"In Albin J. Zak III's highly original study, phonograph records are not just the medium for disseminating songs but musical works unto themselves. Fashioned from a mix of copyright law, recording studios and techniques, the talent of musicians and disc jockeys, the ingenuity and avarice of producers, and the appetites of record buyers, the all-powerful marketplace Zak describes is an unruly zone where music of, by, and for the people is made and anointed."
---Richard Crawford, author of America's Musical Life: A History
"Wrestling clarity from the exuberant chaos of early rock 'n' roll, Albin Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody redefines our understanding of the record in the shaping of the post–World War II soundscape. Zak tracks the story which extends from Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra through Elvis and Buddy Holly to the Beatles and Bob Dylan with excursions into dozens of lesser known, but crucial, players in a game with few established rules. A crucial addition to the bookshelf."
---Craig Werner, author of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America
"I Don't Sound Like Nobody is a superb account of the transformation of American popular music in the 1950s. Albin Zak insightfully explores what recording actually means in terms of the process of making and consuming music. His discussion of the legal, aesthetic, and industrial ramifications of changes in the recording process over the course of the 1950s will make popular music scholars and record collectors reconsider what they think they know about the period."
---Rob Bowman, author of Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records
"Informative, original, and entertaining. Through a narrative that is not only enlightening but also compelling, I Don't Sound Like Nobody probes the sources and mechanisms of change within post-war American popular music, shedding a cultural and historical light on the convergence of musical idioms that created '50s rock and roll."
---Stan Hawkins, author of Settling the Pop Score
"From the birth of the record industry through the legacy of Presley, the development of rock and roll, and the Beatles 'stunning arrival on the world's stage,' Albin Zak takes us on a journey of exceptional scholarship. The breadth of coverage and deep examination of recordings and repertoire reveal the author's reverence and sensitivity to the many dimensions and origins of this complex musical soundscape."
---William Moylan, author of Understanding and Crafting the Mix: The Art of Recording
The 1950s marked a radical transformation in American popular music as the nation drifted away from its love affair with big band swing to embrace the unschooled and unruly new sounds of rock 'n' roll.
The sudden flood of records from the margins of the music industry left impressions on the pop soundscape that would eventually reshape long-established listening habits and expectations, as well as conventions of songwriting, performance, and recording. When Elvis Presley claimed, "I don't sound like nobody," a year before he made his first commercial record, he unwittingly articulated the era's musical Zeitgeist.
The central story line of I Don't Sound Like Nobody is change itself. The book's characters include not just performers but engineers, producers, songwriters, label owners, radio personalities, and fans---all of them key players in the decade's musical transformation.
Written in engaging, accessible prose, Albin Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody approaches musical and historical issues of the 1950s through the lens of recordings and fashions a compelling story of the birth of a new musical language. The book belongs on the shelf of every modern music aficionado and every scholar of rock 'n' roll.
Albin J. Zak III is Professor of Music at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the editor of The Velvet Underground Companion and the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, a groundbreaking study of rock music production. Zak is also a record producer, songwriter, singer, and guitarist.Jacket design by Paula Newcomb
Jacket photograph © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos
“i used to love to dream” is a mixtap/e/ssay that performs hip-hop scholarship using sampled and live instrumentation; repurposed music, film, and news clips; and original rap lyrics. As a genre, the mixtap/e/ssay brings together the mixtape—a self-produced or independently released album issued free of charge to gain publicity—and the personal and scholarly essays. “i used to love to dream” names Decatur, Illinois—the author's hometown—as a reference point for place- and time-specific rapped ruminations about the ideas of growing up, moving away, and pondering one's life choices. At the same time, the tracks attempt to account for moral, philosophical, and ethical dimensions undergirding unease about authenticity, or staying true to oneself and to one’s city or neighborhood, as well as the external factors that contribute to such feelings. Using the local to ask questions about the global, “i used to love to dream” highlights outlooks on Black life generally, and Black manhood in particular, in the United States.
The tracks are presented along with liner notes and a short documentary about the making of the mixtap/e/ssay, and accompanying articles to provide context for the tracks for listeners both in classrooms and outside of them.
"Danielle Goldman's contribution to the theory and history of improvisation in dance is rich, beautiful and extraordinary. In her careful, rigorously imaginative analysis of the discipline of choreography in real time, Goldman both compels and allows us to become initiates in the mysteries of flight and preparation. She studies the massive volitional resources that one unleashes in giving oneself over to being unleashed. It is customary to say of such a text that it is 'long-awaited' or 'much anticipated'; because of Goldman's work we now know something about the potenza, the kinetic explosion, those terms carry. Reader, get ready to move and be moved."
