This is the first book that explores the relationship between the United States and Japan in terms of the competition for industrial raw materials. With startling consistency, their responses to similar problems appear to stem from each country's history and culture, almost as if the country had no choice but to pursue the policy selected. Vernon suggests that in this field of policy, political leaders are prisoners of their national environment more than anyone--including the leaders themselves--has been prepared to recognize.
Examining in turn the world markets in oil, aluminum, copper, and steel, Vernon shows how Japan has learned to cope with its have-not status, using flexible and inventive national policies designed to help industries acquire what they need. The United States, on the other hand, lacking an explicit and consistent national policy, is torn between protecting domestic producers of these resources and trying to develop dependable sources of supplies abroad. The result is a haphazard and unstable raw-materials policy.
This unique commingling of political and economic analysis will appeal not only to scholars of international relations, domestic political behavior, and commodity markets but also to the informed layman who wishes to understand what is likely to happen as two economic superpowers range the world to satisfy their appetites for raw materials.
Drawing on wills and dowries, judicial cases, town council records, and royal decrees, Mangan brings alive the bustle of trade in Potosí. She examines quotidian economic transactions in light of social custom, ethnicity, and gender, illuminating negotiations over vendor locations, kinship ties that sustained urban trade through the course of silver booms and busts, and credit practices that developed to mitigate the pressures of the market economy. Mangan argues that trade exchanges functioned as sites to negotiate identities within this colonial multiethnic society. Throughout the study, she demonstrates how women and indigenous peoples played essential roles in Potosí’s economy through the commercial transactions she describes so vividly.
This study of the Portuguese commercial empire in India during the Hapsburg years is the most serious attempt yet made to analyze the old Portuguese pepper trade--from the planting of orchards in the foothills of Malabar and Kanara to the unloading of spice-laden carracks in Lisbon. Equally significant, it is the first book to explain how and why the Portuguese were not able to modernize their trade system when faced with crisis conditions.
The distress that confronted the Portuguese following the arrival of the Dutch and English, seen here as partly military but fundamentally economic and organizational, reached its decisive stage in the 1620s and early 1630s. The Portuguese attempted to combat the crisis by creating their own India Company. The story of that company and the reasons for its failure are thoroughly investigated as Disney looks at its antecedents, composition, activities, and weaknesses. The author has unearthed much new statistical material from widely scattered manuscript sources and in doing so sheds new light on related problems and issues, such as institutional relations between Spain and Portugal, the careers of individual merchants, and the nature and difficulties of viceregal government in Portuguese India.
Economists have long counseled reliance on markets rather than on government to decide a wide range of questions, in part because allocation through voting can give rise to a "tyranny of the majority." Markets, by contrast, are believed to make products available to suit any individual, regardless of what others want. But the argument is not generally correct. In markets, you can't always get what you want. This book explores why this is so and its consequences for consumers with atypical preferences.
When fixed costs are substantial, markets provide only products desired by large concentrations of people. As a result, people are better off in their capacity as consumers when more fellow consumers share their product preferences. Small groups of consumers with less prevalent tastes, such as blacks, Hispanics, people with rare diseases, and people living in remote areas, find less satisfaction in markets. In some cases, an actual tyranny of the majority occurs in product markets. A single product can suit one group or another. If one group is larger, the product is targeted to the larger group, making them better off and others worse off.
The book illustrates these phenomena with evidence from a variety of industries such as restaurants, air travel, pharmaceuticals, and the media, including radio broadcasting, newspapers, television, bookstores, libraries, and the Internet.
In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad.
While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next.
This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart’s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization.
The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org) and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition (www.econjustice.org).
Beginning early in the 19th century, the American missionary movement made slow headway in China. Alabamians became part of that small beachhead. After 1900 both the money and personnel rapidly expanded, peaking in the early 1920s. By the 1930s many American denominations became confused and divided over the appropriateness of the missionary endeavor. Secular American intellectuals began to criticize missionaries as meddling do-gooders trying to impose American Evangelicalism on a proud, ancient culture.
