Thomas Bender – författare

This book contains an innovative and important series of studies of the complex relations of major cities associated with key moments in the history of higher learning in the West. By exploring the interplay of university learning and civic culture over the centuries, Bender provides a novel perspective on the history of both universities and cities. The theme is pursued in studies of Bologna, Paris, Florence, Leiden, Geneva, Edinburgh, London, Berlin, Frankfurt,Chicago, and New York by several distinguished scholars, including Gene Brucker, Carl Schorske, Edward Shils, Martin Jay, and Nathan Glazer.

This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces, and practices. The past century of urban studies has focused on various aspects—space, culture, politics, economy—but these too often address each domain and the city itself as a bounded and cohesive entity. The multiple and overlapping enactments that constitute urban life require a commensurate method of analysis that encompasses the human and non-human aspects of cities—from nature to socio-technical networks, to hybrid collectivities, physical artefacts and historical legacies, and the virtual or imagined city. This book proposes—and its various chapters offer demonstrations—importing into urban studies a body of theories, concepts, and perspectives developed in the field of science and technology studies (STS) and, more specifically, Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The essays examine artefacts, technical systems, architectures, place and eventful spaces, the persistence of history, imaginary and virtual elements of city life, and the politics and ethical challenges of a mode of analysis that incorporates multiple actors as hybrid chains of causation. The chapters are attentive to the multiple scales of both the object of analysis and the analysis itself. The aim is more ambitious than the mere transfer of a fashionable template. The authors embrace ANT critically, as much as a metaphor as a method of analysis, deploying it to think with, to ask new questions, to find the language to achieve more compelling descriptions of city life and of urban transformations. By greatly extending the chain or network of causation, proliferating heterogeneous agents, non-human as well as human, without limit as to their enrolment in urban assemblages, Actor-Network Theory offers a way of addressing the particular complexity and openness characteristic of cities. By enabling an escape from the reification of the city so common in social theory, ANT’s notion of hybrid assemblages offers richer framing of the reality of the city—of urban experience—that is responsive to contingency and complexity. Therefore Urban Assemblages is a pertinent book for students, practitioners and scholars as it aims to shift the parameters of urban studies and contribute a meaningful argument for the urban arena which will dominate the coming decades in government policies.

This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces, and practices. The past century of urban studies has focused on various aspects—space, culture, politics, economy—but these too often address each domain and the city itself as a bounded and cohesive entity. The multiple and overlapping enactments that constitute urban life require a commensurate method of analysis that encompasses the human and non-human aspects of cities—from nature to socio-technical networks, to hybrid collectivities, physical artefacts and historical legacies, and the virtual or imagined city. This book proposes—and its various chapters offer demonstrations—importing into urban studies a body of theories, concepts, and perspectives developed in the field of science and technology studies (STS) and, more specifically, Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The essays examine artefacts, technical systems, architectures, place and eventful spaces, the persistence of history, imaginary and virtual elements of city life, and the politics and ethical challenges of a mode of analysis that incorporates multiple actors as hybrid chains of causation. The chapters are attentive to the multiple scales of both the object of analysis and the analysis itself. The aim is more ambitious than the mere transfer of a fashionable template. The authors embrace ANT critically, as much as a metaphor as a method of analysis, deploying it to think with, to ask new questions, to find the language to achieve more compelling descriptions of city life and of urban transformations. By greatly extending the chain or network of causation, proliferating heterogeneous agents, non-human as well as human, without limit as to their enrolment in urban assemblages, Actor-Network Theory offers a way of addressing the particular complexity and openness characteristic of cities. By enabling an escape from the reification of the city so common in social theory, ANT’s notion of hybrid assemblages offers richer framing of the reality of the city—of urban experience—that is responsive to contingency and complexity. Therefore Urban Assemblages is a pertinent book for students, practitioners and scholars as it aims to shift the parameters of urban studies and contribute a meaningful argument for the urban arena which will dominate the coming decades in government policies.

This volume brings together one of the most provocative debates among historians in recent years. The center of controversy is the emergence of the antislavery movement in the United States and Britain and the relation of capitalism to this development. The essays delve beyond these issues, however, to raise a deeper question of historical interpretation: What are the relations between consciousness, moral action, and social change? The debate illustrates that concepts common in historical practice are not so stable as we have thought them to be. It is about concepts as much as evidence, about the need for clarity in using the tools of contemporary historical practice. The participating historians are scholars of great distinction. Beginning with an essay published in the American Historical Review (AHR), Thomas L. Haskell challenged the interpretive framework of David Brion Davis's celebrated study, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. The AHR subsequently published responses by Davis and by John Ashworth, as well as a rejoinder by Haskell. The AHR essays and the relevant portions of Davis's book are reprinted here.In addition, there are two new essays by Davis and Ashworth and a general consideration of the subject by Thomas Bender. This is a highly disciplined, insightful presentation of a major controversy in historical interpretation that will expand the debate into new realms.

In rethinking and reframing the American national narrative in a wider context, the contributors to this volume ask questions about both nationalism and the discipline of history itself. The essays offer fresh ways of thinking about the traditional themes and periods of American history. By locating the study of American history in a transnational context, they examine the history of nation-making and the relation of the United States to other nations and to transnational developments. What is now called globalization is here placed in a historical context. A cast of distinguished historians from the United States and abroad examines the historiographical implications of such a reframing and offers alternative interpretations of large questions of American history ranging from the era of European contact to democracy and reform, from environmental and economic development and migration experiences to issues of nationalism and identity.But the largest issue explored is basic to all histories: How does one understand, teach, and write a national history even as one recognizes that the territorial boundaries do not fully contain that history and that within that bounded territory the society is highly differentiated, marked by multiple solidarities and identities? Rethinking American History in a Global Age advances an emerging but important conversation marked by divergent voices, many of which are represented here. The various essays explore big concepts and offer historical narratives that enrich the content and context of American history. The aim is to provide a history that more accurately reflects the dimensions of American experience and better connects the past with contemporary concerns for American identity, structures of power, and world presence.

In the half century since World War II, American academic culture has changed profoundly. Until now, those changes have not been charted, nor have their implications for current discussions of the academy been appraised. In this book, however, eminent academic figures who have helped to produce many of the changes of the last fifty years explore how four disciplines in the social sciences and humanities--political science, economics, philosophy, and literary studies--have been transformed. Edited by the distinguished historians Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, the book places academic developments in their intellectual and socio-political contexts. Scholarly innovators of different generations offer insiders' views of the course of change in their own fields, revealing the internal dynamics of disciplinary change. Historians examine the external context for these changes--including the Cold War, Vietnam, feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism. They also compare the very different paths the disciplines have followed within the academy and the consequent alterations in their relations to the larger public.Initiated by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the study was first published in Daedalus in its 1997 winter issue. The contributors are M. H. Abrams, William Barber, Thomas Bender, Catherine Gallagher, Charles Lindblom, Robert Solow, David Kreps, Hilary Putnam, Jose David Saldivar, Alexander Nehamas, Rogers Smith, Carl Schorske, Ira Katznelson, and David Hollinger.

This compendium offers a textured historical and comparative examination of the significance of locality or "place," and the role of urban representations and spatial practices in defining national identities. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines - from literature to architecture and planning, sociology, and history - these essays problematize the dynamic between the local and the national, the cultural and the material, revealing the complex interplay of social forces by which place is constituted and contributes to the social construction of national identity in Asia, Latin America, and the United States. These essays explore the dialogue between past and present, local and national identities in the making of "modern" places. Contributions range from an assessment of historical discourses on the relationship between modernity and heritage in turn-of-the-century Suzhou to the social construction of San Antonio's Market Square as a contested presencing of the city's Mexican past. Case studies of the socio-spatial restructuring of Penang and Jakarta show how place-making from above by modernizing states is articulated with a claims-making politics of class and ethnic difference from below. An examination of nineteenth-century Central America reveals a case of local grassroots formation not only of national identity but national institutions. Finally, a close examination of Latin American literature at the end of the nineteenth century reveals the importance of a fantastic reversal of Balzac's dystopian vision of Parisian cosmo-politanism in defining the place of Latin America and the possibilities of importing urban modernity.

Did urbanization kill communities in the 19th century, or even earlier? Many historians proclaim that it did, but author Bender says otherwise. Here he argues that community survived the trials of industrialization and urbanization and remains a fundamental element of American society.

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Throughout American history, cities have been a powerful source of inspiration and energy, nourishing the spirit of invention and the world of intellect, and fueling movements for innovation and reform. In The Unfinished City, nationally renowned urban scholar Thomas Bender examines the source of Manhattan's influence over American life.The Unfinished City traces the history of New York from its humble regional beginnings to its present global eminence. Bender contends that the city took shape not only according to the grand designs of urban planners and business tycoons, but also in response to a welter of artistic visions, intellectual projects, and everyday demands of the millions of people who made the city home. Bender's story of urban development ranges from the streets of Times Square to the workshops of Thomas Edison, from the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.In a tour that spans neighborhoods and centuries, The Unfinished City makes a powerful case for the enduring importance of cities in American life. For anyone who loves New York or values the limitless possibilities intrinsic in all cities, this book is an unparalleled guide to Manhattan's past and present.

