Among the most serious challenges facing health systems in lower and middle income countries is establishing efficient, fair, and sustainable financing mechanisms that offer universal protection. Lack of financial protection forces families to suffer the burden not only of illness but also of economic ruin and impoverishment. In Latin America, financial protection for health continues to be segmented and fragmented; health is mainly financed through out-of-pocket payments.

Financing Health in Latin America presents new and important insight into the crucial issue of financial protection in health systems. The book analyzes the level and determinants of catastrophic health expenditures among households in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Peru, applying both descriptive and econometric analyses. The results demonstrate that out-of-pocket health spending is pushing large segments of the population into impoverishment and that the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population are most at risk of financial catastrophe. This work is a product of the collaboration between more than 25 researchers and 18 institutions associated with the Research for Health Financing in Latin America and the Caribbean Network, with support from the International Development Research Centre of Canada.

An insightful, wide-ranging analysis of the economic hurdles facing America’s higher education system.

The US higher education sector faces numerous economic challenges, including the stagnating number of college-age domestic students, geographic mismatch between population growth and the location of colleges and universities, financial pressures, including cutbacks in government support, growing student debt burdens, sticker prices that deter prospective applicants, and the risk of low capital market returns on endowment portfolios. This volume analyzes the responses of students, families, and the financial managers of higher education institutions to these challenges. It presents new insights into the substantial disparities in the financial structure of, and the financial challenges facing, different types of institutions. The volume draws together contributions from financial economics, public finance, and industrial organization, as well as the economics of education.

Conventional wisdom holds that programs for the poor are vulnerable to instability and retrenchment. Medicaid, however, has grown into the nation’s largest intergovernmental grant program, accounting for nearly half of all federal funding to state and local governments. Medicaid’s generous open-ended federal matching grants have given governors a powerful incentive to mobilize on behalf of its maintenance and expansion, using methods ranging from lobbying and negotiation to creative financing mechanisms and waivers to maximize federal financial assistance. Perceiving federal retrenchment efforts as a threat to states’ finances, governors, through the powerful National Governors’ Association, have repeatedly worked together in bipartisan fashion to defend the program against cutbacks.

Financing Medicaidengagingly intertwines theory, historical narrative, and case studies, drawing on sources including archival materials from the National Governors’ Association and gubernatorial and presidential libraries, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data, the Congressional Record, and interviews.

A powerful debut and a lyric coming-of-age narrative that interrogates the myths we carry

In Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles. As he leaves home and forges toward California, the speaker in these poems considers how we learn and mislearn ideas about manhood, confronts the aftershocks of childhood sexual abuse, and questions the human need for belonging. By embracing the touchstones of youth—movies, lore, graphic novels—these poems assert the speaker’s defiant right to childhood even amid damage.

As the collection arcs toward adulthood, the speaker embodies a vision of healing that refuses easy binaries and embraces the joys of intimacy. Across each of its five acts, Perry Janes’s debut collection is driven by an interest troubling our creation myths, asking who built them, why we carry them, and how we might set them aside.

Approaching the study of literature as a unique form of the philosophy of language and mind—as a study of how we produce nonsense and imagine it as sense—this is a book about our human ways of making and losing meaning. Brett Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship.

The book itself is framed by the literary and philosophical challenges presented by Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. With reference to these books and the problems of interpretation and meaning that they pose, Bourbon makes a case for the fundamental philosophical character of the study of literature, and for its dependence on theories of meaning disguised as theories of mind. Within this context, he provides original accounts of what sentences, fictions, non-fictions, and poems are; produces a new account of the logical form of fiction and of the limits of interpretation that follow from it; and delineates a new and fruitful domain of inquiry in which literature, philosophy, and science intersect.

An examination of sculpture and authorship in eighteenth-century Quito that documents Caspicara as a participant in the innovative artistic production of the city’s workshops and its widespread commerce of polychrome sculptures.

Who is Caspicara? Nothing is known of Caspicara’s life, and not a single sculpture has been documented as his work. Yet traditional histories laud him as a prolific Indigenous sculptor in eighteenth-century Quito who created exquisite polychrome figures and became a national artistic icon. Drawing on extensive archival, historical, and object research, Susan Verdi Webster peels away layers of historiographical fabrication to reveal what we do and do not know about Caspicara and his work.

Rather than being a solitary master, Caspicara collaborated with other, largely Indigenous artists in Quito’s protoindustrial workshops, manufacturing sculptures now credited to him alone. The high quality of Quito sculptures produced by anonymous artists turned the city into a hub of wide-ranging commerce in religious icons. The art world and post-independence Ecuadorians have lionized the one named sculptor, Caspicara, according to the Western model of the artist-genius, amplifying the market for works bearing his name and creating a national hero on par with European masters. Lost in this process were the artists themselves. Webster returns to their world, detailing their methods and labor and, for the first time, documenting a sculpture made by Caspicara.

