Carl A. Gerstacker was born in 1916 in Cleveland, Ohio. At an early age his father, Rollin, instilled in him an interest in finance and the stock market. In 1930, when Carl turned fourteen, Rollin advised his son to withdraw his paper-route and odd-job money from a local bank and invest it all in The Dow Chemical Company. It was the beginning of a relationship that would last a lifetime. After high school, Carl landed an hourly position with Dow Chemical as a lab assistant and, at the same time, pursued an engineering degree at the University of Michigan as part of the company’s student training course. After graduating in 1938, Gerstacker continued to work for Dow Chemical until the outbreak of World War II when he joined the U.S. Army. Returning to civilian life in 1946, he was rehired by Dow and quickly moved up the corporate ladder, becoming Treasurer in 1949, Vice-President in 1955, and Chairman of the Board in 1960, a position he retained until 1976. He retired five years later in 1981.
Carl Gerstacker was a business leader who believed that every company had a special personality and that the Dow personality was largely shaped by its employees. “For Dow Chemical, people are the most important asset, not the patents, the plants, nor the products.” Gerstacker’s personal financial acumen was rivaled only by his own contributions to the sound corporate growth of Dow Chemical, a business he loved and to which he devoted his life. Gerstacker died in 1995, leaving a legacy that lives on in the form of numerous philanthropic endeavors he began during his lifetime and on whose boards he once served. Carl A. Gerstacker was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century American industry.
Contributors. Stanley Aronowitz, Jan Currie, Zelda F. Gamson, Emily Hacker, Stefano Harney, Randy Martin, Bart Meyers, David Montgomery, Frederick Moten, Christopher Newfield, Gary Rhoades, Sheila Slaughter, Jeremy Smith, Vincent Tirelli, William Vaughn, Lesley Vidovich, Ira Yankwitt
The copper mines of Michigan's Copper Country, in the Upper Peninsula, were active for 150 years, from 1845 until 1995. Many of the mine workers attempted to unionize, in order to obtain better working conditions, wages, and hours.
The Michigan miners were unsuccessful in their struggles with mine owners, which came to a climax in the 1913–14 Copper Country Strike. This nine-month battle between workers represented by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and the three major mining companies in the region took a particularly nasty turn on Christmas Eve, 1913, at a party for strikers and their families organized by the WFM. As many as 500 people were in the Italian Benevolent Society hall in Calumet, Michigan, when someone reportedly shouted "fire." There was no fire, but it is estimated that 73–79 people, more than 60 of them children, died in the stampede for the exit.
Against this dramatic backdrop, Gary Kaunonen tells the story of Finnish immigrants to Copper Country. By examining the written record and material culture of Finnish immigrant proletarians-analyzing buildings, cultural institutions, and publications of the socialist-unionist media—Kaunonen adds a new depth to our understanding of the time and place, the events and a people.
In this luminous work, Claudio Guillen meditates on the elusive field of comparative literature and its vicissitudes since the early nineteenth century. These pages ring with the authority of a scholar who has keenly observed his discipline during recent decades, when the predominant interest in contrasts, comparisons, influences, and interrelationships gave way to what Guillen terms "the systematic study of supranational assemblages."
This book is a powerful call to abandon the ethnocentric view of literature and to face the tension between the local and the universal. Guillen shows how literature catapults us into supranationality. Poetry provokes and inspires his reflections. Aiming to write a book that approaches the nations of the world, "drawing close to them, listening to them, yielding their best voices, reproducing whenever possible their exact words," Guillen presents the work of Cervantes, Borges, Dante, Garcia Marquez, Neruda, Dario, Ortega, Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, Alberti, Lorca, Jorge Guillen, Rilke, Milton, Beckett, Stefan George, and the great rang poets, as well as Nahuatl literature and Quechua elegies. As he proceeds, the essential components of literary communication unfold before us—its channels, forms, themes, genres, and use of literary history.
Not since Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism has any great critic provided us with so commodious a framework for understanding literature in all its variety. In Guillen's hands, Babel becomes not chaos but a beautifully diverse unity, transcending the boundaries of the individual and the nation. A brilliant exploration of a field, The Challenge of Comparative Literature will be required reading for all who seek a renewed view of literature and its voices throughout the world.
At a moment when Congress is widely viewed as hyper-partisan and dysfunctional, Richard Fenno provides a variegated picture of American representational politics. The Challenge of Congressional Representation offers an up-close-and-personal look at the complex relationship between members of Congress and their constituents back home.
When not crafting policy in Washington, the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives are busy assessing and building voter support in their districts. Fenno delves into the activities of five members of the House—Republicans representing Pennsylvania and New York, and Democrats from California, Florida, and Illinois. Spanning the ideological spectrum, these former and current representatives are senior lawmakers and rookie back-benchers from both urban and rural areas. Fenno travels with them in their own political territories, watching and talking with them, conducting interviews, and meeting aides and constituents. He illuminates the all-consuming nature of representational work—the complicated lives of House members shuttling back and forth between home and Capitol, building and maintaining networks, and making compromises. Agreeing to talk on the record without protective anonymity, these elected House members emerge as real personalities, at once praiseworthy and fallible.
While voting patterns and policy analysis constitute an important window into the legislative process, the nonquantifiable human element that political scientists so frequently overlook is the essence of negotiation. Fenno focuses our attention on how congressional leaders negotiate with constituents as well as with colleagues.
