Global Metaphors: Modernity and the Quest for One World
The advent of the twentieth century saw an incredible advance in scientific technology. By the inter-war period of the 1920s and early 1930s cars, planes and radios were a part of everyday life, and science became a popular cult for a new age. Faith in science surged amidst an atmosphere of intellectual and social crisis.
Jo-Anne Pemberton looks in detail at the rhetoric used by the political classes of the time that propagated a vision of a new global unity, and reveals the way in which those same metaphors and imagery are used today in the rhetoric of globalization. Then, as now, the idea of "one world" was challenged by notions of manyness and multiplicity.
Drawing parallels between then and now, "Global Metaphors" reveals how much of the appeal of globalization rhetoric relies on shimmering technological fantasies about the future. Today this also incorporates images of the environment which are used to reinforce the idea of an interconnected world. While this seductive imagery is impelled at one level by the romance of scientific invention, Pemberton reveals the way in which it is also used to cement particular political, economic and cultural interests as universal goods. Arguing that our current debate about globalization is in effect a rerun of the same debate from the inter-war period, she explores why globalist thinking gains currency at particular moments in history, and looks beyond this to the interests, values and cultural biases it belies.
The book explores many similarities between early twentieth century discussions of modernity and late twentieth century debates about post modernity

Racism
W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1903 that `the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line - the relation of the darker to the lighter races in the various areas of the world in which they interact'. As the century draws to its close, this remains true; if anything the salience of race and racism in all its manifestations has grown in the recent past. The last few years have witnessed a growth in academic interest in racism, and in related issues such as nationalism and ethnicity. . .

The Story of Early Chemistry
later published under the title
Story of Alchemy and Early Chemistry
by John Maxson Stillman

Originally published under the title The Story of Early Chemistry. Tells the story of the development of chemical knowledge and science, from the beginning of time to the end of the 18th century. Contents: practical chemistry of the ancients; earliest chemical manuscripts; theories of the ancients of matter and its changes; early alchemists; chemical knowledge of the Middle Ages; chemistry in the 13th century; chemistry of the 14th and 15th centuries; progressive 16th century; chemical currents in the 16th century; chemistry of the 16th century; the 18th century, rise and fall of the Phlogiston theory; development of pneumatic chemistry in the 18th century; early ideas of chemical affinity; Lavoisier and the chemical revolution.

Matthew Innes
State And Society In The Early Middle Ages
The middle Rhine valley was a region whose geopolitical profile underwent a series of dramatic changes between the late Roman period and the high middle ages, changes which affected the relationship of the region to the political centre. In this Roman frontier province political power was transformed by the Imperial infrastructure, which led to the foundation of fortified settlements as the central points of local society, an influx of men and resources in the army, and, in the fourth century, the physical proximity of the Emperor. Eventually, in the fifth century, the middle Rhine found itself cut off from the redistributive system of the Roman army and administration. A new power structure, which expressed itself in the idiom of a ‘frontier culture’ which had developed through the interaction of barbarian elites and the Roman military, had emerged by the sixth century. The change from Roman to post-Roman, the atrophy of institutionalised forms of power and the emergence of militarised rule which tapped the agrarian surplus directly, was far more abrupt here than elsewhere in Gaul. By 600, rulers began once again to be involved in the region directly; rulers based, as they had been in the fourth century, in northern Gaul, but increasingly interested in exploitation of the ‘wild east’, the provinces beyond the Rhine, and happy to stay at Worms and Mainz. In the second half of the eighth century, the final consolidation of Frankish royal power in the east placed the Rhine at the heart of Empire, a development consummated by the construction of magnificent palace complexes at Ingelheim and Frankfurt. The symbolic significance of these centres, and the geopolitical centrality of the region, meant that the middle Rhine remained a royal heartland to the end of the early medieval period and beyond.