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Baby You're a Rich Man
Suing the Beatles for Fun and Profit
Stan Soocher
University Press of New England, 2015
The Beatles, the most popular, influential, and important band of all time, have been the subject of countless books of biography, photography, analysis, history, and conjecture. But this long and winding road has produced nothing like Baby You’re a Rich Man, the first book devoted to the cascade of legal actions engulfing the band, from the earliest days of the loveable mop-heads to their present prickly twilight of cultural sainthood. Part Beatles history, part legal thriller, Baby You’re a Rich Man begins in the era when manager Brian Epstein opened the Pandora’s box of rock ’n’ roll merchandising, making a hash of the band’s licensing and inviting multiple lawsuits in the United States and the United Kingdom. The band’s long breakup period, from 1969 to 1971, provides a backdrop to the Machiavellian grasping of new manager Allen Klein, who unleashed a blizzard of suits and legal motions to take control of the band, their music, and Apple Records. Unsavory mob associate Morris Levy first sued John Lennon for copyright infringement over “Come Together,” then sued him again for not making a record for him. Phil Spector, hired to record a Lennon solo album, walked off with the master tapes and held them for a king’s ransom. And from 1972 to 1975, Lennon was the target of a deportation campaign personally spearheaded by key aides of President Nixon (caught on tape with a drug-addled Elvis Presley) that wound endlessly through the courts. In Baby You’re a Rich Man, Stan Soocher ties the Beatles’ ongoing legal troubles to some of their most enduring songs. What emerges is a stirring portrait of immense creative talent thriving under the pressures of ill will, harassment, and greed. Praise for They Fought the Law: Rock Music Goes to Court “Stan Soocher not only ably translates the legalese but makes both the plaintiffs and defendants engrossingly human. Mandatory reading for every artist who tends to skip his contract’s fine print.”—Entertainment Weekly
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Changing the Playbook
How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports
Howard Chudacoff
University of Illinois Press, 2015
"In Changing the Playbook, Howard P. Chudacoff delves into the background and what-ifs surrounding seven defining moments that redefined college sports. These changes involved fundamental issues--race and gender, profit and power--that reflected societal tensions and, in many cases, remain pertinent today:
  • the failed 1950 effort to pass a Sanity Code regulating payments to football players;
  • the thorny racial integration of university sports programs;
  • the boom in television money;
  • the 1984 Supreme Court decision that settled who could control skyrocketing media revenues;
  • Title IX's transformation of women's athletics;
  • the cheating, eligibility, and recruitment scandals that tarnished college sports in the 1980s and 1990s;
  • the ongoing controversy over paying student athletes a share of the enormous moneys harvested by schools and athletic departments.

A thought-provoking journey into the whos and whys of college sports history, Changing the Playbook reveals how the turning points of yesterday and today will impact tomorrow."

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Christmas Trees for Pleasure and Profit
Wray, Robert D
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Christmas Trees for Pleasure and Profit is for anyone who enjoys being and working outdoors and is seeking a profitable hobby or small business venture. Robert Wray has updated this fourth edition to include the latest techniques and tools for harvesting trees, new methods of transport, the most recent data on herbicides, and advice on how to run a Christmas-tree business today.

A perennial bestseller, this illustrated guide covers selecting land, choosing species, planting, harvesting, and managing a plantation. Wray provides guidance for choosing species suitable for the grower's situation, where and how to get planting stock, and how to care for it. The planting process is described in detail, including both hand and machine methods. The book presents useful techniques for protecting the growing trees from weeds, animals, fire, insects, and disease, and offers a full description of shearing or shaping trees to improve their form and densityùkeys to a successful crop.

As the grower's job is not done until the trees are sold, issues of grading, harvesting, advertising, and marketing are examined. A chapter on finances deals with costs, profits, and taxes. From novice to experienced grower, there is something in this book for everyone.

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For Fun And Profit
The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption
Richard Butsch
Temple University Press, 1990

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Freak Show
Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit
Robert Bogdan
University of Chicago Press, 1990
From 1840 until 1940, freak shows by the hundreds crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today's standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America's most popular forms of entertainment.

