Terwijl de houten palen onder Amsterdam beginnen te rotten, stijgt in Venetië de waterspiegel en overstromen in Pakistan de 4500 jaar oude ruïnes van Mohenjo Daro. Door inklinking van de Engelse veengrond bezwijkt de Muur van Hadrianus. Door de toename van zout ontploffen de bakstenen van het opgegraven Babylon. Smeltende permafrost in Siberië ondermijnt de eeuwenoude grafheuvels van de Scythische beschaving. In de VS hebben orkanen een deel van het erfgoed van New Orleans en Puerto Rico w...

Facsimile heruitgave naar de druk uit 1946. In Nederland's geestesmerk beschouwt historicus Johan Huizinga de Nederlandse identiteit; Huizinga kenschetst haar als vooral burgerlijk.

Uit veel peilingen blijkt dat Nederland tot de gelukkigste landen ter wereld behoort. Hoe is het ons door de eeuwen heen gelukt om zo'n koppositie te verwerven? Zit er iets in het karakter van Hollanders, Groningers en Brabanders waardoor een klein land groot kan zijn? Wat zit er in ons DNA?

Begin in Nederland niet over identiteit. Dat doen alleen politici die een standpunt over asielzoekers moeten innemen. Ontken in Nederland niet de Nederlandse identiteit. Want dan brult de Nederlandse Leeuw...

"In Praise of Ambiguity" presents a discourse about the seriousness of play. Erasmus and Huizinga are its main characters, their books In Praise of Folly (1511) and Homo Ludens (1938) its main subject. It treats those books as contemporaries and asks what they still have to say to us. The main theme of both books is the contrast between two attitudes of life: the conviction that each subject has two or more sides as opposed to the certainty that there is always only one side to the matter. It...

Anthropocene, post-humanism, biopolitics ... These terms are often used first in an academic context before being used outside the academic world, once their usefulness has become known to the wider public. Whether in official policy documents, in catalogues of expositions or in applications for subsidies, these terms tend to show up regularly.

In this book, 50 terms that are important in contemporary cultural theory are explained by experts in the field. They clarify what the term means, how...

A seven-step toolkit to help you produce winning essay and assignments, build your confidence and improve your grades.

Why bother refuting your opponents, when you can just take away their platform or career?First Amendment rights lawyer Greg Lukianoff teams up with Rikki Schlott to show how a trend of intolerance on university campuses in America has spread to a wide range of workplaces and cultural spaces, which are giving up on a culture of free speech in favour of cancel culture. Drawing on original research and data, along with hundreds of new examples from publishing to psychotherapy, comedy, science an...

A well written, easy to navigate and comprehensive guide to how to develop core skills and to make the most of one's abilities in written work.

Tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog deden Chinese arbeiders uit Rotterdamals stoker dienst op olietankers van de Curaçaosche ScheepvaartMaatschappij (Shell). Dat was een gevaarlijke klus, want de Duitsersnamen transportschepen regelmatig onder vuur. In april 1942 gingen dearbeiders in staking. Toen de staking grimmige vormen begon aan te nemen,schoten politie en bewakers van de olieraffinaderij vijftien Chinezenzonder pardon dood. Zij werden op begraafplaats Kolebra Bèrdè, ook welbekend als 'he...

Technology today is often presented as our best hope of solving the world's social and sustainability problems. And that's nothing new: engineers have always sought to meet the big challenges of their times-even as those challenges have shaped their technology. This book offers a historical look at those interactions between engineering and social challenges, showing how engineers developed solutions to past problems, and looking at the ways that those solutions often bring with them unintend...