A History of the Wind (eBook)

Alain Corbin is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne.

Translator's Note
Acknowledgements
Prelude

Chapter 1: The Inscrutable Wind
Chapter 2: The Winds of the Common Folk
Chapter 3: The Aeolian Harp
Chapter 4: New Experiences of the Wind
The Balloon "At the Head of the Wind"
The Sandstorm in the Desert
The Wind in the Sequoias
Chapter 5: The Tenacity of the Aeolian Imagination in the Bible
Chapter 6: The Epic Power of the Wind
Chapter 7: The Fantasy of the Wind in the Enlightenment
Chapter 8: Gentle Breezes and Caressing Currents
Chapter 9: The Enigma of the Wind in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 10: Short Strolls in the Wind of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 11: The Wind, the Theater, and Cinema
Postlude

Notes
Index

"The free-wheeling and pioneering imagination of master historian Alain Corbin lends itself to conjuring the history of topics - smell, sound, sensibility, silence, anonymity - seemingly devoid of history. Written with distinctive clarity, insight and erudition, A History of the Wind is a captivating study that will open readers' sense to the feeling of the past."
Colin Jones, Queen Mary University

"Throughout his career, Alain Corbin's gift has been to reveal the histories of things unseen. At once concise and panoramic, A History of the Wind ranges with Corbin's characteristic imagination and verve across the arts and sciences as it seeks to understand humanity's encounter with this ever-present yet elusive phenomenon. William A. Peniston's translation allows an English-speaking audience to savour this late work from one of France's greatest living historians."
Robert D. Priest, Royal Holloway, University of London

"The wind has figured in many of Alain Corbin's earlier histories: it carries the sound of bells and of silence, of odors foul and fragrant; it refreshes the air of the seaside. In his newest and most wide-ranging book - from antiquity to the last century - it is the main character: the subject of science, the instrument of God's wrath, the motor of ships, a terror, a blessing, a wrecker. Less history than the biography of the great sea of air in which we dwell."
Thomas Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley