Society politics and culture

POLITICS SOCIETY AND CULTURE

the brief

Pelican Books is the non-fiction imprint of Penguin Books, traditionally a home for 'low-cost intellectual paperbacks'.
These books became especially popular among the self-educating post-war generation, and Pelican was even called an ‘informal university for '50s Britons’ by The Guardian.
You must select three Pelican titles from the Padlet and provide colour illustrations for them which convey a consistent authorial style.
You may omit any lengthy description that appears on some of the earlier titles.
You should present them fully mocked up with the title and author. A 300dpi Photoshop template has been provided to facilitate this.

research

PELICAN BOOKS-

Pelican Books was established in 1937 as a non-fiction imprint for low-cost intellectual paperbacks. The imprint published books on thousands of subjects and became a global phenomenon. The series sold over 250 million copies worldwide over its nearly 50 years. Although Pelican was discontinued in 1984, the original books continue to be collected worldwide and prized for their iconic bright blue covers.

MY CHOSEN BOOKS

Human evolution

What makes us human?
How did we develop language, thought and culture?
Why do we need them?

The past 12,000 years represent the only time in the sweep of human history when there has been only one human species. How did this extraordinary proliferation of species come about - and then go extinct? And why did we emerge such intellectual giants? The tale of our origins has inevitably been told through the 'stones and bones' of the archaeological record, yet Robin Dunbar shows it was our social and cognitive changes rather than our physical development which truly made us distinct from other species.

initial ideas

the american character

1942 Mead published And Keep Your Powder Dry, a book on American national character.
During World War II, anthropologists used the techniques they had developed in small-scale societies to analyse the “national character” of so-called complex societies. By gathering information from immigrants to the United States, as well as from published sources and films, they studied culture “at a distance.” Such research was used to guide government and military policy, to further cooperation among wartime allies, and to plan for a post-war world.
Mead's project in this book is odd. As an anthropologist, her task is to describe the functioning of cultural systems to illuminate something about the human condition, but the introduction to the book explains a special urgency: the US had just entered WWII, and she explicitly intends this book as her contribution to the war effort.

Initial Ideas

european architecture

Nikolaus Pevsner's landmark work was first published in 1942. Through several revisions and updates during Pevsner's lifetime, it continued to be a seminal essay on the subject, and even after his death, it remains as stimulating as it was back in the mid-twentieth century.

Pevsner reviewed the most beautiful, dramatic and outstanding structures that represent the styles and cultures of Europe from the fourth century onwards. His grand tour of Europe’s Romanesque basilicas, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance villas and Baroque churches, sublimely defines ‘the changing spirits of the changing age
In later chapters he considers the revival of medieval forms in the age of Romanticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement through to the radical and unsparing geometry of twentieth-century Modernism. He concluded his survey in the post-war years and the start of the redefinition of so many devastated cityscapes.