---Fred Moten, Duke University
"In this careful, intelligent, and theoretically rigorous book, Danielle Goldman attends to the 'tight spaces' within which improvised dance explores both its limitations and its capacity to press back against them. While doing this, Goldman also allows herself---and us---to be moved by dance itself. The poignant conclusion, evoking specific moments of embodied elegance, vulnerability, and courage, asks the reader: 'Does it make you feel like dancing?' Whether taken literally or figuratively, I can't imagine any other response to this beautiful book."
---Barbara Browning, New York University
"This book will become the single most important reflection on the question of improvisation, a question which has become foundational to dance itself. The achievement of I Want to Be Ready lies not simply in its mastery of the relevant literature within dance, but in its capacity to engage dance in a deep and abiding dialogue with other expressive forms, to think improvisation through myriad sites and a rich vein of cultural diversity, and to join improvisation in dance with its manifestations in life so as to consider what constitutes dance's own politics."
---Randy Martin, Tisch School of Arts at New York University
I Want To Be Ready draws on original archival research, careful readings of individual performances, and a thorough knowledge of dance scholarship to offer an understanding of the "freedom" of improvisational dance. While scholars often celebrate the freedom of improvised performances, they are generally focusing on freedom from formal constraints. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Houston Baker, among others, Danielle Goldman argues that this negative idea of freedom elides improvisation's greatest power. Far from representing an escape from the necessities of genre, gender, class, and race, the most skillful improvisations negotiate an ever shifting landscape of constraints. This work will appeal to those interested in dance history and criticism and also interdisciplinary audiences in the fields of American and cultural studies.
Danielle Goldman is Assistant Professor of Dance at The New School and a professional dancer in New York City, where she recently has danced for DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill.
Cover art: Still from Ghostcatching, 1999, by Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser, and Shelley Eshkar. Image courtesy of Kaiser/Eshkar.
In Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel , Yaron Shemer presents the most comprehensive and systematic study to date of Mizrahi (Oriental-Jewish or Arab-Jewish) films produced in Israel in the last several decades. Through an analysis of dozens of films the book illustrates how narratives, characters, and space have been employed to give expression to Mizrahi ethnic identity and to situate the Mizrahi within the broader context of the Israeli societal fabric. The struggle over identity and the effort to redraw ethnic boundaries have taken place against the backdrop of a long-standing Zionist view of the Mizrahi as an inferior other whose “Levantine” culture posed a threat to the Western-oriented Zionist enterprise.
In its examination of the nature and dynamics of Mizrahi cinema (defined by subject-matter), the book engages the sensitive topic of Mizrahi ethnicity head-on, confronting the conventional notion of Israeli society as a melting pot and the widespread dismissal of ethnic divisions in the country. Shemer explores the continuous marginalization of the Mizrahi in contemporary Israeli cinema and the challenge some Mizrahi films offer to the subjugation of this ethnic group. He also studies the role cultural policies and institutional power in Israel have played in shaping Mizrahi cinema and the creation of a Mizrahi niche in cinema. In a broader sense, this pioneering work is a probing exploration of Israeli culture and society through the prism of film and cinematic expression. It sheds light on the play of ethnicity, class, gender, and religion in contemporary Israel, and on the heated debates surrounding Zionist ideology and identity politics. By charting a new territory of academic inquiry grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, the study contributes to the formation of “Mizrahi Cinema” as a recognized and vibrant scholarly field.
In 1912, white land developers founded Idlewild, an African American resort community in western Michigan. Over the following decades, the town became one of the country’s foremost vacation destinations for the black middle class, during its peak drawing tens of thousands of visitors annually and hosting the era’s premier entertainers, such as The Four Tops, Della Reese, Brook Benton, and George Kirby. With the civil rights movement and the resulting expansion of recreation options available to African Americans, Idlewild suffered a sharp social and economic decline, and by the early 1980s the town had become a struggling retirement community in the midst of financial and political crises.
Meticulously researched and unearthing never-before-seen historical material, Ronald J. Stephens’s book examines the rapid rise and decline of this pivotal landmark in African American and leisure history, in the process exploring intersections among race, class, tourism, entertainment, and historic preservation in the United States. Featuring a wealth of fieldwork on contemporary Idlewild, the book also takes a candid look at recent revitalization efforts and analyzes the possibilities for a future resurgence of this national treasure.
"A brilliant and daring book on how art reveals life, how it illuminates childhood beyond what the sciences of development can tell us."
---Jerome Bruner, University Professor, New York University
"Combining the surgical precision of a psychoanalytically informed critic with the oracular eloquence of a brilliant close reader, Ellen Handler Spitz reads our cultural fortunes about childhood and parenting through works of art. Moving us (in both senses of the term) from the serene plenitude of Piero della Francesca's Madonna of Childbirth to the unsparing horror of Lessing's Fifth Child, she reveals just how powerfully art puts us in touch with the pulsing energies of real life."
---Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
"Illuminating Childhood is a wonderfully well-written and researched interdisciplinary study of childhood in various media and mediums as well as through ethnicity, race, gender, cultures, and time."
---T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Distinguished Professor of French and Director of African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University
While literature and the arts are rarely considered primary sources for knowledge about human motivation and behavior, people read novels, attend movies, watch television, and go to the theater not solely to be entertained but also to learn about one another and about themselves. Illuminating Childhood formalizes this quest for psychological knowledge in the domain of the arts.
Starting with the premise that a gifted writer, artist, or filmmaker has the ability to teach us as much in one scene as a theorist can in a treatise or a therapist in a session, the author shares her intimate experience of eight thematically linked works in film and literature from the second half of the twentieth century, touching on issues central to parent-child relations, including toxic intrafamilial secrets, the disjunction between love and understanding, and the lasting impact of deceased parents on their children. While the canon of literature about children and parent-child relations includes books that identify problems, propose solutions, and present statistical data, Illuminating Childhood offers a living out of experience via the arts, written for a general audience---parents, teachers, mental health professionals, those who engage with their students via the arts of literature and film, and others.
Ellen Handler Spitz holds the Honors College Professorship of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland. She is the author of a number of books on art, psychology, and imagery, including The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood. Her abiding research interests are the cultural lives of young people; the relations between aesthetics and psychology; and the interconnections among literature, music, dance, and the visual arts.
Jacket photo: Courtesy of PhotoFest
"North Korea is not just a security or human rights problem (although it is those things) but a real society. This book gets us closer to understanding North Korea beyond the usual headlines, and does so in a richly detailed, well-researched, and theoretically contextualized way."
---Charles K. Armstrong, Director, Center for Korean Research, Columbia University
"One of this book's strengths is how it deals at the same time with historical, geographical, political, artistic, and cultural materials. Film and theatre are not the only arts Kim studies---she also offers an excellent analysis of paintings, fashion, and what she calls 'everyday performance.' Her analysis is brilliant, her insights amazing, and her discoveries and conclusions always illuminating."
---Patrice Pavis, University of Kent, Canterbury
No nation stages massive parades and collective performances on the scale of North Korea. Even amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, the financially troubled country continues to invest massive amounts of resources to sponsor unflinching displays of patriotism, glorifying its leaders and revolutionary history through state rituals that can involve hundreds of thousands of performers. Author Suk-Young Kim explores how sixty years of state-sponsored propaganda performances---including public spectacles, theater, film, and other visual media such as posters---shape everyday practice such as education, the mobilization of labor, the gendering of social interactions, the organization of national space, tourism, and transnational human rights. Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, Illusive Utopia shows how the country's visual culture and performing arts set the course for the illusionary formation of a distinctive national identity and state legitimacy, illuminating deep-rooted cultural explanations as to why socialism has survived in North Korea despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China's continuing march toward economic prosperity. With over fifty striking color illustrations, Illusive Utopia captures the spectacular illusion within a country where the arts are not only a means of entertainment but also a forceful institution used to regulate, educate, and mobilize the population.
Suk-Young Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor with Kim Yong of Long Road Home: A Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor.
Professor Larissa Bonfante’s great gift was the ability to evoke, in a fresh, immediate, and convincing way, the experiences, beliefs, and thoughts of people living more than two thousand years ago. Her final publication, Images and Translations: The Etruscans Abroad, communicates the sensations of other times and places, from the day-to-day to the solemnly ritualistic.
The world of the Etruscans, sophisticated and pleasure-loving, radiated throughout a vast area of the ancient world – a world very different from our own. Relying on a wealth of creative works, Images and Translations examines the expertise and productions of the artists who made them, the tastes of those who used them, and the sometimes surprising results of the exchanges between creators and buyers. Just as the French demand for Chinese ceramics in the seventeenth century gave birth to the unprecedented famille colors, so the production of Greek ceramics for the Etruscan market produced singularly expressive depictions. Humorous, pious, or erotic to the buyers, they could be shocking to the culture that made them.
Images and Translations explores areas in much closer economic and cultural contact than is usually recognized. The volume finds threads of connection not only between Italy and Greece, but between Italy and northern Europe—today’s France and Germany—as well as between Italy and the Near East. Etruscan influence runs through Western history, into the Renaissance, and emerges in imagery still evocative today.At the heart of Herbert J. Gans's utopian narrative is the vision of progress with fairness on which the best of American idealism has been built. Part utopia, part realism, Imagining America in 2033 is also a liberal's dream of life after Bush and a set of progressive yet practical guidelines for restoring sanity and intelligence to nearly every aspect of public and political life post-Bush.
