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  Plato's Phaedo

  Plato

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  Socrates is in prison, sentenced to die when the sun sets. In this final conversation, he asks what will become of him once he drinks the poison prescribed for his execution. Socrates and his friends examine several arguments designed to prove that the soul is immortal.
   
  This quest leads him to the broader topic of the nature of mind and its connection not only to human existence but also to the cosmos itself. What could be a better way to pass the time between now and the sunset?

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  Klondike Gold Rush The: A...

  Captivating History

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  Did you know that the Klondike Gold Rush was the biggest and fastest movement of people in North American history? 
  From 1897 to 1898, over 100,000 men and women walked, rode, paddled, and sailed thousands of miles to the Klondike River area of the Canadian Yukon in search of gold. 
  Out of those 100,000 people, only about a quarter ever made it to the goldfields, and those who did mostly went home empty-handed. But for a very lucky, hard-working, and fortunate few, the goldfields of the Yukon meant fame and fortune beyond their wildest dreams. 
  In this audiobook by Captivating History, you will discover the truth about the famous Klondike Stampede. 
  Here’s just a small “nugget” of what you’ll discover:The Klondike River area of the Yukon was the richest gold find in history to that date.The first “strike” was made entirely by accident.The first man to discover gold in the Klondike was a First Nations man named Skookum Jim, but his white brother-in-law filed the first claim because it was felt that a native claim would not be honored.The Gold Rush began with a tale told in a bar.Thousands of cheechakos or “tenderfeet” with no experience in the woods made their way to the Yukon.Men were required to take one thousand pounds of gear into Canada, which meant hiking back and forth in stages, literally covering thousands of miles on what normally would have been a seven-hundred plus mile journey.Thousands of horses and dogs were employed, and thousands were maltreated and killed due to men’s greedHundreds of women joined the rush, most of whom ended up in less than savory occupations.Many of the First Nations people worked as packers and guides for the newcomers, earning more money than most miners ever found. 
  Scroll up and click the “add to cart” button to learn more about the Klondike Gold Rush!

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  Poetry: An Embodied Experience

  Jane Hirshfield

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  In this 2023 conversation with Justine Willis Toms, award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield takes us beyond our analytical minds and lands us in an embodied experience. Hirshfield offers that this helps us meet the despair which inevitably rises up in the darkest moments. She adds that poetry can cut windows and doors in your despair and give you a way to walk back into the world with others. Against the torrent of data and information that issues from an increasingly polarized and rageful culture, poetry can enlivening our hearts. It can take us to a grander landscape and leads us to the wholeness of things. It helps us see from a vantage point that includes wonder and awe without denying the dangers and the challenges humanity faces.  
  Jane Hirshfield has authored many books including:The October Palace (HarperCollins 1994)The Lives of the Heart (Harper Collins 1997)Women in Praise of the Sacred (HarperCollins 1994)Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (Perennial 1998) After (Harper Collins 2006)Given Sugar, Given Salt (Harper Collins 2001)Come, Thief (Knopf 2011)Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf 2015)The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf 2015)Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf 2020) The Asking: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf 2023) 
  Interview Date: 9/1/2023          Tags: Jane Hirshfield, Poetry, Hersch Wilson, bryophyta, mosses, kinship of all life, despair, March for Science, beauty, Poetry, Art & Creativity, Ecology/Nature/Environment, Philosophy

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  Rise of Classical Greece The:...

