Migrant Teachers investigates an overlooked trend in U.S. schools today: the growing reliance on teachers trained overseas. This timely study maps the shifting landscape of American education, as federal mandates require K-12 schools to employ qualified teachers or risk funding cuts. Lora Bartlett asserts that a narrowly technocratic view of teachers as subject specialists has spurred some public school districts to look abroad. When these districts use overseas-trained teachers as transient, migrant labor, the teachers have little opportunity to connect well with their students, thereby reducing the effectiveness of their teaching.

Approximately 90,000 teachers from the Philippines, India, and other countries came to the United States between 2002 and 2008. These educators were primarily recruited by inner-city school districts that have traditionally struggled to attract teachers. From the point of view of school administrators, these are excellent employees. They are well educated, experienced, and able to teach in areas like math, science, and special education where teachers are in short supply.

Despite the additional recruitment of qualified teachers, American schools are failing to reap the possible benefits of the global labor market. Bartlett shows how the framing of these recruited teachers as stopgap, low-status workers cultivates a high-turnover, low-investment workforce that undermines the conditions needed for good teaching and learning. Bartlett calls on schools to provide better support to both overseas-trained teachers and their American counterparts. Migrant Teachers asks us to consider carefully how we define teachers' work, distribute the teacher workforce, and organize schools for effective teaching and learning.

This study is not written from the narrow perspective of “Who gets the oil?” It is a thoughtful probing of an issue—the ownership and control of the submerged soils of the marginal sea—the outcome of which may go far to determine the division of powers between states and nation under the American federal system.

American constitutional law, international law, theory of federalism, American politics, the machinations of pressure groups, use of propaganda techniques, and issues of social and economic policy—all these features of American government and many more are inherent in the controversy.

In 1947, in a precedent-making decision, the Supreme Court enunciated the principle that the federal government, not the states, has “paramount rights in and power over” the marginal seas which border the coastal states, and has “full dominion over the resources under that water area, including oil.”

For more than 150 years the littoral states had exercised uncontested jurisdiction and ownership over the marginal-sea area, subject only to the powers specifically granted to the national government by the Constitution. The states had regulated the fisheries within the three-mile limit, applying state laws to vessels licensed under federal statutes. Long before oil possibilities were thought of, they had granted or leased areas in the marginal seas to private persons and corporations for purposes of land reclamation and harbor development, dredging for sand and gravel, development of oyster beds, and similar projects. These property rights can far exceed in value the wealth to be derived from petroleum.

A just settlement of the issue, says the author, calls for restoration to the states of control of the marginal sea out to their historical boundaries—three miles in most cases; three leagues, or ten and one-half miles, in the case of Texas and the west coast of Florida.

This study is based upon thorough investigation of all literature on the subject and personal interviews and correspondence with leaders on both sides of the controversy.

Ellen Wilkinson was a key radical figure in the 20th century British socialist and feminist movement, a woman of passionate energy who was involved in most of the major struggles of her time.

Born in October 1891 into a working-class textile family, Wilkinson was involved in women’s suffrage, helped found the British Communist Party, led the Labour Party’s anti-fascist campaign, headed the iconic Jarrow Crusade and was the first female Minister of Education.

In this lively and engaging biography, Paula Bartley charts the political life of this extraordinary campaigner who went from street agitator to government minister whilst keeping her principles intact.

This study, the first of its kind in English, examines Russian responses to the independence movement in Latin America during the early nineteenth century. From a strictly presentist perspective, the investigation of this subject contributes to the historiography of colonialism and of Latin America's relations with the major world powers. In addition, it rounds out the story of foreign interests in the emancipation of Spanish and Portuguese America, while at the same time shedding new light on the history of Russian overseas expansion.

The study probes the major determinants of Russian responses to the struggle for independence of colonial Latin America and evaluates, from a European perspective, the actual impact of tsarist policy on the course of those historic events. Drawing on a wide range of printed materials and on hitherto unused manuscript sources from the archives and libraries of Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and the USSR, it isolates Russian New World objectives during the first decades of the nineteenth century and relates those objectives to the formulation of tsarist policy toward the insurgent Iberian colonies.