By examining the lives of 47 Alabama missionaries who served in China between 1850 and 1950, Flynt and Berkley reach a different conclusion. Although Alabama missionaries initially fit the negative description of Americans trying to superimpose their own values and beliefs on "heathen," they quickly learned to respect Chinese civilization. The result was a new synthesis, neither entirely southern nor entirely Chinese. Although previous works focus on the failure of Christianity to change China, this book focuses on the degree to which their service in China changed Alabama missionaries. And the change was profound.
In their consideration of 47 missionaries from a single state--their call to missions, preparation for service in China, living, working, contacts back home, cultural clashes, political views, internal conflicts, and gender relations--the authors suggest that the efforts by Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian missionaries from Alabama were not the failure judged by many historians. In fact, the seeds sown in the hundred years before the Communist revolution in 1950 seem to be reaping a rich harvest in the declining years of the 20th century, when the number of Chinese Christians is estimated by some to be as high as one hundred million.
This timely book traces the development of banking and paper money in republican Tianjin in order to explore the creation of social trust in financial institutions. Framing the study around Bian Baimei, a conscientious branch manager of the Bank of China, Brett Sheehan analyzes the actions of bankers, officials, and local elites as they tried to overcome political and financial crises and instill trust in the banking system.
After early failures in promoting trust, government authority as a regulator of the financial system gradually increased, peaking in 1935, when the state unified the money supply for the first time in several hundred years. Concurrently, when local elites proved unable to develop successful strategies to make people trust the system, their influence declined. The need for trust in increasingly complex financial arrangements redefined state-society relations, simultaneously enhancing state power and creating new constraints on the actions of both elites and governments.
Trust in Troubled Times is a valuable new perspective on the economic, social, and political history of modern China.
That economics can usefully explain politics is no longer a novel idea, it is a well-established fact brought about by the work of many public choice scholars. This book, which is a sequel to a similar volume published in 1972, brings together a fresh collection of recent work in the public choice tradition. The essays demonstrate the power of the public choice approach in the analysis of government. Among the issues considered are income redistribution, fiscal limitations on government, voting rules and processes, the demand for public goods, the political business cycle, international negotiations, interest groups, and legislators.
James M. Buchanan is University Distinguished Professor and direct, Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University.
Robert D. Tollison, formerly director, Bureau of Economics, Federal Trade Commission, is now Abney Professor of Economics at Clemson University.
“This is the first book to systematically examine the variation in policies of Eastern European countries. There is a theoretical contribution to understandings of variation in tax policies, but just as impressive is the in-depth empirical analysis and in particular the data from interviews with key players in the process.”
—Yoshiko Herrera, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Post-Communist tax reform, like institutional reform in other areas of the post-Communist transition, holds tremendous material consequences for different groups in society. Consequently, one would expect the allocation of resources and the distribution of the financial burden of that allocation to be highly sensitive to domestic politics. Indeed the political stakes should be especially high since post-Communist tax reform requires not merely a simple adjustment at the margin, but the fundamental reallocation of the responsibility for government revenue. In Eastern Europe, however, important areas of tax policy do not reflect traditional domestic variables (e.g., interest groups and partisanship) so much as the international imperatives associated with regional and global economic integration.
In Tax Politics in Eastern Europe, Hilary Appel analyzes the domestic and international factors that drive tax policy. She begins with a review of the greatest challenges in the initial creation of the capitalist tax systems in former Communist states and then turns to the evolution of specific forms of taxation in order to gauge the relative impact of domestic politics on tax policy. Appel concludes that, although some tax areas, such as personal income taxes, remain politicized, most other taxes, such as corporate income taxes and all forms of consumption taxes, have been less subject to domestic political pressures because of powerful constraints resulting from regional and global economic integration.
When Daniel Webster commented that the two certainties were death and taxes, he could not have imagined all the ingenious ways governments could tax and spend, though leaving this earth has changed not at all.
The tax expenditure concept is one of the newer methods of tax policy analysis that has been reshaping fiscal and monetary plans of governments. A tax expenditure is a financial benefit provided through the tax system. Whether for obsolete machinery in a factory, payment of real estate taxes, or childcare for a working mother, a special tax break is a tax expenditure. The tax expenditure concept was introduced to the Treasury Department in 1968 under the direction of Stanley Surrey and was described in his landmark book Pathways to Tax Reform. In this new book, the authors analyze the development of the concept since 1973, during which time applications of tax expenditures have expanded rapidly and new dimensions have emerged for even wider usage.
