Christopher Lynch - Böcker

Decades after his death, Stephen C. Foster's (1826--64) family and fans seized upon his birth on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and his role in the burgeoning US music industry to mythologize him as a founding father in American cultural history. Hailing him as the father of American music and symbol of US democracy at the end of the nineteenth century required the collective forgetting of certain facts of his life, particularly his initial rise to fame through controversial minstrel songs depicting nostalgia for enslavement. In Formulating Foster, musicologist and librarian Christopher Lynch re-examines the myth of the founding of American music, drawing upon previously unknown archival materials and oral histories to uncover the myth's origins and expose the deliberate work of the Foster family and the wealthy philanthropist Josiah K. Lilly in embedding it in American institutions. By gathering and contextualizing all the remembrances written by acquaintances of the composer, Lynch lays out a roughly ninety-year process following Foster's death that gradually engrained the myth in American popular consciousness. Stripping away the myth's artificiality, Formulating Foster presents a richer, more humanizing portrait of the composer, illuminating important aspects of his life and character and proposing new ways to understand his music.

Decades after his death, Stephen C. Foster's (1826--64) family and fans seized upon his birth on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and his role in the burgeoning US music industry to mythologize him as a founding father in American cultural history. Hailing him as the father of American music and symbol of US democracy at the end of the nineteenth century required the collective forgetting of certain facts of his life, particularly his initial rise to fame through controversial minstrel songs depicting nostalgia for enslavement. In Formulating Foster, musicologist and librarian Christopher Lynch re-examines the myth of the founding of American music, drawing upon previously unknown archival materials and oral histories to uncover the myth's origins and expose the deliberate work of the Foster family and the wealthy philanthropist Josiah K. Lilly in embedding it in American institutions. By gathering and contextualizing all the remembrances written by acquaintances of the composer, Lynch lays out a roughly ninety-year process following Foster's death that gradually engrained the myth in American popular consciousness. Stripping away the myth's artificiality, Formulating Foster presents a richer, more humanizing portrait of the composer, illuminating important aspects of his life and character and proposing new ways to understand his music.

Niccolo Machiavelli's Art of War is one of the world's great classics of military and political theory. Praised by the finest military minds in history and said to have influenced no lesser lights than Frederick the Great and Napoleon, Art of War is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the history and theory of war in the West. Christopher Lynch's fluid translation, faithful to the original but rendered in modern, idomatic English, helps readers appreciate anew Machiavelli's brilliant and often eerily prescient treatments of the relationships between war and politics, civilians and the military, and technology and tactics. Clearly laying out the fundamentals of military organization and strategy, Machiavelli marshals a veritable army of precepts, prescriptions, and examples about such topics as how to motivate soldiers and demoralize the enemy, how to avoid ambushes, and how to gain the tactical and strategic advantage in countless circumstances.To help readers better appreciate Art of War, Lynch provides an insightful introduction and a substantial interpretive essay discussing the military, political, and philosophical aspects of the work, in addition to maps, an index of names, and a glossary. Combining an abundance of relevant scholarship with the most flawless translation to date, this volume will surely be the standard for years to come.

Listening Across Borders: Musicology in the Global Classroom provides readers with the tools and techniques for integrating a global approach to music history—within the framework of the roots, challenges, and benefits of internationalization—into the modern music curriculum. Contributors from around the world offer strategies for empowering students to critique the economic, ideological, and political structures that propagate global challenges. Applicable in a variety of classroom settings, the internationalized teaching methods collected here suggest fruitful ways forward in a global age, in three parts:Creating Global CitizensTeaching with Case Studies of Intercultural EncountersChallenges and OpportunitiesIn reevaluating the role of higher education in a cosmopolitan world, modern educators have come to question the limits of geographically defined canons, traditional curricular content, and other longstanding teaching approaches. Listening Across Borders places the music history classroom at the center of the conversation about internationalization in higher education, embracing pedagogies that develop the skillsets to become global citizens in a world where international cooperation is increasingly essential.

Listening Across Borders: Musicology in the Global Classroom provides readers with the tools and techniques for integrating a global approach to music history—within the framework of the roots, challenges, and benefits of internationalization—into the modern music curriculum. Contributors from around the world offer strategies for empowering students to critique the economic, ideological, and political structures that propagate global challenges. Applicable in a variety of classroom settings, the internationalized teaching methods collected here suggest fruitful ways forward in a global age, in three parts:Creating Global CitizensTeaching with Case Studies of Intercultural EncountersChallenges and OpportunitiesIn reevaluating the role of higher education in a cosmopolitan world, modern educators have come to question the limits of geographically defined canons, traditional curricular content, and other longstanding teaching approaches. Listening Across Borders places the music history classroom at the center of the conversation about internationalization in higher education, embracing pedagogies that develop the skillsets to become global citizens in a world where international cooperation is increasingly essential.

Reflections on principle and prudence in the thoughts and actions of great thinkers and statesmen.Discussions of the place of moral principle in political practice are haunted by the abstract and misleading distinction between realism and its various principled or "idealist" alternatives. This volume argues that such discussions must be recast in terms of the relationship between principle and prudence: as Nathan Tarcov maintains, that relationship is "not dichotomous but complementary." In a substantive introduction, the editors investigate Leo Strauss's attack on contemporary political thought for its failure to account for both principle and prudence in politics. Leading commentators then reflect on principle and prudence in the writings of great thinkers such as Homer, Machiavelli, and Hegel, and in the thoughts and actions of great statesmen such as Pericles, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In a concluding section, contributors reassess Strauss's own approach to principle and prudence in the history of political philosophy.

Reflections on principle and prudence in the thoughts and actions of great thinkers and statesmen.Discussions of the place of moral principle in political practice are haunted by the abstract and misleading distinction between realism and its various principled or "idealist" alternatives. This volume argues that such discussions must be recast in terms of the relationship between principle and prudence: as Nathan Tarcov maintains, that relationship is "not dichotomous but complementary." In a substantive introduction, the editors investigate Leo Strauss's attack on contemporary political thought for its failure to account for both principle and prudence in politics. Leading commentators then reflect on principle and prudence in the writings of great thinkers such as Homer, Machiavelli, and Hegel, and in the thoughts and actions of great statesmen such as Pericles, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In a concluding section, contributors reassess Strauss's own approach to principle and prudence in the history of political philosophy.

Machiavelli on War offers a comprehensive interpretation of the philosopher-historian's treatment of war throughout his writings, from poems and memoranda drafted while he was Florence's top official for military matters to his posthumous works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Christopher Lynch argues that the issue of war permeates the form and content of each of Machiavelli's works, the substance of his thoughts, and his own activity as a writer, concluding that he was the first great modern philosopher because he was the first modern philosopher of war.Lynch details Machiavelli's understanding of warfare in terms of both actual armed conflict and at the intellectual level of thinkers competing on the field of knowledge and belief. Throughout Machiavelli's works, he focuses on how military commanders' knowledge of human necessities, beginning with their own, enables and requires them to mold soldiers, organizationally and politically, to best deploy them in operations attuned to political context and changing circumstances. Intellectually, leaders must shape minds, their own and others', to reject beliefs that would weaken their purpose; for Machiavelli, this meant overcoming the classical and Christian traditions in favor of a new teaching of human freedom and excellence. As Machiavelli on War makes clear, prevailing both on the battlefield and in the war of ideas demands a single-minded engagement in "reasoning about everything," beginning with oneself. For Machiavelli, Lynch shows, the successful military commander is not just an excellent leader but also an excellent human being in constant pursuit of the truth about themselves and the world.