Herbert J. Gans, one of the most influential and prolific sociologists and social commentators of our time, achieves a realistic utopia set mostly in the second and third decades of the century. In Gans's imagined future, elected officials, policymakers, activists, and citizens have transformed America into a much more humane and effective democracy. The book features three Democratic presidents; the major new domestic, foreign, and social policies their administrations pursue; and the political battles they fight.
Gans provides chapters on an exhaustive list of social, political, and economic policy issues: jobs; war; tax reform; global warming; economic, racial, gender, and religious equality; family policies; the creation of affordable housing and energy saving communities; education reform; and more. While hopeful and idealistic, many of Gans's proposals---such as the concept of the nurse-doctor, in which nurses increasingly take on tasks previously handled only by medical doctors within a framework of national health care---are ideas innovative enough that they should be taken seriously by actual policymakers.
Imagining America in 2033 is lively and accessible, with an appeal for general readers, policy hounds, and the politically savvy alike.
Herbert J. Gans is Robert S. Lynd Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Columbia University.
Imagining Politics critically examines two interpretations of government. The first comes from pop culture fictions about politics, the second from academic political science. Stephen Benedict Dyson argues that televised political fictions and political science theories are attempts at meaning-making, reflecting and shaping how a society thinks about its politics.
By taking fiction seriously, and by arguing that political science theory is homologous to fiction, the book offers a fresh perspective on both, using fictions such as The West Wing, House of Cards, Borgen, Black Mirror, and Scandal to challenge the assumptions that construct the discipline of political science itself.
Imagining Politics is also about a political moment in the West. Two great political shocks—Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—are set in a new context here. Dyson traces how Brexit and Trump campaigned against our image of politics as usual, and won.
Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings.
Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization in exploring ways in which our
relationships with forests have been shaped, using Michigan---its history of settlement, popular literature, and forest management controversies---as an exemplary case. Knott looks at such well-known figures as William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Teddy Roosevelt; Ojibwa conceptions of the forest and natural world (including how Longfellow mythologized them); early explorer accounts; and contemporary literature set in the Upper Peninsula, including Jim Harrison's True North and Philip Caputo's Indian Country.
Two competing metaphors evolved over time, Knott shows: the forest as howling wilderness, impeding the progress of civilization and in need of subjugation, and the forest as temple or cathedral, worthy of reverence and protection. Imagining the Forest shows the origin and development of both.
In romances—Renaissance England’s version of the fantasy novel—characters often discover books that turn out to be magical or prophetic, and to offer insights into their readers’ selves. The Immaterial Book examines scenes of reading in important romance texts across genres: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Tempest, Wroth’s Urania, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It offers a response to “material book studies” by calling for a new focus on imaginary or “immaterial” books and argues that early modern romance authors, rather than replicating contemporary reading practices within their texts, are reviving ancient and medieval ideas of the book as a conceptual framework, which they use to investigate urgent, new ideas about the self and the self-conscious mind.
The emergence of New Institutional Economics toward the end of the twentieth century profoundly changed our ideas about the organization of economic systems and their social and political foundations. Imperfect Institutions explores recent developments in this field and pushes the discussion forward by allowing for incomplete knowledge of social systems and unexpected system dynamics and, above all, by focusing explicitly on institutional policy. Empirical studies extending from Africa to Iceland are cited in support of the theoretical argument.
In Imperfect Institutions Thráinn Eggertsson extends his attempt to integrate and develop the new field that began with his acclaimed Economic Behavior and Institutions (1990), which has been translated into six languages. This latest work analyzes why institutions that create relative economic backwardness emerge and persist and considers the possibilities and limits of institutional reform.
Thráinn Eggertsson is Professor of Economics at the University of Iceland and Global Distinguished Professor of Politics at New York University. Previously published works include Economic Behavior and Institutions (1990) and Empirical Studies in Institutional Change with Lee Alston and Douglass North (1996).
Adam Sitze meticulously traces the origins of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission back to two well-established instruments of colonial and imperial governance: the jurisprudence of indemnity and the commission of inquiry. This genealogy provides a fresh, though counterintuitive, understanding of the TRC’s legal, political, and cultural importance. The TRC’s genius, Sitze contends, is not the substitution of “forgiving” restorative justice for “strict” legal justice but rather the innovative adaptation of colonial law, sovereignty, and government. However, this approach also contains a potential liability: if the TRC’s origins are forgotten, the very enterprise intended to overturn the jurisprudence of colonial rule may perpetuate it. In sum, Sitze proposes a provocative new means by which South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be understood and evaluated.
There is an alluring desire that research should lead us to find the practical knowledge that enables people to live a good life in a just and equitable society. This desire haunted the 19th century emergence of the social sciences as a discipline, then became more pronounced in the postwar mobilizations of research. Today that desire lives on in the international assessments of national schools and in the structure of professional education, both of which influence government modernization of schools and also provide for people’s well-being. American policy thus reflects research in which reforms are verified by “scientific, empirical evidences” about “what works” in experiments, and “will work” therefore in society.