The United States prepared special analyses of tax expenditures in 1975 and Congress made the tax expenditure budget a part of the Tax Reform Act of 1981. Other countries now use the tool for analysis and budgeting, and a tax expenditure budget seems to be a permanent fixture in government planning. Recent U.S. tax expenditure budgets have increased by as much as 179 percent, while taxes collected through direct legislation have risen only 14 percent. Surrey and McDaniel focus on the impact of the tax expenditure notion on budget policy and tax policy and administration, and on how governments can decide between tax expenditures or direct spending to implement programs.
Documenting the evolution of economic development and fiscal policies in Taiwan over the last four decades, this work explores the effectiveness of specific tax and trade policies. The authors make a major revision to the previously accepted role played by the export processing zones and the protection of domestic producers from foreign competition. The extensive use of duty exemption systems enabled the government to create competition among the exporting firms, and the innovative design of economic policies and administrative systems helped the private sector generate savings, expand investments, and promote exports.
This work analyzes how unique fiscal policies and administrative practices were designed to foster the rapid growth and development of Taiwan during this period.
"In tax administration," writes the author, "all countries can learn from each other." This revealing case study of the development of Israel's tax system--a system which has dealt with the full panoply of problems that tax administrators must face and which is further characterized by heavy taxation--offers a wealth of noteworthy examples for other countries.
Harold C. Wilkenfeld presents a detailed account of the historical and economic realities that forged Israel's elaborate tax structure from the Ottoman period to the present day. He scrutinizes such areas as the crises that Israel's tax administration faced shortly after the State achieved its independence, the problems which had to be solved, the formulation of administrative policy, the interplay of a developing civil service and a developing citizenry. All of these areas are viewed in the context of an evolving economy and a continuing external conflict.
The author presents practical guidelines for countries interested in advancing the effectiveness of tax administration. For instance, many of the Israeli administration's tactics against tax evasion may be transplantable to other nations. Likewise, a number of the technical solutions to administrative problems of both direct and indirect taxes can certainly and readily be adapted to conditions in a number of developing countries.
Taxes and People in Israel comes as a welcome addition to a field which offers few critical, historical studies of the entire tax system of a country. It will be of considerable interest to tax administrators and ought to be read by every new head of a tax administration. It should also prove a valuable source to public administrators, lawyers, sociologists, economists, and anyone concerned with giving fiscal advice to the developing countries.
A tax revolt almost as momentous as the Boston Tea Party erupted in California in 1978. Its reverberations are still being felt, yet no one is quite sure what general lessons can be drawn from observing its course. This book is an in-depth study of this most recent and notable taxpayers' rebellion: Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13, the Gann measure of 1979, and Proposition 9 (Jarvis II) of 1980. The people of California, speaking directly through referenda, redirected their state from an intense and expensive concern for the welfare of its citizens to a far more circumspect role. The sequence involved cutting property taxes, limiting tax growth, and then rejecting a state income tax cut.
Why did Californians vote to lower some taxes and not others? How fundamental is the American disposition toward tax revolt? Will it happen again? The authors consider a variety of partial answers: the self-interest of certain groups, the apathy of others, the role of party affiliation, the specter of symbolic racism, the meaning of mass mood surges. The interplay between class politics and symbolic protest embodied in the California Tax Revolt has since spread to other states—for example, Proposition 21/2 in Massachusetts, which lowered property taxes—and has reached the federal level. President Reagan, with Republican and conservative Democrat support, has enacted major spending cuts and long-range tax relief. The new revolutionary strand in the fabric of the American political culture appears to be strong.
A tax revolt almost as momentous as the Boston Tea Party erupted in California in 1978. Its reverberations are still being felt, yet no one is quite sure what general lessons can be drawn from observing its course. This book is an in-depth study of this most recent and notable taxpayers' rebellion: Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13, the Gann measure of 1979, and Proposition 9 (Jarvis II) of 1980. The people of California, speaking directly through referenda, redirected their state from an intense and expensive concern for the welfare of its citizens to a far more circumspect role. The sequence involved cutting property taxes, limiting tax growth, and then rejecting a state income tax cut.
