Search results for ""Author David Vincent""

The home run has changed the game of baseball, moving it into a sport where might makes right and fans clamor for the clout.

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The home run is indeed baseball's ultimate weapon. It can change a game in a heartbeat, making a tight game into a blowout or a seemingly easy win into a nail-biter. Homers are majestic, powerful, and awe inspiring. And sluggers are the sport's biggest stars, from the days of Babe Ruth through Barry Bonds.

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Solitude has always had an ambivalent status: the capacity to enjoy being alone can make sociability bearable, but those predisposed to solitude are often viewed with suspicion or pity. Drawing on a wide array of literary and historical sources, David Vincent explores how people have conducted themselves in the absence of company over the last three centuries. He argues that the ambivalent nature of solitude became a prominent concern in the modern era. For intellectuals in the romantic age, solitude gave respite to citizens living in ever more complex modern societies. But while the search for solitude was seen as a symptom of modern life, it was also viewed as a dangerous pathology: a perceived renunciation of the world, which could lead to psychological disorder and anti-social behaviour. Vincent explores the successive attempts of religious authorities and political institutions to manage solitude, taking readers from the monastery to the prisoner’s cell, and explains how western society’s increasing secularism, urbanization and prosperity led to the development of new solitary pastimes at the same time as it made traditional forms of solitary communion, with God and with a pristine nature, impossible. At the dawn of the digital age, solitude has taken on new meanings, as physical isolation and intense sociability have become possible as never before. With the advent of a so-called loneliness epidemic, a proper historical understanding of the natural human desire to disengage from the world is more important than ever. The first full-length account of its subject, A History of Solitude will appeal to a wide general readership.

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This important book provides a comparative study of the growth and impact of mass literacy across Europe between 1750 and 1950. The volume outlines the main features of the comparative growth of literacy, and relates them to the later growth of electronic media. It assesses the ways in which mass literacy has transformed ways of living and thinking, by exploring broader social and cultural issues such as gender, age, consciousness of time and space, and our relationship with the natural world. Vincent begins by considering the evolution of methods of teaching and learning across the centuries, and examines the relationship between literacy and economic growth, including the changing function of literacy in the workplace. He discusses the changing pattern of demand for and provision of reading matter, as well as the changing relationship between oral and written modes of generating and reproducing both information and fantasy. In later chapters, Vincent analyses the history of popular writing, and the relationship between print, language and national identity. The impact of literacy on democracy and political mobilization, and on the making of censorship and propaganda, is also discussed in this lively and accessible study.

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Solitude has always had an ambivalent status: the capacity to enjoy being alone can make sociability bearable, but those predisposed to solitude are often viewed with suspicion or pity. Drawing on a wide array of literary and historical sources, David Vincent explores how people have conducted themselves in the absence of company over the last three centuries. He argues that the ambivalent nature of solitude became a prominent concern in the modern era. For intellectuals in the romantic age, solitude gave respite to citizens living in ever more complex modern societies. But while the search for solitude was seen as a symptom of modern life, it was also viewed as a dangerous pathology: a perceived renunciation of the world, which could lead to psychological disorder and anti-social behaviour. Vincent explores the successive attempts of religious authorities and political institutions to manage solitude, taking readers from the monastery to the prisoner’s cell, and explains how western society’s increasing secularism, urbanization and prosperity led to the development of new solitary pastimes at the same time as it made traditional forms of solitary communion, with God and with a pristine nature, impossible. At the dawn of the digital age, solitude has taken on new meanings, as physical isolation and intense sociability have become possible as never before. With the advent of a so-called loneliness epidemic, a proper historical understanding of the natural human desire to disengage from the world is more important than ever. The first full-length account of its subject, A History of Solitude will appeal to a wide general readership.

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Privacy: A Short History provides a vital historical account of an increasingly stressed sphere of human interaction. At a time when the death of privacy is widely proclaimed, distinguished historian, David Vincent, describes the evolution of the concept and practice of privacy from the Middle Ages to the present controversy over digital communication and state surveillance provoked by the revelations of Edward Snowden. Deploying a range of vivid primary material, he discusses the management of private information in the context of housing, outdoor spaces, religious observance, reading, diaries and autobiographies, correspondence, neighbours, gossip, surveillance, the public sphere and the state. Key developments, such as the nineteenth-century celebration of the enclosed and intimate middle-class household, are placed in the context of long-term development. The book surveys and challenges the main currents in the extensive secondary literature on the subject. It seeks to strike a new balance between the built environment and world beyond the threshold, between written and face-to-face communication, between anonymity and familiarity in towns and cities, between religion and secular meditation, between the state and the private sphere and, above all, between intimacy and individualism. Ranging from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first, this book shows that the history of privacy has been an arena of contested choices, and not simply a progression towards a settled ideal. Privacy: A Short History will be of interest to students and scholars of history, and all those interested in this topical subject.

