Santos, Victor D. O.
Summary: "This illustrated riddle introduces children to language's impact on human culture and history"--
Format: text
Publisher / Publication Date: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers 2024
Copies Available at Kingsley
1 available in Juvenile Nonfiction, Call number: J 306.44 SANCopies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Juvenile Easy, Call number: JE SANPitner, Barrett Holmes
Summary: "In this incisive blend of personal narrative and deep philosophical and linguistic inquiry, journalist, filmmaker, and activist Barrett Holmes Pitner identifies a linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. "Ethnocide," first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term genocide), describes the systemic erasure of a people's ancestral...
Format: text
Publisher / Publication Date: Counterpoint 2021
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 305.896 PITSummary: As Africa continues to modernize, the influence of the media in daily life is growing ever larger. This program examines the importance of the press, radio, the Internet, and TV via segments involving the Sowetan, a widely circulated South African newspaper that has its roots in the anti-apartheid struggle; KKC Kagadi, a rural community radio station in Uganda; Kenya-based Africa Online, an...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: The world is a mosaic of visions, and each vision is encapsulated by a language. Yet every two weeks, one of the world's approximately 6,500 languages dies out. What is the significance of this loss to those who speak the language as well as for the rest of humankind? Why do some languages become global while others disappear? And how are language and identity connected? In this program,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Using multilingual Hong Kong as a case in point, this program makes the hot-button phenomenon known as language-mixing easily accessible to any viewer through interviews with dozens of Hong Kong residents. Their explanations of why and when they mix Cantonese and English reveal much about cultural identity in cosmopolitan populations and the effects of globalization. Scholarly analysis is...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: In this program, John McWhorter, author of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language; Lyle Campbell, of the University of Utah; Brian Joseph, of The Ohio State University; and population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza examine factors that contributed to the diversification and spread of languages, including early migration, the introduction of agriculture, and genes. Language...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: It is predicted that within a century more than half of the world's languages will become extinct, but as languages are lost, new ones emerge naturally or are constructed. In this program, Noam Chomsky; Esperantist Thomas Eccard; endangered languages researcher Peter Ladefoged, who has since passed away; and others provide insights into the language life cycle. Topics include constructed...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Was there a "big bang" in human language and cognitive development, or did speech and abstract thought evolve slowly-perhaps across 200,000 years or so? Surveying prehistoric burial sites and other archaeological finds, including what might be the world's oldest work of art, this program attempts to locate the junction of creativity and communication at which human intelligence was born....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: This program travels the globe as it surveys a large portion of the world's languages-25 percent of which are spoken by a mere 0.1 percent of the Earth's population. Moving from Africa to Oceania and up to Asia and then west to Europe and across the ocean to the Americas, the program assesses how many languages are spoken in each region, the characteristics they share, and misconceptions about...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Melvyn Bragg begins the story of English in Holland, finding ancestral echoes in the Frisian dialect. What follows is a chapter on survival as the English language weathers Viking and Norman invasions, vying with and eventually absorbing rival tongues. Lively settings such as village pubs and markets bring home the lasting influence of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Old French. The connection...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Writing is a relative latecomer to the history of language. This program tracks its emergence in Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica and its spread down through the millennia via conquest-usually violent, sometimes benign-and colonization. The creation of creoles and pidgins resulting from the interaction of specific populations is also addressed, and speculation is made about the first things...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: What precisely is language, and how did humans acquire it? In an effort to answer those essential questions, this program journeys back to prehistoric times in search of language's origin. But this is not a passive discussion, as Noam Chomsky; Brown University's Philip Lieberman; Johanna Nichols, of U.C. Berkeley; Stanford University's Merritt Ruhlen; professor of anthropology Richard Klein;...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Davis, Wade.
Summary: "Many of us are alarmed by the accelerating rates of extinction of plants and animals. But how many of us know that human cultures are going extinct at an even more shocking rate? While biologists estimate that 18 percent of mammals and 11 percent of birds are threatened, and botanists anticipate the loss of 8 percent of flora, anthropologists predict that fully 50 percent of the 7,000...
Format: text
Publisher / Publication Date: Anansi 2009
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 301 DAVSummary: Traveling the world, photographer Phil Borges documents endangered cultures with the hope that he can help preserve them by photographing and interviewing members of them. In this TEDTalk, Borges shows rarely seen images of people from the mountains of Dharamsala, India, and the jungles of the Ecuadorean Amazon, as he tells their stories. In addition, Borges talks about his initiative to link...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Mengham, Rod
Format: text
Publisher / Publication Date: Little, Brown 1994
Copies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 400 MENSummary: Anthropologist/ethnobotanist Wade Davis is a passionate advocate for preserving what he's dubbed the "ethnosphere." Using stunning photos and stories, Davis celebrates the extraordinary diversity of the world's indigenous cultures in this TEDTalk. A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Davis travels the globe to document the cultural practices of people whose time-honored ways of life are...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Since their appearance in Europe some 300 years ago, the stories of The Thousand and One Nights have entranced Western readers with visions of an exotic, magical Middle East. In this program, actor and director Richard E. Grant revisits the book he loved as a child and seeks to understand its persistent hold on the collective imagination. Grant travels to Paris to discover how the Arabist...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
View online at AVOD
Summary: Promoted in its time as a celebration—or at least a fully informed study—of foreign ethnicities and customs, the 1900 World’s Fair is recognized today as a spectacle of Eurocentric myopia. This program lays bare that conceit as it interweaves archival photographs, film clips, and posters from the Fair with commentary from renowned art historians. Offerings from museum collections across the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: When did we begin to create images and, more importantly, find tangible meaning in them? How did this conceptual leap lay the groundwork for our modern, visually oriented culture? This program investigates when and why humanity underwent what archaeologists call the "creative explosion" and invented pictorial art. Beginning with the Altamira cave paintings in Spain, the film addresses questions...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Continuing his trek across the Muslim world, art scholar Waldemar Januszczak introduces viewers to masterworks in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia-from the gigantic and surreal mud mosques of Mali; to a rare, 10th-century Egyptian ewer carved out of a single piece of rock crystal; to the inspired urban planning of the ancient city of Isfahan in Iran; to the stunning architecture of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: One of the world's most fascinating museums is by far one of the oldest. But can the paintings there really be called art? This program goes inside the Lascaux cave complex to examine the richest and most beautiful collection of Paleolithic cave drawings in France. Who were the artisans who rendered those arresting images, and how exactly did they do it? Different theories are presented as the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: This episode of Clash of the Gods examines Homer's The Odyssey, one of the most famous epics ever written. Follow its archetypal hero, Odysseus, as he sets sail on a twenty-year journey to return home from battle to reclaim his wife and kingdom. It's a timeless tale of adventure filled with mythological beasts, vengeful gods, and enchanting seductresses. But could it have actually happened?...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: This episode of Ancient Mysteries brings us back more than 3,000 years to the legendary city of Troy. Scholars delve into the secrets of Troy by researching the Greek poet Homer, who related the city’s history in The Iliad. Their discoveries are revealed and shed new light on the legends of the Trojan horse, Achilles, the abduction of Helen, and the fall of Troy.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1994
View online at AVOD
Summary: In spite of mounting ecological damage, the Amazon Basin continues to nurture age-old stories and beliefs. This documentary illustrates the importance of indigenous narratives to those who dwell near the city of Iquitos, Peru, and view their natural surroundings in mythical terms. Concerning a young man who has recently gone missing in the forest, the film depicts his mother's attempts to find...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009