For millennia, the city stood out against the landscape, walled and compact. This concept of the city was long accepted as adequate for characterizing the urban experience. However, the nature of the city, both real and imagined, has always been more permeable than this model reveals.  The essays in Urban Imaginaries respond to this condition by focusing on how social and physical space is conceived as both indefinite and singular. They emphasize the ways this space is shared and thus made into urban culture. Urban Imaginaries offers case studies on cities in Brazil, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and India, as well as in the United States and France, and in doing so blends social, cultural, and political approaches to better understand the contemporary urban experience. Contributors: Margaret Cohen, Stanford U; Camilla Fojas, De Paul U; Beatriz Jaguaribe, Federal U of Rio de Janeiro; Anthony D. King, SUNY Binghamton; Mark LeVine, U of California, Irvine; Srirupa Roy, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Seteney Shami, Social Science Research Council; AbdouMaliq Simone, New School U; Maha Yahya; Deniz YÜkseker, KoÇ U, Istanbul. Alev Çinar is associate professor of political science and public administration at Bilkent University, Turkey. Thomas Bender is university professor of the humanities and history at New York University.

This compendium offers a textured historical and comparative examination of the significance of locality or "place," and the role of urban representations and spatial practices in defining national identities. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines - from literature to architecture and planning, sociology, and history - these essays problematize the dynamic between the local and the national, the cultural and the material, revealing the complex interplay of social forces by which place is constituted and contributes to the social construction of national identity in Asia, Latin America, and the United States. These essays explore the dialogue between past and present, local and national identities in the making of "modern" places. Contributions range from an assessment of historical discourses on the relationship between modernity and heritage in turn-of-the-century Suzhou to the social construction of San Antonio's Market Square as a contested presencing of the city's Mexican past. Case studies of the socio-spatial restructuring of Penang and Jakarta show how place-making from above by modernizing states is articulated with a claims-making politics of class and ethnic difference from below. An examination of nineteenth-century Central America reveals a case of local grassroots formation not only of national identity but national institutions. Finally, a close examination of Latin American literature at the end of the nineteenth century reveals the importance of a fantastic reversal of Balzac's dystopian vision of Parisian cosmo-politanism in defining the place of Latin America and the possibilities of importing urban modernity.

'Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn' is an original illustrated volume which accompanies the landmark international travelling exhibition opening at the New York Historical Society in November 2011. This fascinating book brings together three globally influential revolutions - in America, France, and Haiti - to explore the enormous transformations in the world's politics and culture between Britain's victory in the Seven Years War in 1763 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars fifty-two years later. While most histories of these revolutions have been told exclusively as chapters within national histories, 'Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn' presents, for the first time, the story of the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions as a part of wider, intertwined, global narrative. Vivid text and images provide a context for our understanding of these major social upheavals and their lasting influence on contemporary society.

New York Intellect is Thomas Bender's remarkable look at the connections between the life of a city and the life of the mind. New York has never been comfortable or convenient as a milieu for art and intellect, Bender notes. Yet New Yorkers have always struggled to create institutions and styles of thought and writing that reflect the special character of the city, its boundless energies and deep divisions.

Periodic "crises" in our academic culture remind us that the organization of our intellectual life is a product of history-neither fixed by the logic of social development nor inherent in the nature of knowledge itself. At a time of much unease in academia and among the general public about the relation of intellect to public life, Thomas Bender explores both the nineteenth-century origins and the twentieth-century configurations of academic intellect in the United States. Intellect and Public Life pays special attention to the changing relationship of academic to urban culture. Examining the historical tensions faced by intellectuals who aspired to be at once academics and citizens, Bender traces the growing commitment of intellectuals to professional expertise and autonomy. He finds, as well, a historical pattern of academic withdrawal from the public discussion of matters of general concern. Yet the volume concludes on a hopeful note.With the demise of the classical republican notion of the public, Bender contends, there has emerged a more pluralistic notion of the public that-combined with the revival of interest in pragmatic theories of truth-may offer the possibility of a richer collaboration of democracy and intellect.