Cultural Treasures of The World: From The Relics of Ancient Empires to Modern Day Icons (dk Wonders of The World)

Take a guided tour through history and discover the most precious, iconic, and celebrated objects ever created.

Featuring Eliades Ochoa (Cuba), Kocani Orkestar (Macedonia), and musicians from Egypt, Iran, Taiwan, and Burma
The tour never ends, the words and music still flow, onstage and on album. More than half a century after he first performed in Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan remains the master. His songs have becomes beacons of the times, from the fire of the 1960s to the embers of revolution that burn today. He’s that rare artist where cover versions of his material have sometimes taken on lives of their own: the Byrds with “Mr. Tambourine Man” or Hendrix transforming “All Along The Watchtower.”

A lost princess and a vanished world: a remarkable true story that moves from the Punjab of the Raj to 1930s Paris and the cataclysm of the Second World War

So much of our historical knowledge is rooted in Western civilization, from the stories of ancient Greece and Rome to the intellectual developments of the Renaissance. But this history tells only part of the story of our global world. Eastern civilization has its own fascinating story, with consequences that matter deeply to our lives today.

This book adopts a cultural sociology of materiality to explore the hallmark of the female athlete: the ponytail. Studying a wealth of news articles about ponytails in sports and society, Broch uncovers this hairstyle’s polyvocality and argues that it is a total social phenomenon. By separating his approach from the cultural studies tradition, Broch highlights how hair is imbued with codes, narratives, and myth that allow its wearers to understand, maneuver, and criticize social gender relations in deeply personal ways. Using multiple theories about hair, bodies, myths, and icons, he creates a multidimensional method to show how icons are imitated and used. As women navigate their practical lives, health issues, and gendered expectations, the ponytail materializes their dynamic maneuvering of cultural and social environments. Sporting a ponytail—itself an embodiment of movement—is filled with a performativity of social movements: a cultural kinetics that is never apolitical.