As the United States has developed as a nation, so too has its educational system. As the colonies rebelled from Britain, their initial reliance on European educational models and philosophies was replaced by a greater focus on the Enlightenment, republicanism, and the influence of such prominent Americans as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and Noah Webster.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Stories
Added by: bat | Karma: 9.96 | Audiobooks | 13 February 2009
115
F. Scott Fitzgerald makes anti-bellum Baltimore his setting for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a fantastical tale with some Poe-like overtones about a baby born at age seventy who then lives life in reverse, his hair turning “in the dozen years of his life from white to iron-gray, the network of wrinkles on his face becoming less pronounced.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Added by: cordelia | Karma: 69.08 | Fiction literature | 13 February 2009
59
Complete, unabridged. It’s a short story about a man, “born under unusual circumstances,” aging backwards, through a life that is as unusual as could be. "As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known. I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself."
This first comparative study of philosophers and literary theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin examines the relationship between the experience of the modern world and the forms that we use to make sense of that experience. Analyzing their views on art, habit, tradition, and language, this comparative study results in a radical reconsideration of received views about thinkers as well as in a reconsideration of the modernity that Bakhtin and Benjamin lived in and that we continue to inhabit now.
Different Like Me introduces children aged 8 to 12 years to famous, inspirational figures from the world of science, art, math, literature, philosophy and comedy. Eight-year-old Quinn, a young boy with Asperger's Syndrome, tells young readers about the achievements and characteristics of his autism heroes, from Albert Einstein, Dian Fossey and Wassily Kandinsky to Lewis Carroll, Benjamin Banneker and Julia Bowman Robinson, among others. All excel in different fields, but are united by the fact that they often found it difficult to fit in - just like Quinn.