Why did Californians vote to lower some taxes and not others? How fundamental is the American disposition toward tax revolt? Will it happen again? The authors consider a variety of partial answers: the self-interest of certain groups, the apathy of others, the role of party affiliation, the specter of symbolic racism, the meaning of mass mood surges. The interplay between class politics and symbolic protest embodied in the California Tax Revolt has since spread to other states—for example, Proposition 21/2 in Massachusetts, which lowered property taxes—and has reached the federal level. President Reagan, with Republican and conservative Democrat support, has enacted major spending cuts and long-range tax relief. The new revolutionary strand in the fabric of the American political culture appears to be strong.
This important contribution to tax analysis presents seven related theoretical essays that examine the effects of capital income taxation on the behavior of firms. It is divided into three sections, focusing on optimal tax design, firm financial policy, and inflation. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the powerful role taxes play in shaping the behavior of American corporations, and also provide insights into the difficult task of tax reform.
Alan Auerbach’s results suggest policies the government might adopt to promote the optimal accumulation of capital. He examines the implications for capital taxation of discrepancies between nominal depreciation rates and real economic depreciation, and suggests appropriate rules of thumb for determining when capital taxation is neutral among alternative investment projects. He also makes important contributions to the debate over the integration of corporate and personal taxes on capital income and to the behavioral puzzle of why corporations pay dividends to their shareholders.
Blame society. Blame a bad upbringing. Blame the circumstances. Blame the victim--she may even blame herself. But what about the perpetrator? When the blame is all assigned, will anyone be left to take responsibility?
This powerful book takes up the disturbing topic of victimization and blame as a pathology of our time and its consequences for personal responsibility. By probing the psychological dynamics of victims and perpetrators of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, Sharon Lamb seeks to answer some crucial questions: How do victims become victims and sometimes perpetrators? How can we break the psychological circle of perpetrators blaming others and victims blaming themselves? How do victims and perpetrators view their actions and reactions? And how does our social response to them facilitate patterns of excuse?
With clarity and compassion, Lamb examines the theories, excuses, and psychotherapies that strip both victims of their power and perpetrators of their agency--and thus deprive them of the means to human dignity, healing, and reparation. She shows how the current practice of painting victims as pure innocents may actually help perpetrators of abuse to shirk responsibility for their actions; they too can claim to be victims in their own right, passive and will-less in their wrongdoing.
The Trouble with Blame clarifies the social cost (quickly becoming so apparent) of letting perpetrators off too easily, and points out the dangers of over-emphasizing victimization, two problems which eclipse our dire need for accountability and recovery.
The five editors of this book are longtime research professors and colleagues in the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. James S. House is also Professor in the Department of Sociology; F. Thomas Juster is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics; Robert L. Kahn is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology and Department of Health Management and Policy; and Howard Schuman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology; Eleanor Singer is Research Professor in the Survey Research Center, all at the University of Michigan. Professors House (1991-2001), Kahn (1970-76), and Schuman (1982-90) have each served as Director of the Survey Research Center; Professor Juster served (1976-86) as Director of the Institute for Social Research; and Professor Singer served (1999-2002) as Associate Director of the Survey Research Center.
Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.
Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the 'indignados' protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest.
Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a 'cyberspace' detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around 'occupied' places such as Cairo’s Tahrir Square or New York’s Zuccotti Park.
An exciting and invigorating journey through the new politics of dissent, Tweets and the Streets points both to the creative possibilities and to the risks of political evanescence which new media brings to the contemporary protest experience.
Thick Moralities, Thin Politics grapples with the work of theorists from both sides of the Atlantic, including Jürgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, and Niklas Luhmann, as well as George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel. Gregg develops a model of validity for arguments made in the public sphere, for understanding among competing worldviews, and for adjudicating disputes generated by normative differences. He applies his theory of politics to specific issues of contemporary social life, including those relating to the place of women, minorities, and multiculturalism in American and European society today. He also addresses the scientific study of religion, issues of legal interpretation, and the critique of ideology, in each case illuminating how different epistemic systems, as well as competing value systems, can achieve some understanding of one another. Gregg demonstrates, ultimately, that thin politics actually further, rather than reduce, citizens' engagement in the political process.
