This book is a collection of scholarly studies focused on urban life and urban culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its capital, Vilnius (Wilno). It covers a wide range of subjects, including the activities of the local craft guilds as well as their houses, the role of religious brotherhoods, and the types and locations of shops and warehouses. The author discusses such aspects of public urban life as inns and pharmacies, music, musicians and musical instruments, and outbreaks of plague, and highlights certain burial customs as well as other elements of urban culture. This posthumous collection contributes significantly to the existing knowledge about forms of urban life in Eastern Europe, the Baltic region, and Lithuania in particular. The book will be useful to architectural and cultural historians as well as all those whose scholarly interests are related to the history and culture of Eastern Europe and the urban legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

A Beginners Guide to Mammalian Cell Culture contains the basics and the most essential knowledge on culturing mammalian cells useful for any researcher to start mammalian cell culture independently. It’s written in a simple language and is equipped with images of cell cultures and illustrations for more clarity. The contents of the book include guidance for researchers to choose appropriate cell lines, reagents, equipment and consumables for their research, usage and maintenance of equipment, basic information on bio-safety levels and precautions that must be taken at each level to ensure safety of the personnel handling cell cultures, microbial contaminations and how to avoid them and most importantly tips to maintain cell cultures and to trouble shoot issues independently. The book has been edited by Dr. Francis Tan, a senior research fellow at the Department of Anesthesia, National University of Singapore. Dr. Tan has many years of experience in culturing mammalian cells, maintaining laboratory equipment and training researchers in these techniques, which has been a valuable source of input for the completion of this book.

Siegfried Kracauer was one of the most important German thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings on Weimar culture, mass society, photography and film were groundbreaking and they anticipated many of the themes later developed members of the Frankfurt School and other cultural theorists. No less remarkable were the circumstances under which he made these contributions. After his early years as a journalist in Germany, the rise of the Nazis forced Kracauer into exile – first in Paris and then, after a protracted flight via Marseilles and Lisbon, to the United States. The existential challenges, personal losses and unrelenting hardship Kracauer faced during these years of exile formed the backdrop against which he offered his acute observations of modern life. Jörg Später provides the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary man. Based on extensive archival research, Später’s biography expertly traces the key influences on Kracauer’s intellectual development and presents his most important works and ideas with great clarity. At the same time, Später ably documents the intensity of Kracauer’s personal relationships, the trauma of his flight and exile, and his embrace of his new homeland, where, finally, the ‘groundlessness’ of refugee existence gave way to a more stable life and, with it, some of the intellectually most fruitful years of Kracauer’s career. The result is a vivid portrait of a man driven both by an urge to capture reality – to attend to the things that are ‘overlooked or misjudged’, that still ‘lack a name’, as he put it – and by a need to find his place in a hostile, threatening world.

This book is a complete guide to setting up an IVF laboratory. Beginning with an introduction to the history and the basics, the following chapters take clinicians through the full set up and management process, from air quality control and cryopreservation facilities, to morphological embryo assessment, sperm processing and selection techniques, to document management systems. A separate chapter provides an update on semen analysis based on World Health Organisation (WHO) standards and interpretation of results. Written by an extensive author and editor team from the UK, Europe and the USA, this practical manual is invaluable for embryologists and IVF specialists planning to set up and manage an IVF laboratory successfully. Key points Practical guide to setting up and managing an IVF laboratory Provides step by step process Includes chapter on semen analysis based on WHO standards and interpretation of results Extensive author and editor team from UK, Europe and USA

"Siegfried Kracauer is today considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. During the Weimar Republic, he established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, now often ranked alongside his friends Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. When he arrived in Manhattan aboard a crowded refugee ship in 1941, however, he was virtually unknown in the United States and had yet to write his best-known books, From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film. In this study, Johannes von Moltke details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual and political context shaped Kracauer's seminal contributions to film studies and shows how Kracauer's American writings helped shape the emergent discipline in turn. Through archival sources and detailed readings of Kracauer's work, von Moltke reconstructs what it means to consider Siegfried Kracauer as the New York Intellectual he became when he settled in Manhattan for the last quarter century of his life. Here, he found an institutional home at the MoMA film library, contributed to communications and propaganda research under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation, and published in the influential "little magazines" of the New York Intellectuals. Adopting a transatlantic perspective on Kracauer's work, von Moltke demonstrates how he pursued questions that animated contemporary critics from Adorno to Hannah Arendt, from Clement Greenberg to Robert Warshow: questions about the origins of totalitarianism and the authoritarian personality, about high and low culture, about liberalism, democracy, and what it means to be human. From these wide-flung conversations and debates, Kracauer's own voice emerges as that of an incisive cultural critic invested in a humanist understanding of the cinema."--Provided by publisher.

Pampa Grande, the largest and most powerful city of the Mochica (Moche) culture on the north coast of Peru, was built, inhabited, and abandoned during the period A.D. 550-700. It is extremely important archaeologically as one of the few pre-Hispanic cities in South America for which there are enough reliable data to reconstruct a model of pre-Hispanic urbanism. This book presents a "biography" of Pampa Grande that offers a reconstruction not only of the site itself but also of the sociocultural and economic environment in which it was built and abandoned. Izumi Shimada argues that Pampa Grande was established rapidly and without outside influence at a strategic position at the neck of the Lambayeque Valley that gave it control over intervalley canals and their agricultural potential and allowed it to gain political dominance over local populations. Study of the site itself leads him to posit a large resident population made up of transplanted Mochica and local non-Mochica groups with a social hierarchy of at least three tiers.

"Explores the recent proliferation of literary and filmic representations of Weimar Berlin in German culture, probing the connections between historical and contemporary texts, their contexts, and their creators, often German Jews and women. More than a century after its founding, there can be little doubt that Weimar is back. The recent proliferation of references to and portrayals of the Weimar Republic-Germany's first democracy, born out of the aftermath of the First World War and characterized by economic and political crisis-is not surprising given our crisis-filled present. That said, the Weimar era has been a consistent focus of scholarly work in both the German-speaking and the Anglo-American academic worlds since the 1970s, and yet depictions of this period in German literature and visual culture were few and far between until the beginning of the 21st century. This book traces this renewed fascination with Weimar-specifically its capital, Berlin-in contemporary German-language culture, providing both wide-angle and close-up views. While discussions of the time period in mainstream media and historiography tend to focus on Weimar as a warning against the dangers of economic and political instability, the novels and visual works produced by contemporary German writers and filmmakers in the last 15 years revive and reshape the cultural legacy of Weimar Berlin. The Afterlives of Weimar Berlin explores the creative interplay between contemporary and historical texts, their contexts, and their creators, tracing a cultural legacy that has the work of German Jews and women as its foundation"--