Search results for ""Author Robert L. Carneiro""

For ages the events of human experience were explained by recourse to supernatural agents and forces. Given the rudimentary intellectual tools then available to the human race, no better explanations were possible. Over the ensuing centuries, the ideas and methods of empirical science came into being and were applied to all aspects of human experience. Conceptions of life, the world, the universe, and even of God were modified, with naturalistic interpretations challenging and supplanting supernaturalistic ones. Today the viewpoint of science is gaining ever-greater acceptance. In his eloquent new book, The Evolution of the Human Mind, Robert Carneiro traces the history of this development—from the Paleolithic to the present—vividly describing the major events that have marked this great transition in human thought.

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For ages the events of human experience were explained by recourse to supernatural agents and forces. Given the rudimentary intellectual tools then available to the human race, no better explanations were possible. Over the ensuing centuries, the ideas and methods of empirical science came into being and were applied to all aspects of human experience. Conceptions of life, the world, the universe, and even of God were modified, with naturalistic interpretations challenging and supplanting supernaturalistic ones. Today the viewpoint of science is gaining ever-greater acceptance. In his eloquent new book, The Evolution of the Human Mind, Robert Carneiro traces the history of this development—from the Paleolithic to the present—vividly describing the major events that have marked this great transition in human thought.

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Thomas Babington Macaulay was one of the great English historians of the nineteenth century. He first made his name as an essayist, contributing many articles on a variety of topics to the Edinburgh Review, the leading literary journal of its day. Among the contributions Macaulay made in these essays was setting forth a distinct philosophy of historiography, in which he argued that written history should be more than a catalog of conspicuous events. It should, he held, also portray events in the everyday lives of common people--something most historians of the day felt was "beneath the dignity of history." By insisting that depicting such events was indeed a proper function of the historian, Macaulay showed himself to be not only a historian with an unusually wide vista, but also an anthropologist before his time. When Macaulay came to write his famous five-volume History of England from the Accession of James II, he gave expression to this philosophy by including in this work a long chapter in which many aspects of English society and culture were surveyed as they stood in the year 1685. This groundbreaking chapter, now all but forgotten, deserves to be rescued from oblivion. It is presented here, standing alone, preceded by a long introduction in which Macaulay's life and career are set forth in detail--highlighting his contributions to English history, politics, and letters.

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What many anthropologists regard as the major step in political development occurred when, for the first time in history, previously autonomous villages gave up their individual sovereignties and were brought together into a multi-village political unit--the chiefdom. Though long neglected as a major stage in history, recent years have seen the chiefdom come in for increased attention. As its importance has been more fully recognized, it has become the object of serious scholarly analysis and interpretation. In this volume specialists in political evolution draw on data from ethnography, archaeology, and history and apply fresh insights to enhance the study of the chiefdom. The papers present penetrating analyses of many aspects of the chiefdom, from how this form of political organization first arose to the role it played in giving rise to the next major stage in the development of human society--the state.

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