In this probing study, Eric Freedman focuses on what images from photography, mobile communications, and the Internet reveal about looking. Exploring subjectivity by critically examining the look, he elaborates on the nature of the photographic frame and its relation to interpretive practices. Freedman scrutinizes what he calls "technobiography"—a life written through technology, and considers the movement of personal images into public spaces. He also considers authorship that situates the self as inherently engaged with and inscribed by information technology.
All of the chapters in Transient Images explore Freedman's interest in examining how media technologies activate particular notions of self and community. He provides examples that address trauma—pictures of missing children on milk cartons and episodes of the reality series Intervention—as well as the strategies behind creating and distributing personal advertisements on the Internet. Transient Images draws out the tensions that exist in images circulating in the digital era.
Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.
Introducing the collection, James Bennett explains how television as digital media is a non-site-specific, hybrid cultural and technological form that spreads across platforms such as mobile phones, games consoles, iPods, and online video services, including YouTube, Hulu and the BBC’s iPlayer. Television as digital media threatens to upset assumptions about television as a mass medium that has helped define the social collective experience, the organization of everyday life, and forms of sociality. As often as we are promised the convenience of the television experience “anytime, anywhere,” we are invited to participate in communities, share television moments, and watch events live. The essays in this collection demonstrate the historical, production, aesthetic, and audience changes and continuities that underpin the emerging meaning of television as digital media.
Contributors. James Bennett, William Boddy, Jean Burgess, John Caldwell, Daniel Chamberlain, Max Dawson, Jason Jacobs, Karen Lury, Roberta Pearson, Jeanette Steemers, Niki Strange, Julian Thomas, Graeme Turner
The first examination of predictive technology from the perspective of Catholic theology
Probabilistic predictions of future risk govern much of society. In business and politics alike, institutional structures manage risk by controlling the behavior of consumers and citizens. New technologies comb through past data to predict and shape future action. Choosing between possible future paths can cause anxiety as every decision becomes a calculation to achieve the most optimal outcome.
Tomorrow’s Troubles is the first book to use virtue ethics to analyze these pressing issues. Paul Scherz uses a theological analysis of risk and practical reason to show how risk-based decision theory reorients our relationships to the future through knowledge of possible dangers and foregone opportunities—and fosters a deceptive hope for total security. Scherz presents this view of temporality as problematic because it encourages a desire for stability through one’s own efforts instead of reliance on God. He also argues that the largest problem with predictive models is that they do not address individual reason and free will. Instead of dwelling on a future, we cannot control, we can use our past experiences and the Christian tradition to focus on discerning God’s will in the present.
Tomorrow’s Troubles offers a thoughtful new framework that will help Christians benefit from the positive aspects of predictive technologies while recognizing God’s role in our lives and our futures.
Grewal combines a postcolonial perspective with social and cultural theory to argue that contemporary notions of gender, race, class, and nationality are linked to earlier histories of colonization. Through an analysis of Mattel’s sales of Barbie dolls in India, she discusses the consumption of American products by middle-class Indian women newly empowered with financial means created by India’s market liberalization. Considering the fate of asylum-seekers, Grewal looks at how a global feminism in which female refugees are figured as human rights victims emerged from a distinctly Western perspective. She reveals in the work of three novelists who emigrated from India to the United States—Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Amitav Ghosh—a concept of Americanness linked to cosmopolitanism. In Transnational America Grewal makes a powerful, nuanced case that the United States must be understood—and studied—as a dynamic entity produced and transformed both within and far beyond its territorial boundaries.
Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity integrates the study of politics and public policy across a broad spectrum of regulatory and social welfare policies in the United States and several nations of Western Europe. The editors and a sterling list of contributors look at policymaking in the 1990s through the present—providing a comparative politics framework—stressing both parallel development and the differences between and among the nations. Similar prevailing ideas and political factors can be identified and transatlantic comparisons made—providing for a clearer understanding of the policymaking process.
