Cow tipping is the purported activity of sneaking up on any unsuspecting or sleeping upright cow and pushing it over for entertainment. The practice of cow tipping is generally considered an urban legend and stories of such feats viewed as tall tales. The implication that rural citizens seek such entertainment due to lack of alternatives is viewed as a stereotype. The concept of cow tipping apparently developed in the 1970s, though tales of animals that cannot rise if they fall has historical antecedents dating to the Roman Empire.
Peace means societal friendship and harmony in the absence of hostility and violence. In a social sense, peace is commonly used to mean a lack of conflict and freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups.
War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or between such organized groups. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces. Warfare refers to the common activities and characteristics of types of war, or of wars in general. Total war is warfare that is not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant suffering and casualties.
In Western anthropology, philosophy, and literature, the Myth of the Noble savage refers to a stock character who is uncorrupted by civilization. As such, the "noble" savage symbolizes the innate goodness and moral superiority of a primitive people living in harmony with Nature. In the heroic drama of the stageplay The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1672), John Dryden represents the noble savage as an archetype of Man-as-Creature-of-Nature.
Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, and conservative political commentator. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, and other media outlets.
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses.
Prehistoric warfare refers to war that occurred between societies without recorded history.
End Zone is Don DeLillo's second novel, published in 1972.
Pierre Clastres was a French anthropologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the field of political anthropology, with his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory of stateless societies. An anarchist seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies, he mostly researched Indigenous peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains were powerless.
Ronald Leslie Numbers was an American historian of science. He was awarded the 2008 George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society for "a lifetime of exceptional scholarly achievement by a distinguished scholar".
The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, and four research centers: the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, the Harvard Art Museums Archives, and the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. The three museums that constitute the Harvard Art Museums were initially integrated into a single institution under the name Harvard University Art Museums in 1983. The word "University" was dropped from the institutional name in 2008.
Ritual warfare is a state of continual or frequent warfare, such as is found in some tribal societies.
Mark Edward Lewis is an American sinologist and historian of ancient China.
War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specialized in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing modern civilization as bad, by setting out to prove that prehistoric societies were often violent and engaged in frequent warfare that was highly destructive to the cultures involved.
Steven A. LeBlanc is an American archaeologist and former director of collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum.
Arthur Waldron is an American historian. Since 1997, Waldron has been the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the department of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He works chiefly on Asia, China in particular, often with a focus on the origins and development of nationalism, and the study of war and violence in general.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred. The book uses data documenting declining violence across time and geography. This paints a picture of massive declines in the violence of all forms, from war, to improved treatment of children. He highlights the role of nation-state monopolies on force, of commerce, of increased literacy and communication, as well as a rise in a rational problem-solving orientation as possible causes of this decline in violence. He notes that paradoxically, our impression of violence has not tracked this decline, perhaps because of increased communication, and that further decline is not inevitable, but is contingent on forces harnessing our better motivations such as empathy and increases in reason.
Lawrence H. Keeley was an American archaeologist best known for pioneering the field of microwear analysis of lithics. He is also known for his 1996 book, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Keeley worked as a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Food or War is a 2019 book by British-Australian science writer Julian Cribb published by Cambridge University Press. The book discusses the central role of food in global stability, arguing that the modern food system, if unchecked, risks precipitating widespread conflict due to its unsustainable practices. Cribb proposes a reimagined food system that harnesses human creativity and technological innovation to secure a renewable, diverse, and safe food supply, thereby promoting global peace.