“[A] spirited and deeply researched project…. [Benkemoun’s] affection for her subject is infectious. This book gives a satisfying treatment to a woman who has been confined for decades to a Cubist’s limited interpretation.” — Joumana Khatib, The New York Times

Merging biography, memoir, and cultural history, this compelling book, a bestseller in France, traces the life of Dora Maar through a serendipitous encounter with the artist’s address book.

In search of a replacement for his lost Hermès agenda, Brigitte Benkemoun’s husband buys a vintage diary on eBay. When it arrives, she opens it and finds inside private notes dating back to 1951—twenty pages of phone numbers and addresses for Balthus, Brassaï, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, Leonor Fini, Jacqueline Lamba, and other artistic luminaries of the European avant-garde.

After realizing that the address book belonged to Dora Maar—Picasso’s famous “Weeping Woman” and a brilliant artist in her own right—Benkemoun embarks on a two-year voyage of discovery to learn more about this provocative, passionate, and enigmatic woman, and the role that each of these figures played in her life.

Longlisted for the prestigious literary award Prix Renaudot, Finding Dora Maar is a fascinating and breathtaking portrait of the artist.

Finding Italy explores the journey of the Romans’ ancestor Aeneas and his fellow Trojans from their old home, Troy, to their new country, Italy, narrated in Vergil’s epic poem Aeneid. K. F. B. Fletcher argues that a main narrative theme is patriotism, specifically the problem of how one comes to love one’s new country. The various directions Aeneas receives throughout the first half of the poem are meant to create this love, explaining both to Aeneas and to Vergil’s readers how they should respond to the new, unified Italy synonymous with Rome. These directions come from the gods, or from people close to Aeneas who have divine connections, and they all serve to instill an emotional connection to the land, creating a mental image of Italy that tells him far more about his destination than merely its location, and ultimately making him fall in love with Italy enough to fight for it soon after his arrival. The poem thus dramatizes the birth of nationalism, as Italy is only a concept to Aeneas throughout his trip; these directions do not describe Italy as it is at the time of Aeneas’ journey, but as an ideal to be realized by Aeneas and his descendants, reaching its final, perfect form under Augustus Caesar.

Finding Italy provides a very detailed reading of the directions Aeneas receives by situating them within their relevant contexts: ancient geography, Greek colonization narratives, prophecy, and ancient views of wandering. Vergil draws on all of these concepts to craft instructions that create in Aeneas an attachment to Italy before he ever arrives, a process that dramatizes a key emotional problem in the late first century BCE in the wake of the Social and Civil Wars: how to balance the love of one's modest birthplace with the love of Rome, the larger city that now encompasses it.

Environment, craft, and meaning in the work of Appalachian instrument makers.

How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appalachia? How does the sonic search for musical tone change relationships with trees and forests? Following three craftspeople in the mountain forests of Appalachia through their processes of making instruments, Finding the Singing Spruce considers the meanings of work, place, and creative expression in drawing music from wood.

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth explores the complexities and contradictions of instrument-making labor, which is deeply rooted in mountain forests and expressive traditions but also engaged with global processes of production and consumption. Using historical narratives and sensory ethnography, among other approaches, he finds that the craft of lutherie speaks to the past, present, and future of the region’s work and nature.

An innovative study of how a prescient poet imagined ecology and embodiment
 
Larry Eigner (1927–1996) wrote thousands of poems in his lifetime, despite profound physical limitations caused by cerebral palsy. Using only the thumb and index finger of his right hand, Eigner generated a torrent of urgent and rich language, participating in vital correspondences as well as publishing widely in literary magazines and poetry journals.
 
While Eigner wrote before the emergence of ecopoetics, his poetry reflected a serious engagement with scientific writing and media, including Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring. Eigner was writing about environmental disasters and climate change long before such concerns took on a moral incumbency. Similarly, Eigner was ahead of his time in his exploration of disability. The field of disability studies has expanded rapidly in the new millennium. Eigner was not an overtly biographical poet, at least as far as his physical limitations were concerned, but his poetry spoke volumes on the idea of embodiment in all its forms.
 
Finding the Weight of Things: Larry Eigner’s Ecrippoetics is the first full-length study of Eigner’s poetry, covering his entire career from the beginning of his mature work in the 1950s to his last poems of the 1990s. George Hart charts where Eigner’s two central interests intersect, and how their interaction fueled his work as a poet-critic—one whose work has much to tell us about the ecology and embodiment of our futures. Hart sees Eigner’s overlapping concerns for disability, ecology, and poetic form as inextricable, and coins the phrase ecrippoetics here to describe Eigner’s prescient vision.

In his 1862 eulogy for Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflected that his friend “dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills, and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea.” Finding Thoreau traces the reception of Thoreau's work from the time of his death to his ascendancy as an environmental icon in the 1970s, revealing insights into American culture's conception of the environment.