Faith in regulated markets and the burden of rising welfare costs are concerns found on both sides of the Atlantic. Western democracies also share political climates colored by economic austerity; low trust in government, pressures from interest groups, and a sharply divided electorate. Because of differing political processes and differing policy starting points, a variety of disparate policy decisions have resulted.
Real world policymaking in the areas of welfare, health, labor, immigration reform, disability rights, consumer and environmental regulation, administrative reforms, and corporate governance are compared. Ultimately, the last decade is best characterized as one of "drift," sluggish changes with little real innovation and much default to the private sector. In general, policymakers on both sides of the ocean, constrained by economic necessity, have been unable to produce policy outcomes that satisfy the key segments of the electorate.
The contributors examine the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany, as well as a number of other European countries, and study the European Union itself as a policymaking institution. Transatlantic Policymaking in an Age of Austerity distills the prominent issues, politics, and roles played by governmental institutions into a new understanding of the dynamics of policymaking in and among transatlantic nations.
Richard Critchfield, author of the best-selling books Villages and An American Looks at Britain, examines the inescapable link between the decline of America's rural roots and the decay of our cities. Trees, Why Do You Wait? is a moving oral history chronicling the changes taking place in rural America. Through it, we meet real people of the heartland and feel the suffering and the strength in their relationship to the land.
"One of the finest examples of the genre of the community survey. . . The book is remarkably free of special pleading. And every chapter is paced with fascinating data and insights. The University of Alabama Prss is to be congratulated for reissuing this splendid community study; the volume fits the description of a classic. And Clarence L. Mohr's introduction alone is worth the price of the volume."
—Journal of Southwest Georgia History
George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History
VSNY Book Award, New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America
Hornblower Award for a First Book, New York Society Library
James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
With pigs roaming the streets and cows foraging in the Battery, antebellum Manhattan would have been unrecognizable to inhabitants of today’s sprawling metropolis. Fruits and vegetables came from small market gardens in the city, and manure piled high on streets and docks was gold to nearby farmers. But as Catherine McNeur reveals in this environmental history of Gotham, a battle to control the boundaries between city and country was already being waged, and the winners would take dramatic steps to outlaw New York’s wild side.
“[A] fine book which make[s] a real contribution to urban biography.”
—Joseph Rykwert, Times Literary Supplement
“Tells an odd story in lively prose…The city McNeur depicts in Taming Manhattan is the pestiferous obverse of the belle epoque city of Henry James and Edith Wharton that sits comfortably in many imaginations…[Taming Manhattan] is a smart book that engages in the old fashioned business of trying to harvest lessons for the present from the past.”
—Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times
Winner of the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians
Co-Winner of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Award
Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences.
“Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them…This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign’s record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking… How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small.”
—Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review
“As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement…Immerwahr’s account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big.”
—Jamie Martin, The Nation
After the bombings of Oklahoma City in 1995, most Americans were shocked to discover that tens of thousands of their fellow citizens had banded together in homegrown militias. Within the next few years, numerous studies and media reports appeared revealing the unseen world of the American militia movement, a loose alliance of groups with widely divergent views. Not surprisingly, it was the movement’s most extreme voices that attracted the lion's share of attention.
In reality the militia movement was neither as irrational nor as new as it was portrayed in the press, Robert Churchill writes. What bound the movement together was the shared belief that citizens have a right, even a duty, to take up arms against wanton exercise of unconstitutional power by the federal government. Many were motivated to join the movement by what they saw as a rise in state violence, illustrated by the government assaults at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992, and Waco, Texas in 1993. It was this perception and the determination to deter future state violence, Churchill argues, that played the greatest role in the growth of the American militia movement.
Churchill uses three case studies to illustrate the origin of some of the core values of the modern militia movement: Fries' Rebellion in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century, the Sons of Liberty Conspiracy in Civil War-era Indiana and Illinois, and the Black Legion in Michigan and Ohio during the Depression. Building on extensive interviews with militia members, the author places the contemporary militia movement in the context of these earlier insurrectionary movements that, animated by a libertarian interpretation of the American Revolution, used force to resist the authority of the federal government.