Robert Bogdan's fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, becoming the celebrities of their time, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimans.
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Holistic Management Handbook, Third Edition
Regenerating Your Land and Growing Your Profits
Jody Butterfield, Sam Bingham, and Allan Savory
Island Press, 2019
Holistic management is a systems-thinking approach developed by biologist Allan Savory to restore the world’s grassland soils and minimize the damaging effects of climate change and desertification on humans and the natural world. This third edition of Holistic Management Handbook: Regenerating Your Land and Growing Your Profits is the long-awaited companion volume to the classic text Holistic Management, Third Edition. Crafted under the direction of Savory’s longtime collaborator Jody Butterfield, this handbook is the key to developing a comprehensive holistic land plan based on Savory’s principles that will help you to restore health to your land and ensure a stable, sustainable livelihood from its bounty.

This new edition, thoroughly revised, updated, and streamlined, explains the planning procedures described in Holistic Management, and offers step-by-step instructions for running a ranch or farm using a holistic management approach. Butterfield and her coauthors describe how to use the handbook in conjunction with the textbook to tailor a management plan for your unique combination of land, livestock, and finances. Their mantra is “plan, monitor, control, and replan.” Using a four-part approach, the authors walk readers through basic concepts and techniques, help them put a plan onto paper, monitor the results, and adjust the details as needed. Appendixes provide updated worksheets, checklists, planning and monitoring forms, and detailed examples of typical scenarios a user might encounter. The handbook includes a comprehensive glossary of terms.

Ranchers, farmers, pastoralists, social entrepreneurs, government agencies, and NGOs working to address global environmental degradation will find this comprehensive handbook an indispensable guide to putting the holistic management concept into action with tangible results they can take to the bank.
 
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Honor and Profit
Athenian Trade Policy and the Economy and Society of Greece, 415-307 B.C.E.
Darel Tai Engen
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Honor and Profit offers a welcome corrective to the outmoded Finleyite view of the ancient economy. This important volume collects and analyzes economic evidence including government decrees for all known occasions on which Athens granted honors and privileges for services relating to trade.

The analysis proceeds within the intellectual framework of substantive economic theory, in which formal market behavior and institutions are considered to be but a subset of a larger group of economic behaviors and institutions devoted to the production, distribution, and exchange of goods.

Honor and Profit merges theory with empirical historical evidence to illustrate the complexity and dynamism of the ancient Greek economy. The author's conclusions have broad implications for our understanding not only of Athens and environs but also of the social and political history of Greece and the ancient Mediterranean world.

Darel Tai Engen is Associate Professor of History at California State University, San Marcos.

Also of interest

An Introduction to Greek Epigraphy of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods from Alexander the Great down to the Reign of Constantine (323 B.C.---A.D. 337)
By B. H. McLean

The Athenian Empire Restored: Epigraphic and Historical Studies
By Harold B. Mattingly

The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508---490 B.C.
By Greg Anderson

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Investment, Profit, and Tenancy
The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy
Dennis P. Kehoe
University of Michigan Press, 1997
The economy of the Roman Empire was dominated by the business of agriculture. It employed the vast majority of the Empire's labor force and provided the wealth on which the upper classes depended for their social privileges. Consequently, the way in which upper-class Romans maintained and profited from their agricultural investments played a crucial role in shaping the basic relationships characterizing the Roman economy.
In Investment, Profit, and Tenancy Dennis P. Kehoe defines the economic mentality of upper-class Romans by analyzing the assumptions that Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. In particular the author analyzes the duties of guardians in managing the property of their wards, and the bequeathing of agricultural property. He bases his analysis on Roman legal sources, which offer a comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans. Farm tenancy was crucial to these interests, and Kehoe carefully examines how Roman landowners contended with the legal, social, and economic institutions surrounding farm tenancy as they pursued security from their agricultural investments.
Kehoe argues that Roman jurists offer a consistent picture of agriculture as a form of investment that was grounded in upper-class conceptions of the Roman economy. In the eyes of the jurists, agriculture represented the only form of investment capable of providing upper-class Romans with economic security, and this situation had important implications for the relationship between landowners and tenants. Landowners who sought economic stability from their agricultural holdings preferred to simplify the task of managing their estates by delegating the work and costs to their tenants. This tended to make landowners depend on the expertise and resources of tenants, which in turn gave the tenants significant bargaining power. This dynamic relationship is traced in the jurists' regulation of farm tenancy, as the jurists adapted Roman law to the economic realities of the Roman empire.
Investment, Profit, and Tenancy will be of interest to classicists as well as to scholars of preindustrial comparative economics.
Dennis P. Kehoe is Professor of Classical Studies, Tulane University.
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Power, Pleasure, and Profit
Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
David Wootton
Harvard University Press, 2018

A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success.

Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.