Moving decade by decade through this period, Richard W. Judd unveils a cache of commentary from intellectuals, critics, and journalists to demonstrate the dynamism in the idea of nature, as Americans defined and redefined the organic world around them amidst shifting intellectual, creative, and political forces. This book tells the captivating story of one writer's rise from obscurity to fame through a cultural reappraisal of the work he left behind.

“Ambitious, fast-paced, fact-filled, and accessible.”
—Science

“A compelling case for why achieving the right balance of time with our families…is vital to the economic success and prosperity of our nation… A must read.”
—Maria Shriver

From backyard barbecues to the blogosphere, working men and women across the country are raising the same worried question: How can I get ahead at my job while making sure my family doesn’t suffer? A visionary economist who has looked at the numbers behind the personal stories, Heather Boushey argues that resolving the work–life conflict is as vital for us personally as it is essential economically. Finding Time offers ingenious ways to help us carve out the time we need, while showing businesses that more flexible policies can actually make them more productive.

“Supply and demand curves are suddenly ‘sexy’ when Boushey uses them to prove that paid sick days, paid family leave, flexible work schedules, and affordable child care aren’t just cutesy women’s issues for families to figure out ‘on their own time and dime,’ but economic issues affecting the country at large.”
—Vogue

“Boushey argues that better family-leave policies should not only improve the lives of struggling families but also boost workers’ productivity and reduce firms’ costs.”
—The Economist

Melting sea ice and rumbling volcanoes. Sled dogs racing through unnamed valleys.

These were the images that came to mind when Molly Rettig moved to Fairbanks, Alaska to work as a reporter at the local newspaper. An avid environmentalist, she couldn’t wait to explore the vast, untamed spaces that had largely been paved over on the east coast. But when her 72-year-old neighbor, Clutch, invites her on a tour of his gold mine—an 800-foot tunnel blasted into the side of his house–she begins to question many of her ideas about Alaska, and about herself. 

In Finding True North, Rettig takes us on a gripping journey through Alaska's past that brings alive the state's magnificent country and its quirky, larger-than-life characters. She meets a trapper who harvests all she needs from the land, a bush pilot who taught himself how to fly, and an archaeologist who helped build an oil pipeline through pristine wilderness. While she learns how airplanes, mines, and oil fields have paved the way for newcomers like herself, she also stumbles upon a bigger question: what has this quest for Alaska’s natural resources actually cost, and how much more is at stake?

This is a book about all the ways wild places teach us about ourselves. Rettig writes both playfully and honestly about how one place can be many things to many people—and how all of it can be true.

Longlisted for the 2025 Nigeria Prize for Literature

A 2024 Foreword INDIES Finalist

Set in a fictional town, at a fictional school, Linda N. Masi’s debut novel, Fine Dreams, rewrites myth and history. Framed by a ghost’s first-person narrative, the book centers on four young friends, the stars of their school’s track team. While studying for exams, they are kidnapped and taken to a terrorist encampment. Two are claimed as “wives” by their captors, one is forced to wear a suicide vest, and each is subjected to appalling violence and terror. While their stories resonate with a widely publicized 2014 abduction, these four young women could have been taken in any of the many incidents that have plagued the Nigerian people for years.

Even though they are abducted and abused by men in power and forced to survive in a dark place like Persephone, Masi’s protagonists offer new endings for Persephone’s story. In Masi’s telling, these resilient young women recover their dreams and hopes to live in daylight once again. No matter where they travel or where they stay, they gain self-determination and reclaim their dreams.

Ray Didinger opens his lively memoir Finished Business with the Philadelphia Eagles’ upset win in Super Bowl LII. When the Eagles finally hoist the Lombardi Trophy, Didinger does his best to straddle the emotions of a working reporter and a long-suffering Philly fan. His ability to do that is why he has built up such a loyal following.

Didinger began following the Eagles as a kid, hanging out in his grandfather’s bar in Southwest Philadelphia. He spent his summers at the team's training camp in Hershey. It was there he met his idol, flanker Tommy McDonald. He would later write a play, Tommy and Me, about their friendship and his efforts to see McDonald enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Didinger has been covering the Eagles as a newspaper columnist or TV analyst since 1970. Over the years, he wrote sports for the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Philadelphia Daily News. He later produced Emmy Award–winning documentaries for NFL Films before transitioning to sports talk radio and TV analysis.

In five decades, across multiple media platforms, he has interviewed everyone from Hank Aaron, Wayne Gretzky, Muhammad Ali, Julius Erving, Jack Nicklaus, to Mike Schmidt, as well as writing film scripts for Hollywood stars such as Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin. He went to the White House with the U.S. Olympic team and even explored the bizarre world of professional wrestling.

His stories, told in his familiar, breezy style, capture his enthusiasm for sports and his affection for the fans who still mourn the pennant that eluded the Phillies in 1964. Didinger has become synonymous with Philadelphia sports, and his memoir is as passionate as an autumn Sunday at Lincoln Financial Field.