This is the story of a man who tried to resurrect the spirit of democratic life. He was born into a time of chaos and absurdity, and he took it as his fate to carry a candle into the night. This is his story and the story of many others, the writers, artists, actors, and philosophers who took it upon themselves to remember a tradition that had failed so miserably it had almost been forgotten.

Václav Havel (1936–2011), the famous Czech dissident, intellectual, and playwright, was there when a half million people came to Wenceslas Square to demand an end to Communism in 1989. Many came to hear him call for a free Czechoslovakia, for democratic elections, and a return to Europe. The demonstrators roared when he spoke. “Havel to the castle,” they chanted— meaning Havel for president. And a few weeks later, Havel became a most unusual president. He was sometimes misunderstood and not always popular, but by the time of his death in 2011, the world recognized Havel as one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century.

Born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in Prague, Havel was the constant subject of attention and an artistic eccentric in a family of businessmen. A young Havel and his family were cast by the Communist takeover as class enemies. Havel traveled a dark road that, ironically, provided the experiences he needed to reconnect not only to his own “ground of being” but to the traditions of civic society. This biography is the story of Havel’s inward journey in his underground years and thus the story of how Havel, the outsider, became the ultimate insider as president of the nation.

In this intimate and sweeping portrayal of Havel, David Barton reveals the eccentricities of the last president of Czechoslovakia, and the first president of the Czech Republic.

The question of how one can be both Hispanic and Protestant has perplexed Mexican Americans in Texas ever since Anglo-American Protestants began converting their Mexican Catholic neighbors early in the nineteenth century. Mexican-American Protestants have faced the double challenge of being a religious minority within the larger Mexican-American community and a cultural minority within their Protestant denominations. As they have negotiated and sought to reconcile these two worlds over nearly two centuries, los Protestantes have melded Anglo-American Protestantism with Mexican-American culture to create a truly indigenous, authentic, and empowering faith tradition in the Mexican-American community.

This book presents the first comparative history of Hispanic Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas. Covering a broad sweep from the 1830s to the 1990s, Paul Barton examines how Mexican-American Protestant identities have formed and evolved as los Protestantes interacted with their two very different communities in the barrio and in the Protestant church. He looks at historical trends and events that affected Mexican-American Protestant identity at different periods and discusses why and how shifts in los Protestantes' sense of identity occurred. His research highlights the fact that while Protestantism has traditionally served to assimilate Mexican Americans into the dominant U.S. society, it has also been transformed into a vehicle for expressing and transmitting Hispanic culture and heritage by its Mexican-American adherents.

Modern secularists have been reluctant to recognize Abraham Lincoln's deep spirituality, in spite of the fact that he was often known as "Father Abraham" and has been described as one of the most deeply religious presidents the country has ever seen.  Yet for all of his familiarity with the Bible, his invocation of Providence, and of the Almighty, he did not actively participate in a church or lend his name and authority to a denomination.

After more than fifty years of hagiographic and contradictory accounts of Abraham Lincoln's life, William Barton stepped boldly into the bedlam of claims and counterclaims about Lincoln's religion. Armed with an enormous collection of Lincoln materials and his own strict evidentiary rules, Barton worked to avoid partisan politicking over Lincoln's legacy and instead to simply "lay bare the facts."  

To enable a better examination of the vexed questions surrounding Lincoln's faith and religious principles, Barton gathered Lincoln's most important writing and speeches about religion, and topically and chronologically assembled testimonies by his friends, family, and associates, about the most important and most debated issues.  This volume, Barton's first and most important work on Lincoln, is introduced by Michael Nelson who provides a history of the literature on Lincoln's religion, the historical context of Barton's writing, and the details of the method that made Barton's approach to this American icon such a distinctive success.

When Nero took the stage, the audience played along--or else. The drama thus enacted, whether in the theater proper or in the political arena, unfolds in all its rich complexity in Actors in the Audience. This is a book about language, theatricality, and empire--about how the Roman emperor dramatized his rule and how his subordinates in turn staged their response. The focus is on Nero: his performances onstage spurred his contemporaries to reflect on the nature of power and representation, and to make the stage a paradigm for larger questions about the theatricality of power. Through these portrayals by ancient writers, Shadi Bartsch explores what happens to language and representation when all discourse is distorted by the pull of an autocratic authority.