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Power, Profit and Prestige
A History of American Imperial Expansion
Philip S. Golub
Pluto Press, 2010

Power, Profit and Prestige applies incisive historical and sociological analysis to make sense of the United States’ post-Cold War imperial behaviour.

Philip Golub studies imperial identity formation and shows how an embedded culture of force and expansion has shaped American foreign policy. He argues that the US logic of world power and deeply rooted assumptions about American primacy inhibits democratic transformation at domestic and international levels. This resistance to change may lead the US empire into a crisis of its own making.

This enlightening book will be particularly useful to students of history and international relations as they explore a world where America is no longer able to set the global agenda.

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The Profit of the Earth
The Global Seeds of American Agriculture
Courtney Fullilove
University of Chicago Press, 2017
While there is enormous public interest in biodiversity, food sourcing, and sustainable agriculture, romantic attachments to heirloom seeds and family farms have provoked misleading fantasies of an unrecoverable agrarian past. The reality, as Courtney Fullilove shows, is that seeds are inherently political objects transformed by the ways they are gathered, preserved, distributed, regenerated, and improved. In The Profit of the Earth, Fullilove unearths the history of American agricultural development and of seeds as tools and talismans put in its service.
 
Organized into three thematic parts, The Profit of the Earth is a narrative history of the collection, circulation, and preservation of seeds. Fullilove begins with the political economy of agricultural improvement, recovering the efforts of the US Patent Office and the nascent US Department of Agriculture to import seeds and cuttings for free distribution to American farmers. She then turns to immigrant agricultural knowledge, exploring how public and private institutions attempting to boost midwestern wheat yields drew on the resources of willing and unwilling settlers. Last, she explores the impact of these cereal monocultures on biocultural diversity, chronicling a fin-de-siècle Ohio pharmacist’s attempt to source Purple Coneflower from the diminishing prairie. Through these captivating narratives of improvisation, appropriation, and loss, Fullilove explores contradictions between ideologies of property rights and common use that persist in national and international development—ultimately challenging readers to rethink fantasies of global agriculture’s past and future.
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Profits and Morality
Edited by Robin Cowan and Mario J. Rizzo
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Are profits morally justifiable? While neoclassical economists have traditionally endorsed the pursuit of profits, many moral philosophers have challenged profit making on a variety of ethical grounds. Through the lenses of economics, philosophy, and law, these six essays explore the morality of profits from libertarian, utilitarian, and consequentialist perspectives.

Presenting arguments for and against the morality of profit making, the contributors examine the nature of profits and which ethical theories can support them. Two essays address how profits are made: one explores entrepreneurship as a legitimate source of profit, while another argues that recent advances in welfare economics weaken the case for the morality of profits. The other chapters focus on ethical theory, covering the right to profits from economic rent; the morality of how profits are used—those directed toward library or university endowments, for example, are considered morally acceptable—and whether or not profits are deserved.
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Shared Capitalism at Work
Employee Ownership, Profit and Gain Sharing, and Broad-Based Stock Options
Edited by Douglas L. Kruse, Richard B. Freeman, and Joseph R. Blasi
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The historical relationship between capital and labor has evolved in the past few decades. One particularly noteworthy development is the rise of shared capitalism, a system in which workers have become partial owners of their firms and thus, in effect, both employees and stockholders. Profit sharing arrangements and gain-sharing bonuses, which tie compensation directly to a firm’s performance, also reflect this new attitude toward labor.

Shared Capitalism at Work
analyzes the effects of this trend on workers and firms. The contributors focus on four main areas: the fraction of firms that participate in shared capitalism programs in the United States and abroad, the factors that enable these firms to overcome classic free rider and risk problems, the effect of shared capitalism on firm performance, and the impact of shared capitalism on worker well-being. This volume provides essential studies for understanding the increasingly important role of shared capitalism in the modern workplace.

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Soccer's Neoliberal Pitch
The Sport's Power, Profit, and Discursive Politics
John M. Sloop
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A powerful cultural critique of soccer’s public rhetoric
 
American sports agnostics might raise an eyebrow at the idea that soccer represents a staging ground for cultural, social, and political possibility. It is just another game, after all, in a society where mass-audience spectator sports largely avoid any political stance other than a generic, corporate-friendly patriotism. But John M. Sloop picks up on the work of Laurent Dubois and others to see in American soccer—a sport that has achieved immense participation and popularity despite its struggle to establish major league status—a game that permits surprisingly diverse modes of thinking about national identity because of its marginality.