In 2005 Michael Ignatieff left his life as a writer and professor at Harvard University to enter the combative world of politics back home in Canada. By 2008, he was leader of the country’s Liberal Party and poised—should the governing Conservatives falter—to become Canada’s next Prime Minister. It never happened. Today, after a bruising electoral defeat, Ignatieff is back where he started, writing and teaching what he learned.

What did he take away from this crash course in political success and failure? Did a life of thinking about politics prepare him for the real thing? How did he handle it when his own history as a longtime expatriate became a major political issue? Are cynics right to despair about democratic politics? Are idealists right to hope? Ignatieff blends reflection and analysis to portray today’s democratic politics as ruthless, unpredictable, unforgiving, and hyper-adversarial.

Rough as it is, Ignatieff argues, democratic politics is a crucible for compromise, and many of the apparent vices of political life, from inconsistency to the fake smile, follow from the necessity of bridging differences in a pluralist society. A compelling account of modern politics as it really is, the book is also a celebration of the political life in all its wild, exuberant variety.

Walter Tschinkel's passion for fire ants has been stoked by over thirty years of exploring the rhythm and drama of Solenopsis invicta's biology. Since South American fire ants arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in the 1940s, they have spread to become one of the most reviled pests in the Sunbelt.

In Fire Ants Tschinkel provides not just an encyclopedic overview of S. invicta--how they found colonies, construct and defend their nests, forage and distribute food, struggle among themselves for primacy, and even relocate entire colonies--but a lively account of how research is done, how science establishes facts, and the pleasures and problems of a scientific career.

Between chapters detailed enough for experts but readily accessible to any educated reader, "interludes" provide vivid verbal images of the world of fire ants and the people who study them. Early chapters describe the several failed, and heavily politically influenced, eradication campaigns, and later ones the remarkable spread of S. invicta's "polygyne" form, in which nests harbor multiple queens and colonies reproduce by "budding." The reader learns much about ants, the practice of science, and humans' role in the fire ant's North American success.

From Buddy Holly and the Crickets to the Flatlanders, Terry Allen, and Natalie Maines, Lubbock, Texas, has produced songwriters, musicians, and artists as prolifically as cotton, conservatives, and windstorms. While nobody questions where the conservatives come from in a city that a recent nonpartisan study ranked as America's second most conservative, many people wonder why Lubbock is such fertile ground for creative spirits who want to expand the boundaries of thought in music and art. Is it just that "there's nothing else to do," as some have suggested, or is there something in the character of Lubbock that encourages creativity as much as conservatism?

In this book, Christopher Oglesby interviews twenty-five musicians and artists with ties to Lubbock to discover what it is about this community and West Texas in general that feeds the creative spirit. Their answers are revealing. Some speak of the need to rebel against conventional attitudes that threaten to limit their horizons. Others, such as Joe Ely, praise the freedom of mind they find on the wide open plains. "There is this empty desolation that I could fill if I picked up a pen and wrote, or picked up a guitar and played," he says. Still others express skepticism about how much Lubbock as a place contributes to the success of its musicians. Jimmie Dale Gilmore says, "I think there is a large measure of this Lubbock phenomenon that is just luck, and that is the part that you cannot explain."

As a whole, the interviews create a portrait not only of Lubbock's musicians and artists, but also of the musical community that has sustained them, including venues such as the legendary Cotton Club and the original Stubb's Barbecue. This kaleidoscopic portrait of the West Texas music scene gets to the heart of what it takes to create art in an isolated, often inhospitable environment. As Oglesby says, "Necessity is the mother of creation. Lubbock needed beauty, poetry, humor, and it needed to get up and shake its communal ass a bit or go mad from loneliness and boredom; so Lubbock created the amazing likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Joe Ely."

In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience.

The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals, including Abraham Cahan, Mikhail Zametkin, and Chaim Zhitlovsky. Socialist leaders quickly found Yiddish essential to convey their message to the Jewish immigrant community, and they developed a remarkable public culture through lectures and social events, workers’ education societies, Yiddish schools, and a press that found its strongest voice in the mass-circulation newspaper Forverts.

Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around.

The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.

In John B. Wright’s debut environmental mystery, Matt Solberg is charged with discovering who is lighting fires in the forests that surround Missoula, Montana. A geographer with a deep personal need to bring people out of danger, Matt leads a search and rescue team whose job is to head directly into the mouth of hell, hiking into blazing backcountry to find missing residents. Matt and his team not only rely on their hard-won knowledge of Montana’s wild landscape, but also on Matt’s mentor, Dr. Bill Knight, a fire ecologist who understands the burning beast better than anyone.
 
When a suspicious fire destroys the mansion of a movie star, Matt must hike in to find his missing daughter and save her from the chaos. Then fires begin to explode everywhere as climate change drives temperatures over 100 degrees and rain refuses to fall, threatening thousands of homes. Who is setting these fires? Is it the Montana Tree Monkeys, an eco-radical group determined to scare off the newcomers? Or is it a retired smokejumper with an axe to grind about the encroaching mansions? Could it be Paladin, a shadowy figure leaving strange clues around the state? It’s Matt’s mission to find answers to these questions during a summer of heat, smoke, and unimaginable loss. Weaving together gripping drama and intriguing fire science, Fire Scars reveals the physical and psychological wounds we all carry—and the power we have to overcome.
 