The book explores the idea that practical and useful knowledge changes over time, and shows how this knowledge has been (re)visioned in contemporary research on educational reform, instructional improvement, and professionalization. The study of science draws on a range of social and cultural theories and historical studies to understand the politics of science, as well as scientific knowledge that is concerned with social and educational change. Research hopes to change social conditions to create a better life, and to shape people whose conduct embodies these valued characteristics—the good citizen, parent, or worker. Yet this hope continually articulates the dangers that threaten this future. Thomas Popkewitz explores how the research to correct social wrongs is paradoxically entangled with the inscription of differences that ultimately hamper the efforts to include.
The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility addresses a series of questions about common beliefs about adoption. Underlying these beliefs is the assumption that human qualities are innate and intrinsic, an assumption often held by adoptees and their families, sometimes at great emotional cost. This book explores representations of adoption—transracial, transnational, and domestic same-race adoption—that reimagine human possibility by questioning this assumption and conceiving of alternatives.
Literary scholar Margaret Homans examines fiction making’s special relationship to themes of adoption, an “as if” form of family making, fabricated or fictional instead of biological or “real.” Adoption has tended to generate stories rather than uncover bedrock truths. Adoptive families are made, not born; in the words of novelist Jeanette Winterson, “adopted children are self-invented because we have to be.” In attempting to recover their lost histories and identities, adoptees create new stories about themselves. While some believe that adoptees cannot be whole unless they reconnect with their origins, others believe that privileging biology reaffirms hierarchies (such as those of race) that harm societies and individuals. Adoption is lived and represented through an irresolvable tension between belief in the innate nature of human traits and belief in their constructedness, contingency, and changeability. The book shows some of the ways in which literary creation, and a concept of adoption as a form of creativity, manages this tension.
The texts examined include fiction (e.g., classic novels such as Silas Marner, What Maisie Knew, and Beloved); memoirs by adoptees, adoptive parents, and birthmothers; drama, documentary films, advice manuals, social science writing; and published interviews with adoptees, parents, and birth parents. Along the way the book tracks the quests of adoptees who, whether or not they meet their original families, must construct their own stories rather than finding them; follows transnational adoptees as they return, hopes held high, to Korea and China; looks over the shoulders of a generation of girls adopted from China as they watch Disney’s iconic Mulan, with its alluring story of destiny written on the skin; and listens to birthmothers as they struggle to tell painful secrets held for decades.
This book engages in debates within adoption studies, women’s and gender studies, transnational studies, and ethnic studies; it will appeal to literary scholars and critics, including specialists in memoir or narrative theory, and to general readers interested in adoption and in race.
The conventional way of understanding what musicians do as performers is to treat them as producers of sound; some even argue that it is unnecessary to see musicians in performance as long as one can hear them. But musical performance, counters Philip Auslander, is also a social interaction between musicians and their audiences, appealing as much to the eye as to the ear. In Concert: Performing Musical Persona he addresses not only the visual means by which musicians engage their audiences through costume and physical gesture, but also spectacular aspects of performance such as light shows.
Although musicians do not usually enact fictional characters on stage, they nevertheless present themselves to audiences in ways specific to the performance situation. Auslander’s term to denote the musician’s presence before the audience is musical persona. While presence of a musical persona may be most obvious within rock and pop music, the book’s analysis extends to classical music, jazz, blues, country, electronic music, laptop performance, and music made with experimental digital interfaces. The eclectic group of performers discussed include the Beatles, Miles Davis, Keith Urban, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Frank Zappa, B. B. King, Jefferson Airplane, Virgil Fox, Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould, and Laurie Anderson.
In this book, Amy Lai examines the current free speech crisis in Western universities. She studies the origin, history, and importance of freedom of speech in the university setting, and addresses the relevance and pitfalls of political correctness and microaggressions on campuses, where laws on harassment, discrimination, and hate speech are already in place, along with other concepts that have gained currency in the free speech debate, including deplatforming, trigger warning, and safe space. Looking at numerous free speech disputes in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, the book argues for the equal application of the free speech principle to all expressions to facilitate respectful debates. All in all, it affirms that the right to free expression is a natural right essential to the pursuit of truth, democratic governance, and self-development, and this right is nowhere more important than in the university.
In Defense of Monopoly offers an unconventional but empirically grounded argument in favor of market monopolies. Authors McKenzie and Lee claim that conventional, static models exaggerate the harm done by real-world monopolies, and they show why some degree of monopoly presence is necessary to maximize the improvement of human welfare over time.
Inspired by Joseph Schumpeter's suggestion that market imperfections can drive an economy's long-term progress, In Defense of Monopoly defies conventional assumptions to show readers why an economic system's failure to efficiently allocate its resources is actually a necessary precondition for maximizing the system's long-term performance: the perfectly fluid, competitive economy idealized by most economists is decidedly inferior to one characterized by market entry and exit restrictions or costs.