As a rhetorician who draws on both critical theory and culture, Sloop seeks to read soccer as the game intersects with gender, race, sexuality, and class. The result of this engagement is a sense of both enormous possibility and real constraint. If American soccer offers more possibility because of its marginality, looking at how those possibilities are constrained can provide valuable insights into neoliberal logics of power, profit, politics, and selfhood.

In Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch, Sloop analyzes a host of soccer-adjacent phenomena: the equal pay dispute between the US women’s national team and the US Soccer Federation, the significance of hooligan literature, the introduction of English soccer to American TV audiences, the strange invisibility of the Mexican soccer league despite its consistent high TV ratings, and the reading of US national teams as “underdogs” despite the nation’s quasi-imperial dominance of the Western hemisphere. An invaluable addition to a growing bookshelf on soccer titles, Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch serves as a model for critical cultural work with sports, with appeal to not only sports studies, but cultural studies, communication, and even gender studies classrooms.
 
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Speaking of Profit
Bao Shichen and Reform in Nineteenth-Century China
William T. Rowe
Harvard University Press

In the first half of the nineteenth century the Qing Empire faced a crisis. It was broadly perceived both inside and outside of government that the “prosperous age” of the eighteenth century was over. Bureaucratic corruption and malaise, population pressure and food shortages, ecological and infrastructural decay, domestic and frontier rebellion, adverse balances of trade, and, eventually, a previously inconceivable foreign threat from the West seemed to present hopelessly daunting challenges.

This study uses the literati reformer Bao Shichen as a prism to understand contemporary perceptions of and proposed solutions to this general crisis. Though Bao only briefly and inconsequentially served in office himself, he was widely recognized as an expert on each of these matters, and his advice was regularly sought by reform-minded administrators. From examination of his thought on bureaucratic and fiscal restructuring, agricultural improvement, the grain tribute administration, the salt monopoly, monetary policy, and foreign relations, Bao emerges as a consistent advocate of the hard-nosed pursuit of material “profit,” in the interests not only of the rural populace but also of the Chinese state and nation, anticipating the arguments of “self-strengthening” reformers later in the century.

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Sport and the Neoliberal University
Profit, Politics, and Pedagogy
King-White, Ryan
Rutgers University Press, 2018
College students are now regarded as consumers, not students, and nowhere is the growth and exploitation of the university more obvious than in the realm of college sports, where the evidence is in the stadiums built with corporate money, and the crowded sporting events sponsored by large conglomerates. 

The contributors to Sport and the Neoliberal University examine how intercollegiate athletics became a contested terrain of public/private interests. They look at college sports from economic, social, legal, and cultural perspectives to cut through popular mythologies regarding intercollegiate athletics and to advocate for increased clarity about what is going on at a variety of campuses with regard to athletics. Focusing on current issues, including the NCAA, Title IX, recruitment of high school athletes, and the Penn State scandal, among others, Sport and the Neoliberal University shows the different ways institutions, individuals, and corporations are interacting with university athletics in ways that are profoundly shaped by neoliberal ideologies.  
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The Terrorism News Beat
Professionalism, Profit, and the Press
Aaron M. Hoffman
University of Michigan Press
Critics of terrorism news coverage often describe it as a sensationalized and intimidating area of reporting. However, this characterization offers a misleading guide to the coverage of terrorist threats and attacks, counterterrorism, and community responses to terrorism that appears in U.S. newspapers. Counterterrorism—not terrorist threats or attacks—is the most reported on subject in newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Rather than focusing on accounts of terrorist attacks, militarized counterterrorism, or counterterrorism failures, journalists more often cover counterterrorism successes, criminal justice, and diplomatic or community responses to terrorism. 

The Terrorism News Beat engages thinking about terrorism and the news media from the fields of political science, communication, criminology, economics, and sociology using multimethod research involving more than 2,500 newspaper articles published between 1997 and 2018. Chapters analyze the terrorism news beat’s subject matter, language, and coverage of the Oklahoma City Bombing, Olympic Park bombing, 9/11 attacks, DC Sniper case, and Dallas Police shooting. When it comes to language use, Hoffman finds that rather than giving into the temptation to convey the news in lurid detail, journalists are minimalists. The language used to depict events on the terrorism beat is typically moderate and extreme words like “torture” appear only as necessary. The Terrorism News Beat shows that contrary to claims of sensationalism, the tone of terrorism coverage becomes even more sober during terrorism crises than it is during non-crisis periods and meets journalistic standards for quality.
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Tribute and Profit
Sino-Siamese Trade, 1652-1853
Sarasin Viraphol
Harvard University Press, 1977


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