundered clothing the general practice. Cleanliness, once simply a requirement for good health, became an essential element of beauty. Beneath this transformation lay a sea change in understandings, motives, ideologies, technologies, and practices, all of which shaped popular habits over time. Peter Ward explains that what began as an urban bourgeois phenomenon in the later eighteenth century became a universal condition by the end of the twentieth, touching young and old, rich and poor, city dwellers and country residents alike. Based on a wealth of sources in English, French, German, and Italian, The Clean Body surveys the great hygienic transformation that took place across Europe and North America over the course of four centuries.

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In 1967 Peter Ward crashed in a training ride. While recovering, he wrote the iconic King of Sports: Cycling Road Racing, which hasn't been republished since - until now.

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In The Medea Hypothesis, renowned paleontologist Peter Ward proposes a revolutionary and provocative vision of life's relationship with the Earth's biosphere--one that has frightening implications for our future, yet also offers hope. Using the latest discoveries from the geological record, he argues that life might be its own worst enemy. This stands in stark contrast to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis--the idea that life sustains habitable conditions on Earth. In answer to Gaia, which draws on the idea of the "good mother" who nurtures life, Ward invokes Medea, the mythical mother who killed her own children. Could life by its very nature threaten its own existence? According to the Medea hypothesis, it does. Ward demonstrates that all but one of the mass extinctions that have struck Earth were caused by life itself. He looks at our planet's history in a new way, revealing an Earth that is witnessing an alarming decline of diversity and biomass--a decline brought on by life's own "biocidal" tendencies. And the Medea hypothesis applies not just to our planet--its dire prognosis extends to all potential life in the universe. Yet life on Earth doesn't have to be lethal. Ward shows why, but warns that our time is running out. Breathtaking in scope, The Medea Hypothesis is certain to arouse fierce debate and radically transform our worldview. It serves as an urgent challenge to all of us to think in new ways if we hope to save ourselves from ourselves.

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This is a history of domestic space in Canada. Peter Ward looks at how spaces in the Canadian home have changed over the last three centuries, and how family and social relationships have shaped – and been shaped by – these changing spaces. A fundamental element of daily life for individuals and families is domestic privacy, that of individuals and that of the family or household.There are also two facets of privacy – privacy from and privacy to. Personal privacy sets the individual apart from the group, creating opportunities for seclusion. Family privacy draws boundaries between the household and the community, defending the solidarity of the home and providing a basis for family relationships. In both ways, privacy is intimately involved with the history of the house.Over time, the changing size, shape, and location of the home have created widely different opportunities for family and personal privacy. Together with major shifts in household composition, family size, and domestic technology, they have gradually altered the conditions of everyday domestic life.But the pattern of change has been far from uniform, for the nature, meaning, and experience of privacy in Canadian have varied widely over the past 300 years. This book explores some of those experiences and meanings, reflecting on their impllications for family and social life historically as well as in the recent past.

Read more less