"The preoccupation with water is, according to Jean-Pierre Goubert, one of the subdivisions of the religion of progress. . . . Goubert's research is entirely interdisciplinary, and his procedure is highly original. The first in his field, the author has at all points built up a study which never departs from its faithfulness to texts, documents and facts."--From the introduction
This book is the first major study of the social and cultural conquest of water during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jean-Pierre Goubert discloses the changing meanings of everyday reality as he explores the transition from water-scarce cultures, in which water was a sacred symbol, to the secularization and then the mass democratization of the water supply. He imaginatively discusses almost every area of life in which water plays a role, using a variety of sources from advertising to government records to interviews. Goubert examines the development of a body of scientific and technical knowledge about water and the range of water policies designed to prevent mass typhoid epidemics and to raise health standards in general. He demonstrates how the new role of water in the preservation of health was vigorously promoted by education, medicine, and the media. Finally, he makes it clear that water has conquered us as much as we have conquered it, in the sense that our civilization has been transformed by water and has become dependent on vast and immediately available quantities of that crucial substance for both personal and industrial use.

Conquête de l'eau

Only yesterday

Goubert, Jean-Pierre

Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Princeton University, Department of Art & Archaeology

United States, United States of America

Princeton, N.J, ©2000

Translation of: La conquête de l'eau. Includes bibliographical references and index.
6

Bibliography: p. [261]-293.
Translation of: La conquête de l'eau.
Includes index.

Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him

Israeli Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon's famous masterpiece, his novel Only Yesterday, here appears in English translation for the first time. Published in 1945, the book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya -- the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. Only Yesterday quickly became recognized as a monumental work of world literature, but not only for its vivid historical reckon of Israel's founding society. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence?

Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playfulmode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without"understanding" why, he really does go mad and Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise

This book is the first major study of the social and cultural conquest of water during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jean-Pierre Goubert discloses the changing meanings of everyday reality as he explores the transition from water-scarce cultures, in which water was a sacred symbol, to the secularization and then the mass democratization of the water supply. He imaginatively discusses almost every area of life in which water plays a role, using a variety of sources from advertising to government records to interviews.

<p>This is a social history of the attitudes by the various classes toward water and its uses and abuses in 19th and 20th century France.
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vi, 300 pages : 24 cm
Translation of: La conquête de l'eau
Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-293) and index
Pt. 1. Water, purity and hygiene. -- Pt. 2. Mass diffusion. -- Pt. 3. The effects of the conquest : The case of France

2023-06-28