A historian of early America, Robert H. Churchill has published numerous articles on American political violence and the right to keep and bear arms. He is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Hartford.
"This book is about how we think about the past, how cultural memories are formed and evolve, and how these memories then come to impact current understandings of issues. Churchill provides an enlightening analysis of the ideology, structure, and purpose of the militia movement. Where much scholarship has categorized it as a cohesive, single movement, Churchill begins the process of unraveling its complexity."
---Steve Chermak, Michigan State University
"To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face addresses an area---the relationship of American political violence to American ideology---that is of growing importance and that is commanding an ever increasing audience, and it does so in a way like nothing else in the field."
---David Williams, Indiana University Bloomington
The key to democratization lies within the experience of the popular movements. Those who engaged in the popular struggle in Guatemala have a deep understanding of substantive democratic behavior, and the experience of Guatemala’s civil society should be the cornerstone for building a meaningful formal democracy.
In Terror in the Countryside Rachel May offers an in-depth examination of the relationship between political violence and civil society. Focusing on Guatemala, Professor May develops a theoretical scheme that calls into question the more conventional understandings of both violence and civil society.
By elaborating a cyclical model of violence, and suggesting a typology of rural (campesino) popular organizations, Terror in the Countryside provides both a history and an analysis of late-twentieth-century violence and of the role of campesino organizations during the worst years of conflict in Guatemala.
This history details the way ideologies, organizational structures, and mobilization strategies evolved in response to the climate of terror, emphasizing the courage and sacrifice of those who worked for justice and human rights.
This book argues that the peace accords can be considered only as a first step to eliminate a violence that has become deeply rooted in the political life of the country.
Escobar illuminates many interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government’s policies of development and pluralism that created conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements and those movements’ efforts to steer the region in particular directions. He examines attempts by capitalists to appropriate the rainforest and extract resources, by developers to set the region on the path of modernist progress, and by biologists and others to defend this incredibly rich biodiversity “hot-spot” from the most predatory activities of capitalists and developers. He also looks at the attempts of academics, activists, and intellectuals to understand all of these complicated processes. Territories of Difference is Escobar’s effort to think with Afro-Colombian intellectual-activists who aim to move beyond the limits of Eurocentric paradigms as they confront the ravages of neoliberal globalization and seek to defend their place-based cultures and territories.
With a common heritage as former colonies of Europe, why did the United States so outstrip Latin America in terms of economic development in the nineteenth century? In this innovative study, Camilla Townsend challenges the traditional view that North Americans succeeded because of better attitudes toward work—the Protestant work ethic—and argues instead that they prospered because of differences in attitudes towards workers that evolved in the colonial era.
Townsend builds her study around workers' lives in two very similar port cities in the 1820s and 1830s. Through the eyes of the young Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, Maryland, and an Indian woman named Ana Yagual in Guayaquil, Ecuador, she shows how differing attitudes towards race and class in North and South America affected local ways of doing business. This empirical research significantly clarifies the relationship between economic culture and racial identity and its long-term effects.
Why are the political polarities of Northern Ireland so intractable? Why, in a society riven by class division, do Northern Ireland's people identify most strongly with the nationalist and religious groupings of British Protestant versus Irish Catholic? Why, after over thirty years of violence and death, is dialogue about the future so difficult to create and sustain?
In The Troubles in Ballybogoin, William F. Kelleher Jr. examines the patterns of avoidance and engagement deployed by people in the western region of Northern Ireland and compares them to colonial patterns of settlement and retreat. The book shows how social memories inform and are strengthened by mundane aspects of daily life—the paths people use to move through communal spaces, the bodily movements involved in informal social encounters that mark political identities, and the "holiday" marches that displace citizens for the day and divide cross-community friendships.
The Troubles in Ballybogoin is the story of Ireland, its historical conundrums, its violence. It details the location of historical memory in the politics of the everyday and the colonial modernities that so often nurture long-term conflict.
". . . Bill Kelleher brings the reader in to the heart of Northern Ireland and its long, tragic conflict. Northern Ireland, in all its complexity, is authentically rendered."READERS
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