 

Today pentecostalism claims nearly 500 million followers worldwide. An early stronghold was the American South, where believers spoke in unknown tongues, worshipped in free-form churches, and broke down social barriers that had long divided traditional Protestants. Thriving denominations made their headquarters in the region and gathered white and black converts from the Texas plains to the Carolina low country.

Pentecostalism was, in fact, a religious import. It came to the South following the post-Civil War holiness revival, a northern-born crusade that emphasized sinlessness and religious empowerment. Adherents formed new churches in the Jim Crow South and held unconventional beliefs about authority, power, race, and gender. Such views set them at odds with other Christians in the region. By 1900 nearly all southern holiness folk abandoned mainline churches and adopted a pessimistic, apocalyptic theology. Signs of the last days, they thought, were all around them.

The faith first took root among anonymous religious zealots. It later claimed southern celebrities and innovators like televangelists Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, T. D. Jakes, and John Hagee; rock-and-roll icons Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard; and, more recently, conservative political leaders such as John Ashcroft.

With the growth of southern pentecostal denominations and the rise of new, affluent congregants, the movement moved cautiously into the evangelical mainstream. By the 1980s the once-apolitical faith looked entirely different. Many still watched and waited for spectacular signs of the end. Yet a growing number did so as active political conservatives.

An action-packed crime novel starring Parker, the heister starring in the forthcoming Shane Black film Play Dirty!

Richard Stark's Parker novels are the hardest of hard-boiled, classic crime novels where the heists are huge, the body counts are high, and the bad guys usually win. 

The Parker novels have been a huge influence on countless writers and filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King, George Pelecanos, Colson Whitehead, Lucy Sante, John Banville, and many more. Their stripped-down language and hard-as-nails amorality create an unforgettable world where the next score could be the big one, but your next mistake could also be your last. There's nothing else like them.

Between Parker’s 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990s, the whole world of crime changed. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst of all, money had gone digital—the days of cash-stuffed payroll trucks were long gone.
 
But cash isn’t everything: Firebreak takes Parker to a palatial Montana “hunting lodge” where a dot-com millionaire hides a gallery of stolen old masters—which will fetch Parker a pretty penny if his team can just get it past the mansion’s tight security. The forests of Montana are an inhospitable place for a heister when well-laid plans fall apart, but no matter how untamed the wilderness, Parker’s guaranteed to be the most dangerous predator around.

Of all the horrors of the last century—perhaps the bloodiest century of the past millennium—ethnic cleansing ranks among the worst. The term burst forth in public discourse in the spring of 1992 as a way to describe Serbian attacks on the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but as this landmark book attests, ethnic cleansing is neither new nor likely to cease in our time.

Norman Naimark, distinguished historian of Europe and Russia, provides an insightful history of ethnic cleansing and its relationship to genocide and population transfer. Focusing on five specific cases, he exposes the myths about ethnic cleansing, in particular the commonly held belief that the practice stems from ancient hatreds. Naimark shows that this face of genocide had its roots in the European nationalism of the late nineteenth century but found its most virulent expression in the twentieth century as modern states and societies began to organize themselves by ethnic criteria. The most obvious example, and one of Naimark’s cases, is the Nazi attack on the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Naimark also discusses the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia during the Greco–Turkish War of 1921–22; the Soviet forced deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars in 1944; the Polish and Czechoslovak expulsion of the Germans in 1944–47; and Bosnia and Kosovo.

In this harrowing history, Naimark reveals how over and over, as racism and religious hatreds picked up an ethnic name tag, war provided a cover for violence and mayhem, an evil tapestry behind which nations acted with impunity.

Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history, from the sixth century BCE to the present day.

Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town it was—more like Calcutta or the Costa del Sol?—and what it can tell us about “ordinary” life there. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, Beard offers us the big picture even as she takes us close enough to the past to smell the bad breath and see the intestinal tapeworms of the inhabitants of the lost city. She resurrects the Temple of Isis as a testament to ancient multiculturalism. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica.

Recently, Pompeii has been a focus of pleasure and loss: from Pink Floyd’s memorable rock concert to Primo Levi’s elegy on the victims. But Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem. This book shows us how much more and less there is to Pompeii than a city frozen in time as it went about its business on 24 August 79.

Fireworks are synonymous with celebration in the twenty-first century. But pyrotechnics—in the form of rockets, crackers, wheels, and bombs—have exploded in sparks and noise to delight audiences in Europe ever since the Renaissance. Here, Simon Werrett shows that, far from being only a means of entertainment, fireworks helped foster advances in natural philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and many other branches of the sciences.