An economy is not a board game in which players compete for a limited number of properties, nor is it much like the kind of blackboard games that economists use to develop their monopoly models. As McKenzie and Lee demonstrate, the creation of goods and services in the real world requires not only competition but the prospect of gains beyond a normal competitive rate of return.
This volume on Muslim life focuses on young male migrants of rural origin who move to build better lives in Bougouni, a provincial town in southwest Mali. Describing themselves as “simply Muslims” and “adventurers,” these migrants aim to be both prosperous and good Muslims. Drawing upon seventeen months of fieldwork, author André Chappatte explores their sense of prosperity and piety as they embark on tunga (adventure), a customary search for money and more in a tradition that dates back to the colonial period.
In the context of the current global war on terrorism, most studies of Muslim life have focused on the politics of piety of reformist movements, their leaders, and members. By contrast, In Search of “Tunga” takes a perspective from below. It opens piety up to “simply Muslims,” although the religious elites have always claimed authority and legitimacy over piety. Is piety an exclusive field of experiences for those who claim to strive for it? What does piety involve for the majority of Muslims, the non-elite and unaffiliated Muslims? This volume “democratizes” piety by documenting its practice as going beyond sharply defined religious affiliations and Islamic scholarship, and by showing it is both alive and normative, existential and prescriptive. As opposed to studies that build on the classic historical connections between the Maghreb and the Sahel, the southbound migration from the Sahel documented in this book stresses the overlooked historical connections between the southern shores of the Sahara and the lands south of those shores. It demonstrates how the Malian savanna, this former buffer-zone between ancient Mande kingdoms and thereafter remote areas of French Sudan, is increasingly becoming central in today’s Sahel contexts of desiccation and insecurity.
Nearly forty years after its initial publication, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin is considered a classic narrative of the Black colonial experience. This poetic autobiographical novel juxtaposes the undeveloped, unencumbered life of a small Caribbean island with the materialism and anxiety of the twentieth century.
Written when Lamming was twenty-three and residing in England, In the Castle of My Skin poignantly chronicles the author's life from his ninth to his nineteenth year. Through the eyes of a young boy the experiences of colonial education, class tensions, and natural disaster are interpreted and reinterpreted, mediated through the presence of the old villagers and friends who leave for the mainland.
One of the leading Black writers of the twentieth century, George Lamming is the author of numerous works exploring the colonial experience.
One of the most memorable images of the British women’s suffrage movement occurred on June 4, Derby Day, 1913. As the field of horses approached a turning at Epsom, militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison ducked out from under the railing and ran onto the track, reaching for the bridle of the King’s horse, and was killed in the collision. While her death transformed her into a heroine, it all but erased her identity. To identify what impelled Davison to suffer multiple imprisonments, to experience the torture of force-feedings and the insults of hostile members of the crowds who came to hear her speak, Carolyn P. Collette explores a largely ignored source—the writing to which Davison dedicated so much time and effort during the years from 1908 to 1913. Davison’s writing is an implicit apologia for why she lived the life of a militant suffragette and where she continually revisits and restates the principles that guided her: that woman suffrage was necessary to improve the lives of men, women, and children; that the freedom and justice women sought was sanctioned by God and unjustly withheld by humans whose opposition constituted a tyranny that had to be opposed; and that the evolution of human progress demanded that women become fully equal citizens of their nation in every respect— politically, economically, and culturally.
In the Thick of the Fight makes available for the first time the archive of published and unpublished writings of Emily Wilding Davison. Collette reorients both scholarly and public attention away from a single, defining event to the complexity of Davison’s contributions to modern feminist discourse, giving the reader a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of Davison’s suffrage writings.
Lawmaking provides many opportunities for proposals to be altered, amended, tabled, or stopped completely. The ideal legislator should assess evidence, update his or her beliefs with new information, and sometimes be willing to change course. In practice, however, lawmakers face criticism from the media, the public, and their colleagues for “flip-flopping.” Legislators may also only appear to change positions in some cases as a means of voting strategically.
This book presents a systematic examination of legislative indecision in American politics. This might occur via “waffling”—where a legislator cosponsors a bill, then votes against it at roll call. Or it might occur when a legislator votes one way on a bill, then switches her vote to the other side. In Indecision in American Legislatures, Jeffrey J. Harden and Justin H. Kirkland develop a theoretical framework to explain indecision itself, as well as the public’s attitudes toward indecision. They test their expectations with data sources from American state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, and survey questions administered to American citizens. Understanding legislative indecision from both the legislator and citizen perspectives is important for discussions about the quality of representation in American politics.
