Tomi's Time chronicles the unthinkable happening to a baby after he contracted bacterial meningitis at nine months of age--and then survived the advanced states of this devastating brain infection. Such an outcome for our previously healthy son was as remote to us as any star in space. We were new parents; the previous nine months saw nothing but pure delight, and we had no real perspective on just how utterly a life can change. But in a period of time that's often measured in hours, Tomi went from typically sick--to seizure--to severely brain damaged, in a wave of strokes that would define the rest of his life. These events left Tomi in silence and darkness, disoriented and uncoordinated in the space around him, lost in the space within, seizing without control, and with a global development delay that has permanently returned our newborn baby to us. This, however, is neither the end of the story nor the sum of all things--even though it hasn't felt this way, at times. This is the point where Tomi's end met new life and where recovery began for all of us. This is a way in which healing and recovery of one means the same for others, and this is why "perspective" for us (and arguably everyone else) is everything. So in these ways, what just happened to us is only the beginning.

The development of the American nation has typically been interpreted in terms of its expansion through space, specifically its growth westward. In this innovative study, Thomas Allen posits time, not space, as the most significant territory of the young

"For everyone who needs a hero or loves a good story, here is an inspiring collection of personal revelations from more than 100 remarkable men and women who share a moment when words changed their lives"--Jacket.

In 1885, at the age of seventy-two and "in the evening of life," Thomas Mellon published his autobiography in a limited edition exclusively for his family. He was a distinguished and highly successful Pittsburgh entrepreneur, judge, and banker, and his descendants would play major roles in American business, art, and philanthropy. Two of his sons, Andrew William and Richard Beatty, were to join Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller as the four wealthiest men in the United States.Thomas Mellon was an anomaly among the great American capitalists of his time. Highly literate and intelligent, astute and deadly honest about his own life and financial success, and an excellent narrative writer with a chilly but genuine sense of humor, he wrote a perspective and self-revealing book that remains to this day a major autobiography and an important source for American social and business history.That it has found very few readers in the 114 year since its publication is due to the author himself. Warning his descendants in the preface that the book should never "be for sale in the bookstore, nor any new edition published," because it contains "nothing which concerns the public to know, and much which if writing for it I would have omitted," Thomas in effect buried a masterpiece.Nor in later years has it ever been generally available. An abridged version was prepared solely for the Mellon family in 1968, and the book also appeared years ago in an obscure fascimile. Until the University of Pittsburgh Press edition, Thomas Mellon and His Times has been virtually unobtainable.Born in Ulster with a Scotch-Irish heritage, Thomas Mellon immigrated to the United States in 1818 at the age of five. He was raised by his parents on a small, hilly farm at Poverty Point, about twenty miles east of Pittsburgh. When he was nine, he walked to Pittsburgh and, awe-struck, viewed the mansion and steam mill of the Negley family, "impressed . . . with an idea of wealth and magnificence I had before no conception of."Yet the true turning point of his life was a decision he made at the age of seventeen. For years his father, Andrew, had insisted that Thomas become a farmer. One summer day in 1831, leaving his son cutting timber, Andrew rode to the county seat to close on the purchase of an adjoining farm which he intended for Thomas. "Nearly crazed" by the impending collapse of all hope of "acquiring knowledge and wealth," Thomas threw down his axe and ran ten miles to stop the purchase. From this spontaneous decision flowed his later success as a judge, banker, and capitolist who caught the exhilarating tide of the American economy in the second half of the nineteenth century.For this new edition of the book, Paul Mellon, Thomas Mellon's grandson, has written a preface, and David McCullough, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Harry S. Truman, has contributed a foreword. The introduction, notes, and afterword by Mary L, Briscoe, Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and editor of American Autobiography, 1945-1980, provide the historical and social context for the autobiography. The book is illustrated with three maps and approximately twenty-five photographs, many of them rarely seen, from a variety of sources that includes Paul Mellon and other members of the Mellon family.

Beginning with the famous opening to the Declaration of Independence ("When in the course of human events..."), almost all of Thomas Jefferson’s writings include creative, stylistically and philosophically complex references to time and history. Although best known for his "forward-looking" statements envisioning future progress, Jefferson was in fact deeply concerned with the problem of coming to terms with the impending loss or fragmentation of the past. As Hannah Spahn shows in Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History, his efforts to promote an exceptionalist interpretation of the United States as the first nation to escape from the "crimes and calamities" of European history were complicated both by his doubts about the outcome of the American experiment and by his skepticism about the methods and morals of eighteenth-century philosophical history. Spahn approaches the conundrum of Jefferson’s Janus-faced, equally forward- and backward-oriented thought by discussing it less as a matter of personal contradiction and paradox than as the expression of a late Newtonian Enlightenment, in a period between ancient and modern modes of explaining change in time. She follows Jefferson in his creation of an influential narrative of American and global history over the course of half a century, opening avenues into a temporal and historical imagination that was different from ours, and offering new assessments of the solutions Jefferson and his generation found (or failed to find) to central moral and political problems like slavery.

This volume evaluates Thomas Bradwardine's view of time as a mathematical, philosophical and theological concept within the context of ancient and medieval discussions of the problem of time. The book begins with an historiographical analysis of Bradwardine's mathematical and theological works, followed by an examination of the problem of time in classical, early medieval and thirteenth-century texts. Next, a series of chapters surveys Bradwardine's view of time as it related to proportionality, contingency, continuity and predestination. A final chapter establishes Bradwardine's place among fourteenth-century natural philosophers and theologians. As it uses a wide range of Bradwardine's writings, this book is able to show how Bradwardine's philosophical and theological views converged. This study is especially useful for historians of late medieval science, philosophy and theology.