Fireworks brings to vibrant life the many artful practices of pyrotechnicians, as well as the elegant compositions of the architects, poets, painters, and musicians they inspired. At the same time, it uncovers the dynamic relationships that developed between the many artists and scientists who produced pyrotechnics. In so doing, the book demonstrates the critical role that pyrotechnics played in the development of physics, astronomy, chemistry and physiology, meteorology, and electrical science. Richly illustrated and drawing on a wide range of new sources, Fireworks takes readers back to a world where pyrotechnics were both divine and magical and reveals for the first time their vital contribution to the modernization of European ideas.

A Nobel Prize winner's most important, groundbreaking work, collected in one volume

The Firm, the Market, and the Law gathers the most important and lasting works by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991 for his groundbreaking work on the significance of transaction costs and property rights, Coase continually urged his fellow economists to examine the real-world foundations on which their theories rest. This volume collects some of his classic articles probing those very foundations. "The Nature of the Firm" (1937) introduced the then-revolutionary concept of transaction costs into economic theory. "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960) further developed this concept, emphasizing the effect of the law on the working of the economic system. The remaining papers and new introductory essay clarify and extend Coarse's arguments and address his critics.
 

Conservative opponents of LGBT equality in the United States often couch their opposition in claims of free speech, free association, and religious liberty. It is no surprise, then, that many LGBT supporters equate First Amendment arguments with resistance to their cause. The First Amendment and LGBT Equality tells another story, about the First Amendment’s crucial yet largely forgotten role in the first few decades of the gay rights movement.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, when many courts were still openly hostile to sexual minorities, they nonetheless recognized the freedom of gay and lesbian people to express themselves and associate with one another. Successful First Amendment cases protected LGBT publications and organizations, protests and parades, and individuals’ right to come out. The amendment was wielded by the other side only after it had laid the groundwork for major LGBT equality victories.

Carlos A. Ball illuminates the full trajectory of this legal and cultural history. He argues that, in accommodating those who dissent from LGBT equality on grounds of conscience, it is neither necessary nor appropriate to depart from the established ways in which American antidiscrimination law has, for decades, accommodated equality dissenters. But he also argues that as progressives fight the First Amendment claims of religious conservatives and other LGBT opponents today, they should take care not to erode the very safeguards of liberty that allowed LGBT rights to exist in the first place.

In determining the news that’s fit to print, U.S. courts have traditionally declined to second-guess professional journalists. But in an age when news, entertainment, and new media outlets are constantly pushing the envelope of acceptable content, the consensus over press freedoms is eroding. The First Amendment Bubble examines how unbridled media are endangering the constitutional privileges journalists gained in the past century.

For decades, judges have generally affirmed that individual privacy takes a back seat to the public’s right to know. But the growth of the Internet and the resulting market pressures on traditional journalism have made it ever harder to distinguish public from private, news from titillation, journalists from provocateurs. Is a television program that outs criminals or a website that posts salacious videos entitled to First Amendment protections based on newsworthiness? U.S. courts are increasingly inclined to answer no, demonstrating new resolve in protecting individuals from invasive media scrutiny and enforcing their own sense of the proper boundaries of news.

This judicial backlash now extends beyond ethically dubious purveyors of infotainment, to mainstream journalists, who are seeing their ability to investigate crime and corruption curtailed. Yet many—heedless of judicial demands for accountability—continue to push for ever broader constitutional privileges. In so doing, Amy Gajda warns, they may be creating a First Amendment bubble that will rupture in the courts, with disastrous consequences for conventional news.

Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the individualism, rebelliousness, anti-authoritarianism, and the spirit of nonconformity within all of us. In The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance, Steven Shiffrin argues that romantics like Emerson have more to teach us about freedom of speech and democracy than does Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: if the first amendment is to have a single organizing symbol, let it be the image of the dissenter. A major purpose of the first amendment, says Shiffrin, is to protect those who would break out of orthodox forms.

Although the Emersonian ideal of freedom of speech has deep roots in the nation's culture, it has been subtly denigrated in recent first-amendment theory and seriously abused in practice. Yet Shiffrin believes that the first amendment can provide a sensible accommodation among a host of conflicting values in a changing world, and can also stand as a national symbol—in short, it can allow for both social construction and romance.

Blending insights from literature, philosophy, political science, history, rhetoric, and law, Shiffrin maintains that the romantic tradition sheds light not only on a range of free-speech issues, such as libel, flag burning, and the commercialization of the mass media, but also on subjects of broader theoretical controversy, including liberalism, pragmatism, and the republican revival. In addition to its original approach to the law, this book brings new observations and fresh insights to its discussions of the role of the first amendment in American culture. It will interest a general audience as well as lawyers, journalists, and scholars in a variety of academic fields.

Addressing a host of hot-button issues, from the barring of Christian student groups and military recruiters from law schools and universities to churches’ immunity from civil rights legislation in hiring and firing ministers, Paul Horwitz proposes a radical reformation of First Amendment law. Arguing that rigidly doctrinal approaches can’t account for messy, real-world situations, he suggests that the courts loosen their reins and let those institutions with a stake in First Amendment freedoms do more of the work of enforcing them.