Some Roman senators, forced to become actors and dissimulators under the scrutinizing eye of the ruler, portrayed themselves and their class as the victims of regimes that are, for us, redolent of Stalinism. Other writers claimed that doublespeak--saying one thing and meaning two--was the way one could, and did, undo the constraining effects of imperial oppression. Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal all figure in Bartsch's shrewd analysis of historical and literary responses to the brute facts of empire; even the Panegyricus of Pliny the Younger now appears as a reaction against the widespread awareness of dissimulation. Informed by theories of dramaturgy, sociology, new historicism, and cultural criticism, this close reading of literary and historical texts gives us a new perspective on the politics of the Roman empire--and on the languages and representation of power.

Is Lucan’s brilliant and grotesque epic Civil War an example of ideological poetry at its most flagrant, or is it a work that despairingly proclaims the meaninglessness of ideology? Shadi Bartsch offers a startlingly new answer to this split debate on the Roman poet’s magnum opus.

Reflecting on the disintegration of the Roman republic in the wake of the civil war that began in 49 B.C., Lucan (writing during the grim tyranny of Nero’s Rome) recounts that fateful conflict with a strangely ambiguous portrayal of his republican hero, Pompey. Although the story is one of a tragic defeat, the language of his epic is more often violent and nihilistic than heroic and tragic. And Lucan is oddly fascinated by the graphic destruction of lives, the violation of human bodies—an interest paralleled in his deviant syntax and fragmented poetry. In an analysis that draws on contemporary political thought ranging from Hannah Arendt and Richard Rorty to the poetry of Vietnam veterans, as well as on literary theory and ancient sources, Bartsch finds in the paradoxes of Lucan’s poetry both a political irony that responds to the universally perceived need for, yet suspicion of, ideology, and a recourse to the redemptive power of storytelling. This shrewd and lively book contributes substantially to our understanding of Roman civilization and of poetry as a means of political expression.

Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion. 

Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policymakers, and artists, alike.

An NRC Handelsblad Book of the Year

“Offers rich discussions of olfactory perception, the conscious and subconscious impacts of smell on behavior and emotion.”
—Science

Decades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli “spark” neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. We think of the brain as a space we can map: here it responds to faces, there it perceives a sensation. But the sense of smell—only recently attracting broader attention in neuroscience—doesn’t work this way. So what does the nose tell the brain, and how does the brain understand it?

A. S. Barwich turned to experts in neuroscience, psychology, chemistry, and perfumery in an effort to understand the mechanics and meaning of odors. She discovered that scents are often fickle, and do not line up with well-defined neural regions. Upending existing theories of perception, Smellosophy offers a new model for understanding how the brain senses and processes odors.

“A beguiling analysis of olfactory experience that is fast becoming a core reference work in the field.”
—Irish Times

“Lively, authoritative…Aims to rehabilitate smell’s neglected and marginalized status.”
—Wall Street Journal

“This is a special book…It teaches readers a lot about olfaction. It teaches us even more about what philosophy can be.”
—Times Literary Supplement

This journal is the exciting personal narrative of a Texan who was a prisoner of the Union Army during the Civil War, escaped to Canada, and finally made his way back into the Confederacy through the blockade. It was written while the war was still in progress.

The journal was issued anonymously in Houston early in 1865. Its author, Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, was a colorful, competent, truly remarkable Texan—well educated, well traveled, and sophisticated as an observer. Barziza came to Texas from Virginia in 1857. He left a growing law practice at Owensville to enter Confederate service as first lieutenant of the “Robertson Five-Shooters,” an infantry company which was one of the original units of the Fourth Texas Infantry, Hood’s Brigade. After fighting in many battles, he was wounded at Gettysburg and left lying on the field. The Yankees picked him up and imprisoned him at Johnson’s Island.