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Privacy: A Short History provides a vital historical account of an increasingly stressed sphere of human interaction. At a time when the death of privacy is widely proclaimed, distinguished historian, David Vincent, describes the evolution of the concept and practice of privacy from the Middle Ages to the present controversy over digital communication and state surveillance provoked by the revelations of Edward Snowden. Deploying a range of vivid primary material, he discusses the management of private information in the context of housing, outdoor spaces, religious observance, reading, diaries and autobiographies, correspondence, neighbours, gossip, surveillance, the public sphere and the state. Key developments, such as the nineteenth-century celebration of the enclosed and intimate middle-class household, are placed in the context of long-term development. The book surveys and challenges the main currents in the extensive secondary literature on the subject. It seeks to strike a new balance between the built environment and world beyond the threshold, between written and face-to-face communication, between anonymity and familiarity in towns and cities, between religion and secular meditation, between the state and the private sphere and, above all, between intimacy and individualism. Ranging from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first, this book shows that the history of privacy has been an arena of contested choices, and not simply a progression towards a settled ideal. Privacy: A Short History will be of interest to students and scholars of history, and all those interested in this topical subject.

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The Fatal Breath is the first full-scale history of the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain. Deploying a rich archive of personal testimonies together with a wide range of research reports and official data, it presents a moving and challenging account of the crisis that enveloped Britain (and the world) in the spring of 2020. With sensitivity, care, and an historian’s critical eye, David Vincent places the pandemic in context. While much contemporary commentary has assumed people were forced to develop entirely new ways of living and working during lockdown, Vincent reveals how the population was able to draw upon a wealth of resources and coping strategies already seen over the centuries, often reacting far more quickly and effectively than slow-moving authorities. He tells the stories of doctors’ and nurses’ time on the frontlines, reveals the true extent of supply shortages, conspiracy theories, and vaccine resistance, and explores individuals’ newfound appreciation of nature and community in lockdown. The Fatal Breath will appeal to anyone seeking to reflect on the past few years and how the pandemic has changed Britain – for better and for worse.

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An unusually complete collection of over 300 broadsides from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, produced in the heated political climate of the early 18c. In the half century before 1790, there had been only one contested election in Newcastle, but between 1790 and 1832 there were a dozen. This new and heated political climate prompted the production of a vast array of printed propaganda and political commentary, aimed at voters and non-voters alike. Most of this material took the form of single printed sheets, or broadsides, produced in great numbers and distributed amongst the town's inhabitants for free.This volume reproduces just over three hundred Newcastle broadsides published during this time; they constitute an important and unique collection, for though such material was produced in many constituencies in Hanoverian England, rarely has it survived in such a complete form. Material comes from Keele University Library, the Sutherland papers at the Staffordshire Record Office, and Newcastle Museum. A representative selection of reproductions of original broadsides is included to give the reader an idea of how contemporaries would have seen the texts and an introduction explains their context. Dr HANNAH BARKER is Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester; Dr DAVIDVINCENT is Professor of Social History at the University of Keele.

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I Am Morbid tells the astounding story of David Vincent, former bassist and singer with Morbid Angel, and now outlaw-country performer and leader of the I Am Morbid supergroup. Written with the bestselling author Joel McIver, it s an autobiography that transcends the heavy metal category by its very nature. Much more than a mere memoir, I Am Morbid is an instruction manual for life at the sharp end; a gathering of wisdom distilled into ten acute lessons for anyone interested in furthering their fortunes in life. Morbid Angel redefined the term pioneers. A band of heavy-metal-loving kids from all over America who broke through a host of music industry prejudices and went on to scale huge commercial heights, they introduced a whole new form of extreme music to the world. Formed in 1984, and breaking into the limelight in 1989 with their devastating first album, Altars Of Madness, the Florida death-metal legends became the first band of their genre to sign to a major label, from which point they came to dominate the worldwide metal scene for two decades and beyond. David left Morbid Angel in 1996, and again, following a reunion, in 2015. For the first time, I Am Morbid explores the reasons behind his departure, and the transformation of his life, career, and music in the years since. This is a classic but never predictable tale of a man who has fought convention every step of the way . . . and won.

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