Universities, the press, libraries, churches, and various other institutions and associations are a fundamental part of the infrastructure of public discourse. Rather than subject them to ill-fitting, top-down rules and legal categories, courts should make them partners in shaping public discourse and First Amendment law, giving these institutions substantial autonomy to regulate their own affairs. Self-regulation and public criticism should be the key restraints on these institutions, not judicial fiat. Horwitz suggests that this approach would help the law enhance the contribution of our “First Amendment institutions” to social and political life. It would also move us toward a conception of the state as a participating member of our social framework, rather than a reigning and often overbearing sovereign.

First Amendment Institutions offers a new vantage point from which to evaluate ongoing debates over topics ranging from campaign finance reform to campus hate speech and affirmative action in higher education. This book promises to promote—and provoke—important new discussions about the shape and future of the First Amendment.

Hugh M. Hefner’s legacy of enduring free speech and free press values is embodied in the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards, established in 1979, which honor leading First Amendment scholars and advocates. Hefner also had a lifelong interest in film censorship issues and supported teaching about them at the University of Southern California for 20 years. His deep commitment to these values was confirmed when the author was granted unrestricted access to over 3,000 personal scrapbooks, which Hefner had kept in order to track free speech and press issues during his lifetime.
 
The format of the book is an homage to the in-depth conversational interviews Hefner pioneered as the editor and publisher of Playboy magazine. Stuart Brotman conducted in-person conversations with eight persons who in their lifetimes have come to represent a “greatest generation” of free speech and free press scholars and advocates. Notably, these conversations include:

Geoffrey R. Stone
Floyd Abrams
Nadine Strossen
Burt Neuborne
David D. Cole
Lucy A. Dalglish
Bob Corn-Revere
Rick Jewell

Organized alphabetically as a reference guide, this volume provides a biographical sketch of each architect's life, education, and professional career, and a list of known works and sources for further research. Many of these remarkable women have never before appeared in any other history, making The First American Women Architects a unique and invaluable reference for students and scholars interested in women's history and architecture. As an instructive record of the legacy of women in architectural history, this book will also serve as a stimulating indicator of the broadening potential for women and other minorities within the field of architecture.

“Essential reading.” —Erika Lee, author of The Making of Asian America

“A broadly thought-provoking book.” —Asian Review of Books

“Fascinating…[this book] indicates new avenues of research…[and] stands as a bellwether for shifting trajectories of analysis that invite micro-historical follow-up.” —H-Net Reviews

“[This book] offers an invaluable perspective… [it] not only intellectually satisfies the reader with a necessary and innovative view . . . but also makes us want to learn more about this essential and still insufficiently explored topic...will become a fundamental pillar within the discipline.” —Colonial Latin American Review

Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons monopolized trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians made the treacherous transpacific journey each year.

Diego Javier Luis chronicles this first sustained wave of Asian mobility to the Americas, shedding new light on the daily lives of those who disembarked at Acapulco. There, diverse ethnolinguistic populations officially became “chinos,” racialized as members of a single caste under colonial control. Luis shows how Asians resisted legal strictures, forging new connections across ethnic groups and continually adapting to adverse conditions.

Detailing an important era in the construction of race, The First Asians in the Americas vividly unfolds what it meant to be “chino” in the early modern Spanish empire and reveals the significance of colonial Latin America to Asian diasporic history.

Decades after the U.S. Supreme Court and certain governmental actions struck down racial segregation in the larger society, American prison administrators still boldly adhered to discriminatory practices. Not until 1975 did legislation prohibit racial segregation and discrimination in Texas prisons. However, vestiges of this practice endured behind prison walls. Charting the transformation from segregation to desegregation in Texas prisons—which resulted in Texas prisons becoming one of the most desegregated places in America—First Available Cell chronicles the pivotal steps in the process, including prison director George J. Beto's 1965 decision to allow inmates of different races to co-exist in the same prison setting, defying Southern norms.

The authors also clarify the significant impetus for change that emerged in 1972, when a Texas inmate filed a lawsuit alleging racial segregation and discrimination in the Texas Department of Corrections. Perhaps surprisingly, a multiracial group of prisoners sided with the TDC, fearing that desegregated housing would unleash racial violence. Members of the security staff also feared and predicted severe racial violence. Nearly two decades after the 1972 lawsuit, one vestige of segregation remained in place: the double cell. Revealing the aftermath of racial desegregation within that 9 x 5 foot space, First Available Cell tells the story of one of the greatest social experiments with racial desegregation in American history.

Examining the power of speculative fiction to reimagine historical accounts of the conquest of the Americas

The historical conquest of the Americas resides at the core of all first-contact narratives, which stage colonization and resistance in the generic guise of speculative fiction. Starting from this axiom, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period’s historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac Zimmer examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. First Contact thus poses a foundational question: Can we understand the conquest as an originary world-historical event without eclipsing the other cosmologies that existed, and continue to exist, within the contact zone? Can we decolonize the speculative imagination itself?