  Editors Charles River

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  When people think of ancient Greece, images of philosophers such as Plato or Socrates often come to mind, as do great warriors like Pericles and Alexander the Great, but hundreds of years before Athens became a city, a Greek culture flourished and spread its tentacles throughout the western Mediterranean region via trade and warfare. Scholars have termed this pre-Classical Greek culture the Mycenaean culture, which existed from about 2000-1200 B.C., when Greece, along with much of the eastern Mediterranean, was thrust into a centuries long Dark Ages. Before the Mycenaean culture collapsed, it was a vital part of the late Bronze Age Mediterranean system and stood on equal footing with some of the great powers of the region, such as the Egyptians and Hittites. 
  If anything, the collapse of the Mycenaeans was a drawn-out affair, and while the early centuries of the Dark Ages might be seen as a continuation of this trend, even in the worst years, there was a degree of continuity and even some innovations. These changes including the beginnings of the use of iron as an alternative to bronze and some religious practices that continued to be observed. Furthermore, enough remained to form the basis of a recovery in economic, cultural, and artistic aspects of life in the later stage of the era, and in the political sphere, changes necessitated by the collapse in the economic system certainly paved the way for the rise of the polis 
  During the Greek Renaissance of the 8th century the Greek alphabet developed and the earliest surviving Greek literature was composed, while in terms of art and architecture, sculptures and red-figure pottery began. Warfare changed significantly as well when the hoplite became the core infantry. Put simply, none of these developments could have occurred if the basis for these changes had not been secured during what came to be known as the Greek Renaissance.

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  Let My Country Awake - Indian...

  Scott Miller

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  On the eve of World War I, a band of Indian immigrants living in the United States hatched an audacious plan to liberate their homeland from British colonial rule. Founded by a group of student radicals at UC Berkeley, the Ghadar Movement mounted one of the most significant challenges to the British Raj before the rise of the Indian National Congress under Gandhi—but unlike the INC, the Ghadar Movement advocated for a violent insurrection against colonial rule. From its bases on the West Coast of the US and Canada, the movement recruited thousands of supporters via its underground newspaper and sent hundreds of freedom fighters across the Pacific in an attempt to smuggle guns and seditious literature into India—an effort abetted by spies working for the German government, who were keen to undermine a wartime adversary. All the while, the Ghadar Movement was tracked by Britain's intelligence service, which eventually convinced the US government to crack down. The result was one of the most complex trials to date, culminating in a courtroom gun battle that shocked the nation. Scott Miller's Let My Country Awake is the first book to tell the story of this overlooked moment in Indian, and American, history—one that offers a new perspective on anticolonial struggle in the twentieth century.

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  General Jan Smuts and his First...

  David Brock Katz

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  A new assessment of Jan Smuts’s military leadership through examination of his World War I campaigning, demonstrating that he was a gifted general, conversant with the craft of maneuver warfare, and a command style steeped in the experiences of his time as a Boer general.World War I ushered in a renewed scramble for Africa. At its helm, Jan Smuts grabbed the opportunity to realize his ambition of a Greater South Africa. He set his sights upon the vast German colonies of South-West Africa and East Africa – the demise of which would end the Kaiser’s grandiose schemes for Mittelafrika. As part of his strategy to shift South Africa’s borders inexorably northward, Smuts even cast an eye toward Portuguese and Belgian African possessions.  Smuts, his abilities as a general much denigrated by both his contemporary and then later modern historians, was no armchair soldier. This cabinet minister and statesman donned a uniform and led his men into battle. He learned his soldiery craft under General Koos De la Rey's tutelage, and another soldier-statesman, General Louis Botha during the South African War 1899–1902. He emerged from that war, immersed in the Boer maneuver doctrine he devastatingly waged in the guerrilla phase of that conflict. His daring and epic invasion of the Cape at the head of his commando remains legendary. The first phase of the German South West African campaign and the Afrikaner Rebellion in 1914 placed his abilities as a sound strategic thinker and a bold operational planner on display. Champing at the bit, he finally had the opportunity to command the Southern Forces in the second phase of the German South West African campaign.  Placed in command of the Allied forces in East Africa in 1916, he led a mixed bag of South Africans and Imperial troops against the legendary Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his Shutztruppe. Using his penchant for Boer maneuver warfare together with mounted infantry led and manned by Boer Republican veterans, he proceeded to free the vast German territory from Lettow-Vorbeck’s grip. Often leading from the front, his operational concepts were an enigma to the British under his command, remaining so to modern-day historians. Although unable to bring the elusive and wily Lettow-Vorbeck to a final decisive battle, Smuts conquered most of the territory by the end of his tenure in February 1917.  General Jan Smuts and His First World War in Africa makes use of multiple archival sources and the official accounts of all the participants to provide a long-overdue reassessment of Smuts’s generalship and his role in furthering the strategic aims of South Africa and the British Empire in Africa during World War I.

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