Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2019–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The book Paris, 1200 is pretty good read for anyone interested in 'point in time' history:
> Paris in 1200 was a city in transition. The great cathedral of Notre Dame was halfway through its construction and walls were being built to enclose the new, larger limits of the city. Pope Innocent III ordered all French churches closed to punish King Philip Augustus for his remarriage; the king himself negotiated an unprecedented truce with the English; and the students of Paris threatened a general strike, punctuated with incidents of violence, to protest infringements of their rights. John W. Baldwin brilliantly resurrects this key moment in Parisian history using documents only from 1190 to 1210—a narrow focus made possible by the availability of collections of the Capetian monarchy and the medieval scholastic thinkers. This unique approach results in a vivid snapshot of the city at the turn of the thirteenth century. Paris, 1200 introduces the reader to the city itself and its inhabitants. Three "faces" exemplify these that of the celebrated scholar Pierre the Chanter, of King Philip Augustus, and of the more deeply hidden visages of women. The book examines the city's primary the royal government, the Church, and its celebrated schools that evolved into the university at Paris. Finally, it offers an account of the delights and pleasures, as well as the fears and sorrows, of Parisian life in this period.
- Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals (1987) is a book about how the humanities and social sciences professionalized and lost their grander vision. Essentially Jacoby claims that gentrification and the expansion of academia killed the figure of the independent "public" intellectual.
Some of the books he holds up as examples of intellectual (rather than academic) engagement are Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, William Whyte's Organization Man, C. Wright Mills' White Collar, Murray Bookchin's The Limits of the City, and Lewis Mumford's The City in History. I think most of these would be good candidates for "undead" status.
A few years ago there was an interesting symposium revisiting the argument in light of changes in the public sphere: https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-Last/16
Related
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
61 recommend · 104
The Image of the City
4 recommend · 11
A City is Not a Tree
15 recommend · 37
The culture of cities
2 recommend · 3
The city in history
3 recommend · 5
The City & The City
32 recommend · 69
