The Foundations of Western CivilizationThe Foundations of Western Civilization
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Audiobook CD, 2002
Current format, Audiobook CD, 2002, , Available by request.Audiobook CD, 2002
Current format, Audiobook CD, 2002, , Available by request. Offered in 0 more formatsFrom its humble beginnings in the great river valleys of Iraq and Egypt to the dawn of the modern world, discover the essential nature, evolution, and perceptions of Western civilization. With these 48 lectures on the people, places, ideas, and events that make up The Foundations of Western Civilization, award-winning scholar and teacher Thomas F. X. Noble invites you to explore the unique human experience in what has come to be called "Western civilization." Your learning in this course will cover the latter stages of the Agricultural Revolution to the doorstep of the Scientific Revolution, from roughly 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1600, when the "foundations" of the modern West come into view. Professor Noble has a master lecturer's assurance and a careful scholar's eye for precision and the telling fact. He offers a history of what has been truly "foundational" across millennia in the life of the West, that most unusual of world civilizations. Did the Roman Empire really "fall"? What did people at the time experience? What exactly was being reborn in the Renaissance? Is it historically accurate to speak of the "Protestant Reformation"? Why do we think of the Middle Ages as just that-i.e., a time somehow sandwiched between two other (and presumably superior) times? Did the brilliant intellectuals and writers who clustered around the court of Charlemagne see it that way? You will find in these lectures everything from a thumbnail sketch of the Assyrians (cruel practitioners of state terror) to a detailed analysis of how the Roman constitution worked. For example, the word "veto," which means "I forbid," was literally shouted into the Senate chamber by Roman tribunes listening from just outside the door. Professor Noble will walk you through history as it develops, taking into account such themes as ecology, geography, and climate; government and economics; religion; work and leisure; philosophy; literature; art and architecture; and even virtues, values, and aesthetics. This broad and panoramic series will help you pull an enormous sweep of history together into one coherent-though by no means closed-framework. By surveying Mesopotamia to modernity, and everything in between, you will pursue answers to the questions of what "the West" most essentially is or has been thought to be, and what makes it distinctive among other world civilizations-not necessarily better, but surely unique.
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- Chantilly, VA : Teaching Co., [2002], [©2002]
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