The narrative explores the intriguing connections formed between European aristocrats and the warrior elites of Native American societies during their visits to North America. It delves into the cultural exchanges and mutual respect that emerged, highlighting the complexities of these relationships against a backdrop of colonialism and changing social dynamics. The book offers a unique perspective on how these interactions influenced both European and Indigenous identities.
Exploring the concept of the gift, this book delves into modern European interpretations while situating them within a global framework. It examines how cultural, social, and economic factors influence the understanding and significance of gifting practices across different societies. Through a historical lens, it reveals the evolving meanings and implications of gifts in contemporary contexts, providing insights into the interplay between tradition and modernity.
Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse. While contemporary globalized musical culture has become ubiquitous and unremarkable, its fascinating origins long predate the internet era. In Music and the New Global Culture, Harry Liebersohn traces the origins of global music to a handful of critical transformations that took place between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Britain, the arts and crafts movement inspired a fascination with non-Western music; Germany fostered a scholarly approach to global musical comparison, creating the field we now call ethnomusicology; and the United States provided the technological foundation for the dissemination of a diverse spectrum of musical cultures by launching the phonograph industry. This is not just a story of Western innovation, however: Liebersohn shows musical responses to globalization in diverse areas that include the major metropolises of India and China and remote settlements in South America and the Arctic. By tracing this long history of world music, Liebersohn shows how global movement has forever changed how we hear music—and indeed, how we feel about the world around us.
This collection of memoirs by refugees from Nazi Germany is a rich source of autobiographical information on the Nazi era. Housed at Houghton Library of Harvard University, it consists of 263 files containing the memoirs of approximately 230 people who lived in Germany or Austria during the 1930s. The stories of the memoirists encompass an almost bewildering range of human experience. The authors come from Danzig and Berlin, from central Germany and the Southwest, from Munich and from Vienna. They are Jews and Catholics and Protestants, and mixtures of these all-too-neat categories in their origins and marriages. They are peddlers and professors, machinists and lawyers, private housewives and public activists. They are conservatives and liberals and Communists. The strongest common bond was their exile.