A year later, as Barziza was being shipped to another prison, he escaped by diving through a window of the moving train at midnight. Making his way across Pennsylvania to New York, he took a train for Canada. There he became one of the first beneficiaries of an underground system which eventually returned him to North Carolina. Too ill from his wounds and the hardships of his escape to return to active duty, he spent the next few months writing his memoirs. They cover the period from the drive for Gettysburg to Barziza’s return to the Confederacy.

Before the original publication of this book, only two copies of The Adventures of a Prisoner of War were known to exist. R. Henderson Shuffler, then director of the Texana program of the University of Texas, felt that it was intriguing and important enough to merit editing for republication. The journal has the further attraction of describing the then little-known machinery which was set up in Canada to help Rebel soldiers who had escaped Northern prisons make their way back to the Confederacy by way of Nova Scotia and Bermuda.

Shuffler supplements the narrative with limited yet helpful documentation, providing introductory sections explaining Barziza’s background and his career as a Texas legislator and lawyer, as well as carrying the war story up to the sequence where Barziza’s account begins.

An investigation of how the expansion of modern medicine in Turkey transformed young boys’ experiences of circumcision.

In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet the procedure is a potentially painful and traumatic ordeal. With the expansion of modern medicine, the social position of sünnetçi (male circumcisers) became subject to the institutional arrangements of Turkey’s evolving health care and welfare system. In the transition from traditional itinerant circumcisers to low-ranking health officers in the 1960s and hospital doctors in the 1990s, the medicalization of male circumcision has become entangled with state formation, market fetishism, and class inequalities.

Based on Oyman Başaran’s extensive ethnographic and historical research, Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey is a close examination of the socioreligious practice of circumcision in twenty-five cities and their outlying towns and villages in Turkey. By analyzing the changing subjectivity of medical actors who seek to alleviate suffering in male circumcision, Başaran offers a psychoanalytically informed alternate approach to the standard sociological arguments surrounding medicalization and male circumcision.

This synthesis of thirty-five years of intensive investigation comes at a particularly propitious moment. Since the Second World War, cell biology and molecular biology have worked separately in probing the central question of cancer research--how do cells divide?--biology focusing on cell behavior in isolation and as part of tissues and organs, molecular biology concentrating on individual biochemical steps, especially as controlled by genes. But now a new alliance is being forged in the continuing effort to conquer cancer. New discoveries point to the value of an interdisciplinary approach, and for the first time scientists from both camps are struggling to catch up on one another's literature.

Baserga's work provides the unifying background for this cross-fertilization of ideas. It begins with the growth of cell populations and how cells interact with each other. The second section goes within the cell to consider the effect of drugs, the use of temperature-sensitive mutants of the cell cycle, and the use of cell fusion to understand how cells divide. The third section turns to the molecular genetics of cell proliferation, the growth factors, and the genes and gene products that regulate cell division.

Drawing on more than five hundred classic and recent references, the book is comprehensive yet refreshingly readable. It will provide a congenial and sophisticated introduction for students as well as working scientists.

In the West, media coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan is framed by military and political concerns, resulting in a simplistic picture of ageless barbarity, terrorist safe havens, and peoples in need of either punishment or salvation. Under the Drones looks beyond this limiting view to investigate real people on the ground, and to analyze the political, social, and economic forces that shape their lives. Understanding the complexity of life along the 1,600-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan can help America and its European allies realign their priorities in the region to address genuine problems, rather than fabricated ones.

This volume explodes Western misunderstandings by revealing a land that abounds with human agency, perpetual innovation, and vibrant complexity. Through the work of historians and social scientists, the thirteen essays here explore the real and imagined presence of the Taliban; the animated sociopolitical identities expressed through traditions like Pakistani truck decoration; Sufism’s ambivalent position as an alternative to militancy; the long and contradictory history of Afghan media; and the simultaneous brutality and potential that heroin brings to women in the area.

Moving past shifting conceptions of security, the authors expose the West’s prevailing perspective on the region as strategic, targeted, and alarmingly dehumanizing. Under the Drones is an essential antidote to contemporary media coverage and military concerns.

Correspondence of a Cappadocian Father.