Foreign policies and diplomatic missions, combined with military action, were the driving forces behind the growth of the early United States. In an era when the Old and New Worlds were subject to British, French, and Spanish imperial ambitions, the new republic had limited diplomatic presence and minimal public credit. It was vulnerable to hostile forces in every direction. The United States could not have survived, grown, or flourished without the adoption of prescient foreign policies, or without skillful diplomatic operations.
An Independent Empire shows how foreign policy and diplomacy constitute a truly national story, necessary for understanding the history of the United States. In this lively and well-written book, episodes in American history—such as the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Henry Clay’s advocacy of an American System, Pinckney’s Treaty with Spain, and the visionary but absurd Congress of Panama—are recast as elemental aspects of United States foreign and security policy.
An Independent Empire tells the stories of the people who defined the early history of America’s international relationships. Throughout the book are brief, entertaining vignettes of often-overlooked intellectuals, spies, diplomats, and statesmen whose actions and decisions shaped the first fifty years of the United States. More than a dozen bespoke maps illustrate that the growth of the early United States was as much a geographical as a political or military phenomenon.
As India finds itself in the envious position of kingmaker, both the status quo and revisionist major powers are jockeying for India’s support for either upholding or revising the current world order. Using India’s bilateral treaties as a proxy measure of the strength of its relationship with other major powers, Slobodchikoff and Tandon determine whether India will remain neutral in its foreign policy approach or adopt a more assertive role in shaping the future global order. This book provides an in-depth analysis of India’s bilateral ties with major powers that include the United States, Russia, China, Japan, as well as the European Union (including the United Kingdom, France, and Germany) and uses network analysis to study India’s foreign policy positions with other major powers.
Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. By emphasizing local agency and regional interdependencies, this metaphor reconfigures current narratives about the China India border and opens a new perspective on the long history of the Silk Roads, the modern BCIM Initiative, and dam construction along the Nu River in China and the Teesta River in India.
Together, the authors show that positive interaction among people on both sides of a border generates larger, cross-border communities, which can pressure for cooperation and development. India China offers the hope that people divided by arbitrary geo-political boundaries can circumvent race, gender, class, religion, and other social barriers, to form more inclusive institutions and forms of governance.
Industry and the Creative Mind takes a radically new look at the figure of the eccentric, alienated writer in American literature and entertainment from 1790 to 1860. Traditional scholarship takes for granted that the eccentric writer, modeled by such Romantic beings as Lord Byron and brought to life for American audiences by the gloomy person of Edgar Allan Poe, was a figure of rebellion against the excesses of modern commercial culture and industrial life. By contrast, Industry and the Creative Mind argues that in the United States myths of writerly moodiness, alienation, and irresponsibility predated the development of a commercial arts and entertainment industry and instead of forming a site of rebellion from this industry formed a bedrock for its development. Looking at the careers of a number of early American writers---Joseph Dennie, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Edgar Allan Poe, Fanny Fern, as well as a host of now forgotten souls who peopled the twilight worlds of hack fiction and industrial literature---this book traces the way in which early nineteenth-century American arts and entertainment systems incorporated writerly eccentricity in their "logical" economic workings, placing the mad, rebellious writer at the center of the industry's productivity and success.
Campaign contributions are widely viewed as a corrupting influence but most scholarly research concludes that they have marginal impact on legislative behavior. Lynda W. Powell shows that contributions have considerable influence in some state legislatures but very little in others. Using a national survey of legislators, she develops an innovative measure of influence and delineates the factors that explain this great variation across the 99 U.S. state legislative chambers.
Powell identifies the personal, institutional, and political factors that determine how much time a legislator devotes to personal fundraising and fundraising for the caucus. She shows that the extent of donors' legislative influence varies in ways corresponding to the same variations in the factors that determine fundraising time. She also confirms a link between fundraising and lobbying with evidence supporting the theory that contributors gain access to legislators based on donations, Powell's findings have important implications for the debate over the role of money in the legislative process.
In this controversial book, Keith Krehbiel investigates and casts doubt upon a view of Congress held by many academics, journalists, and members of the lay public: that Congress is organized primarily to facilitate logrolling or "gains from trade" between legislators. The author puts forward an alternative "informational" theory that, unlike previous formal theories, highlights institutional needs and individual incentives for acquiring policy expertise. Using games with incomplete information, Krehbiel derives a set of unique and testable predictions about the organization of legislatures -- including the composition of committees and the procedures under which legislation is considered.
Krehbiel's creative illustrations and nonmathematical presentation of formal theories make this book accessible to a diverse set of readers. The political relevance and testability of games with incomplete information will be appreciated by game theorists and economists, while the book's findings make it essential reading for political scientists who study American politics, political institutions, or democratic legislatures.
"Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager."
---Peter Burke, University of Cambridge
"Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing
royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long
overdue and compelling."
---Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles
"Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs."
---Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
"Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state."
