HSPLS site
Login
My List - 0
Help
Search
My Account
Databases
HI Newspaper
eBooks/Audiobooks
Learning
PC Reservation
Reading Program
Basic
Advanced
Power
History
Search:
Title Browse
Author Browse
Subject Browse
Best Seller Browse
Music Title Browse
Video/DVD Title Browse
Journal/Newspaper Title Browse
Serial Title Browse
Series Browse (includes Bestseller List)
General Keyword
Title Keyword
Author Keyword
Subject Keyword
Name Keyword
Series Keyword
Score Title Browse
Talking Book Title Browse
Awards Note Browse
Bib No.
Barcode
Refine Search
> You're searching:
HAWAII STATE PUBLIC LIBRARY SYSTEM
Item Information
Holdings
Summary
More Content
More by this author
Geroulanos, Stefanos, 1979- author.
Subjects
Human beings -- Origin.
Anthropology and history.
Prehistoric peoples -- History.
Civilization -- Philosophy.
Ethnophilosophy -- History.
Violence -- History.
Racism -- History.
Science and civilization.
Imperialism and science.
Civilization -- History.
Browse Catalog
by author:
Geroulanos, Stefanos, 1979- author.
by title:
The invention of pre...
MARC Display
The invention of prehistory : empire, violence, and our obsession with human origins / Stefanos Geroulanos.
by
Geroulanos, Stefanos, 1979- author.
New York, NY : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, [2024]
Subjects
Human beings -- Origin.
Anthropology and history.
Prehistoric peoples -- History.
Civilization -- Philosophy.
Ethnophilosophy -- History.
Violence -- History.
Racism -- History.
Science and civilization.
Imperialism and science.
Civilization -- History.
ISBN:
9781324091455 (hardcover) :
1324091452 (hardcover)
Description:
498 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Edition:
First edition.
Contents:
Introduction: The human epic -- Part 1. Scattered shapes of a fabulous past (from the 1750s to the 1870s). The infancy of humanity -- Europe's "indigenous" noble savages -- The creatures deep time invented -- Humanity, divided by three -- The conflict of the sciences -- Part 2. The concepts that tied it all together (from the 1830s to World War I). Mother love: primitive communism -- The disappearing native -- Neanderthals, "our doubles" -- The thin veneer -- On the antiquity of the psyche -- Part 3. The horror, Part 1 (from 1900 to the 1960s). The hordes and the flood -- Nazis -- Bomb them back to the Stone Age -- The Manchurian Catholic and the future of the humanity -- Part 4. The new scientific ideologies: or the horror, Part 2 (since 1930, and still ongoing). Darwin in the age of UNESCO -- A history of cave painting -- Killer apes for an age of decolonization -- Stone-age computers -- The births and ends of patriarchy -- Is violence ingrained, and how? -- Epilogue: A storm blowing from paradise.
Requests:
7
Summary:
"Books about human origins dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory--and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world. The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the "state of nature" and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the claims that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples "savages" allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of "killer apes" who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West's imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric Indo-Germans; the notion that colonialized peoples could be "bombed back to the Stone Age" was made possible by not only the technology of flight, but by the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages. As Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than anything else--and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past."--Provided by publisher.
Copy/Holding information
Location
Collection
Call No.
Status
Hana P/S Library
Adult Nonfiction
909 Ge
In Cataloging
Add Copy to MyList
Hawaii State Library
Acquisitions, LLH
in Processing
Add Copy to MyList
Kahului Public Library
Floating Collection
909 Ge
Checked In
Add Copy to MyList
Horizon Information Portal 3.25_9884
© 2001-2013
SirsiDynix
All rights reserved.