Basil the Great was born ca. AD 330 at Caesarea in Cappadocia into a family noted for piety. He was at Constantinople and Athens for several years as a student with Gregory of Nazianzus and was much influenced by Origen. For a short time he held a chair of rhetoric at Caesarea, and was then baptized. He visited monasteries in Egypt and Palestine and sought out the most famous hermits in Syria and elsewhere to learn how to lead a pious and ascetic life; but he decided that communal monastic life and work were best. About 360 he founded in Pontus a convent to which his sister and widowed mother belonged. Ordained a presbyter in 365, in 370 he succeeded Eusebius in the archbishopric of Caesarea, which included authority over all Pontus. He died in 379. Even today his reform of monastic life in the east is the basis of modern Greek and Slavonic monasteries.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Basil’s Letters is in four volumes.

Correspondence of a Cappadocian Father.

Basil the Great was born ca. AD 330 at Caesarea in Cappadocia into a family noted for piety. He was at Constantinople and Athens for several years as a student with Gregory of Nazianzus and was much influenced by Origen. For a short time he held a chair of rhetoric at Caesarea, and was then baptized. He visited monasteries in Egypt and Palestine and sought out the most famous hermits in Syria and elsewhere to learn how to lead a pious and ascetic life; but he decided that communal monastic life and work were best. About 360 he founded in Pontus a convent to which his sister and widowed mother belonged. Ordained a presbyter in 365, in 370 he succeeded Eusebius in the archbishopric of Caesarea, which included authority over all Pontus. He died in 379. Even today his reform of monastic life in the east is the basis of modern Greek and Slavonic monasteries.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Basil’s Letters is in four volumes.

Correspondence of a Cappadocian Father.

Basil the Great was born ca. AD 330 at Caesarea in Cappadocia into a family noted for piety. He was at Constantinople and Athens for several years as a student with Gregory of Nazianzus and was much influenced by Origen. For a short time he held a chair of rhetoric at Caesarea, and was then baptized. He visited monasteries in Egypt and Palestine and sought out the most famous hermits in Syria and elsewhere to learn how to lead a pious and ascetic life; but he decided that communal monastic life and work were best. About 360 he founded in Pontus a convent to which his sister and widowed mother belonged. Ordained a presbyter in 365, in 370 he succeeded Eusebius in the archbishopric of Caesarea, which included authority over all Pontus. He died in 379. Even today his reform of monastic life in the east is the basis of modern Greek and Slavonic monasteries.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Basil’s Letters is in four volumes.

Correspondence of a Cappadocian Father.

Basil the Great was born ca. AD 330 at Caesarea in Cappadocia into a family noted for piety. He was at Constantinople and Athens for several years as a student with Gregory of Nazianzus and was much influenced by Origen. For a short time he held a chair of rhetoric at Caesarea, and was then baptized. He visited monasteries in Egypt and Palestine and sought out the most famous hermits in Syria and elsewhere to learn how to lead a pious and ascetic life; but he decided that communal monastic life and work were best. About 360 he founded in Pontus a convent to which his sister and widowed mother belonged. Ordained a presbyter in 365, in 370 he succeeded Eusebius in the archbishopric of Caesarea, which included authority over all Pontus. He died in 379. Even today his reform of monastic life in the east is the basis of modern Greek and Slavonic monasteries.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Basil’s Letters is in four volumes.

Progymnasmata, preliminary exercises in the study of declamation, were the cornerstone of elite education from Hellenistic through Byzantine times. Using material from Greek literary, mythological, and historical traditions, students and writers composed examples ranging from simple fables to complex arguments about fictional laws. In the Byzantine period, the spectrum of source material expanded to include the Bible and Christian hagiography and theology.

This collection was written by Nikephoros Basilakes, imperial notary and teacher at the prestigious Patriarchal School in Constantinople during the twelfth century. In his texts, Basilakes made significant use of biblical themes, especially in character studies—known as ethopoeiae—featuring King David, the Virgin Mary, and Saint Peter. The Greek exercises presented here, translated into English for the first time, shed light on education under the Komnenian emperors and illuminate literary culture during one of the most important epochs in the long history of the Byzantine Empire.