---Keith Baker, Stanford University
When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert---the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry---to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines.
Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches---regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy---Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history.
The insects are the world's most amazing animals and comprise over eighty-five percent of the known animal species. Insects of the Great Lakes Region is the first comprehensive guide to document the rich and diverse insect fauna of the Great Lakes region. In Insects of the Great Lakes Region, educators, insect enthusiasts, and the general public will find high-quality, well-presented, easy-to-understand information with over 250 illustrations of the insects found in yards, gardens, fields, and forests. Among the topics discussed are the geological, biological, and entomological history of the Great Lakes region, the distributional patterns of insects in the Great Lakes region, and insect classification and identification. Appendixes guide the reader to entomological organizations, entomological periodicals, public insect collections, regulations on collecting insects from public lands in the Great Lakes region, as well as rare, threatened, and endangered insects. This guide shows the amateur entomologist everything he needs to know, from where to collect milkweed bugs to how often to feed his pet tarantula.
Gary Dunn is Executive Director and Editor, Young Entomologists' Society, Inc., International Headquarters, Lansing, Michigan.
Inside Academic Writing is designed to prepare students in any academic discipline for graduate-level writing. The text situates students within their writing communities by prioritizing the steps of learning; students are directed to use common threads of academic writing across disciplines. The goal of Inside Academic Writing is to give students the opportunity to write for a variety of audiences and to develop the knowledge necessary to recognize how to write for different audiences and purposes.
Inside Academic Writing allows students to examine basic assumptions about writing before they learn specific strategies for targeting the audience or mapping the flow of information. Through the material in this textbook, students will create a portfolio of writings that includes a biographical statement and a research interest essay—important pieces of writing that are rarely taught in courses. Other types of writing featured are a summary, a problem-solution text, a comparative structure paper, and a commentary.
Other textbooks prepare students for graduate writing, but Inside Academic Writing was designed to bridge the gap between non-academic writing and the writing required within an academic community, with one’s peers, colleagues, and field experts. In addition, Inside Academic Writing offers guidance on writing materials for grants, fellowships, conferences, and publication.
Legislative term limits adopted in the 1990s are in effect in fifteen states today. This reform is arguably the most significant institutional change in American government of recent decades. Most of the legislatures in these fifteen states have experienced a complete turnover of their membership; hundreds of experienced lawmakers have become ineligible for reelection, and their replacements must learn and perform their jobs in as few as six years.
Now that term limits have been in effect long enough for both their electoral and institutional effects to become apparent, their consequences can be gauged fully and with the benefit of hindsight. In the most comprehensive study of the subject, editors Kurtz, Cain, and Niemi and a team of experts offer their broad evaluation of the effects term limits have had on the national political landscape.
"The contributors to this excellent and comprehensive volume on legislative term limits come neither to praise the idea nor to bury it, but rather to speak dispassionately about its observed consequences. What they find is neither the horror story of inept legislators completely captive to strong governors and interest groups anticipated by the harshest critics, nor the idyll of renewed citizen democracy hypothesized by its more extreme advocates. Rather, effects have varied across states, mattering most in the states that were already most professionalized, but with countervailing factors mitigating against extreme consequences, such as a flight of former lower chamber members to the upper chamber that enhances legislative continuity. This book is must reading for anyone who wants to understand what happens to major institutional reforms after the dust has settled."
---Bernard Grofman, Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Professor of Economics, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine
"A decade has passed since the first state legislators were term limited. The contributors to this volume, all well-regarded scholars, take full advantage of the distance afforded by this passage of time to explore new survey data on the institutional effects of term limits. Their book is the first major volume to exploit this superb opportunity."
---Peverill Squire, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Iowa
Karl T. Kurtz is Director of the Trust for Representative Democracy at the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Bruce Cain is Heller Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Director of the University of California Washington Center.
Richard G. Niemi is Don Alonzo Watson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester.
This second edition assesses some of the major refinements, extensions, and useful applications that have developed in neoinstitutionalist thought in recent years. More attention is given to the overlap between the New Institutional Economics and developments in economic history and political science. In addition to updated references, new material includes analysis of parallel developments in the field of economic sociology and its attacks on representatives of the NIE as well as an explanation of the institution-as-an-equilibrium-of-game approach.
Already an international best seller, Institutions and Economic Theory is essential reading for economists and students attracted to the NIE approach. Scholars from such disciplines as political science, sociology, and law will find the work useful as the NIE continues to gain wide academic acceptance. A useful glossary for students is included.
Eirik Furubotn is Honorary Professor of Economics, Co-Director of the Center for New Institutional Economics, University of Saarland, Germany and Research Fellow, Private Enterprise Research Center, Texas A&M University.
Rudolph Richter is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Director of the Center for New Institutional Economics, University of Saarland, Germany.
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