“The most significant contribution to rethinking the origins and course of the First Crusade for a generation.”
—Mark Whittow, Times Literary Supplement

“Filled with Byzantine intrigue, in every sense this book is important, compellingly revisionist and impressive. It refocuses the familiar western story through the eyes of the emperor of the east and fills in the missing piece of the puzzle of the Crusades.”
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography

“Highly readable…its presentation of political machinations, compromises, and betrayals seems utterly convincing.”
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“A dazzling book, perfectly combining deep scholarship and easy readability. The most important addition to Crusading literature since Steven Runciman.”
—John Julius Norwich, author of Byzantium

“Fluent and dramatic…Frankopan rightly places the Emperor Alexios at the heart of the First Crusade, skillfully adding a dimension frequently missing from our understanding of this seminal event.”
—Jonathan Phillips, author of Holy Warriors

In 1096, an expedition of extraordinary scale and ambition set off from western Europe on a mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Three years later, after a journey that saw acute hardship, the most severe dangers, and thousands of casualties, the knights of the First Crusade found themselves storming the fortifications and capturing the Holy City. Against all odds, the expedition had returned Jerusalem to Christian hands.

In this groundbreaking book, Peter Frankopan paints a vivid picture of this infamous confrontation between Christianity and Islam. Basing his account on long-ignored eastern sources, he gives a provocative and highly original explanation of the world-changing events that followed. The Vatican’s victory cemented papal power, while Constantinople, the heart of the still-vital Byzantine Empire, never recovered. Frankopan’s revolutionary work shows how the taking of Jerusalem set the stage for western Europe’s dominance and shaped the modern world.

    First, Do No Harm shows how health care professionals, with the best intentions of providing excellent, holistic health care, can nonetheless perpetuate violence against vulnerable patients. The essays investigate the need to rethink contemporary healthcare practices in ways that can bring the art and science of medicine back into sorely needed balance.
    These ground-breaking studies by noted scholars question commonly held assumptions in contemporary healthcare that underlie oppressive power dynamics and even violence for patients and their families. The contributors discuss such topics as women and violence, life-support technologies, and healthcare professionals’ own experiences as patients. First, Do No Harm opens the discourse for reaching new understandings, from reassessing the meaning of "quality of life" to questioning the appropriateness of the very language used by healthcare professionals. It will be welcomed by healthcare workers and by scholars in nursing, medicine, and the allied health sciences.

Standing guard around the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi, the ranks of a terracotta army bear silent witness to the vast power of the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty, who unified China in 221 BCE. Six thousand warriors and horses make up the army, while chariots, a military guard, and a command post complete the host. A new look at one of the most spectacular finds in the annals of archaeology, this book also considers the historical and archaeological context of the Terracotta Army, as well as the extensive research and excavation carried out since its discovery in 1974.

In richly illustrated chapters, experts in the field describe the Qin's rise and military conquest, the empire's ideology and practices, and the emperor's achievements and legacy. The authors examine the site itself, including new discoveries such as terracotta bureaucrats, acrobats, and strongmen, life-size bronze birds, hundreds of suits of stone armor, and terracotta warriors with colored faces preserved with new technology.

From explorations of the massive mausoleum and the rituals that surrounded it, to explanations of the actual manufacture of the Terracotta Army, the book offers a detailed and authoritative tour of one of ancient history's most eloquent memorials, with all it says of China's long and coherent cultural past--and future potential.

It’s a shame that so many very apt words fall out of common use over time, like “blobber-lippd,” which means having lips that are very thick, hanging down, or turning over; and “chounter”, which is to talk pertly, and sometimes angrily. Both words can be found in The First English Dictionary of Slang, originally published in 1699 as A New Dictionary of Terms, Ancient and Modern, of the Canting Crew by B. E. Gentleman. Though a number of early texts, beginning in the sixteenth century, codified forms of cant—the slang language of the criminal underworld—in word lists which appeared as appendices or parts of larger volumes, the dictionary of 1699 was the first work dedicated to slang words and their meanings. It aimed to educate the more polite classes in the language and, consequently, the methods of thieves and vagabonds, protecting the innocent from cant speakers and their activities.

            This dictionary is also the first that attempts to show the overlap and integration between canting words and common slang words. Refusing to distinguish between criminal vocabulary and the more ordinary everyday English of the period, it sets canting words side by side with terms used in domestic culture and those used by sailors and laborers. With such a democratic attitude toward words, this text is genuinely a modern dictionary, as well as the first attempt by dictionary makers to catalog the ever-changing world of English slang.

            Reproduced here with an introduction by John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, describing the history and culture of canting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the evolution of English slang, this is a fascinating volume for all who marvel at words and may wish to reclaim a few—say, to dabble in the parlance of a seventeenth-century sailor one day and that of a vagabond the next.