The development of crime policy in the United States for many generations has been hampered by a drastic shortage of knowledge and data, an excess of partisanship and instinctual responses, and a one-way tendency to expand the criminal justice system. Even if a three-decade pattern of prison growth came to a full stop in the early 2000s, the current decade will be by far the most punitive in U.S. history, hitting some minority communities particularly hard.
The book examines the history, scope, and effects of the revolution in America's response to crime since 1970. Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz offer a comprehensive, long-term, pragmatic approach to increase public understanding of and find improvements in the nation's response to crime. Concentrating on meaningful areas for change in policing, sentencing, guns, drugs, and juvenile crime, they discuss such topics as new priorities for the use of incarceration; aggressive policing; the war on drugs; the need to switch the gun control debate to a focus on crime gun regulation; a new focus on offenders' transition from confinement to freedom; and the role of private enterprise.
A book that rejects traditional liberal and conservative outlooks, The Challenge of Crime takes a major step in offering new approaches for the nation's responses to crime.
This path-breaking anthology illuminates the lives of ten influential twentieth-century American women and looks at the challenges experienced by the women who have written about them. Exploring the frequently complicated dialogue between writer and subject, the contributors discuss tools appropriate to writing women's biography while their riveting accounts reveal how feminist scholarship led them to approach the study of women's lives in unconventional ways.
"This wonderful collection demonstrates the significance of women's biography as a central part of feminist scholarship. The feminist biographer inserts a second life into a biography, her own, giving us yet another layer of depth and insight."--Ann J. Lane, author of To "Herland" and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Challenge of Global Warming examines the causes and effects of global climate change.
In The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice, philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science offer a multidisciplinary view of the complex interrelationships of values in science and society in both contemporary and historic contexts. They analyze the impact of commercialization and politicization on epistemic aspirations, and, conversely, the ethical dilemmas raised by “practically relevant” science in today's society. For example, much scientific research over the past quarter century has been guided by the financing that supports it. What effect has this had on the quality of research produced and the advancement of real knowledge?
The contributors reveal how social values affect objectivity, theory, and the direction of inquiry, and examine the byproducts of external value systems in topics such as “expertise” and “socially robust knowledge,” among others. They view science's own internal value systems, the earlier disconnection of societal values from the scientific process, and the plausibility of “value free” science.
The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice presents an in-depth analysis that places the role of values at the center of philosophical debate and raises questions of morality, credibility, and the future role of values in scientific inquiry.
Informed and up to date, Challenged Sovereignty explains the effects of today’s globalized problems on the contemporary Caribbean.
An essential collection at the intersection of globalization, production supply chains, corporate finance regulation, and economic measurement.
The substantial increase in the complexity of global supply chains and other production arrangements over the past three decades has challenged some traditional measures of national income account aggregates and raised the potential for distortions in conventional calculations of GDP and productivity. This volume examines a variety of multinational business activities and assesses their impact on economic measurement. Several chapters consider how global supply chains complicate the interpretation of traditional trade statistics and how new measurement techniques can provide information about global production arrangements. Other chapters examine the role of intangible capital in global production, including the output of factoryless goods producers and the problems of measuring R&D in a globalized world. The studies in this volume also explore potential ways to enhance the quality of the national accounts by improving data collection and analysis and by updating the standards for measurement.
Threats to American unity are not unique to modern times. In the 1960s, the assassination of President Kennedy, the tension of racial strife, the political extremes of the Radical Right with its John Birchers and the Radical Left with its threat of Communism all raised critically urgent questions relative to our national unity, to our political stability, and to our vaunted respect for the rule of law. The Challenges to Democracy is an assessment of the foundations of political unity in the United States.
The American consensus, as Murray Clark Havens defines it, emphasizes a set of values and procedures that most Americans, since the adoption of the Constitution, have accepted in principle: religious tolerance, individual freedom in intellectual and cultural matters, the importance of education and intellectual effort, settlement of internal conflict through peaceful and political processes, the supremacy of law, a high and generally rising standard of living, and, since the Civil War, racial compatibility.
Never in our history have the ideals of this consensus been fully achieved, but as long as the majority of our citizens accept the validity of those ideals and the democratic procedures for realizing them, the basic American political unity is not threatened. However, when citizens who cannot accept the elements of the American consensus become influential enough to block the democratic process, then that consensus is threatened.
Havens shows how such threats have come to us all through our history—the Civil War, racial and religious bigotry, the Ku Klux Klan, Huey Long, Father Coughlin and other extremists of the desperate thirties, McCarthyism. He discusses contemporary dangers to American unity such as those connected with the acceptance of the African American, religious friction in politics and government, the Radical Right and the Radical Left, and our foreign policy as an expression of the American consensus.
The broad conclusions of this study are that our national unity is continuously in jeopardy, with frequent recurrences of serious questions as to the permanence of some of the patterns we have always associated with American government, but that our democracy is possessed of considerable potential for survival because of our deep national commitment to democracy and because of our even deeper nationalism.
In 2014, the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan grabbed international attention as citizen protesters demanded the Taiwan government withdraw its free-trade agreement with China. In that same year, in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement sustained 79 days of demonstrations, protests that demanded genuine universal suffrage in electing Hong Kong’s chief executive. It too, became an international incident before it collapsed. Both of these student-led movements featured large-scale and intense participation and had deep and far-reaching consequences. But how did two massive and disruptive protests take place in culturally conservative societies? And how did the two “occupy”-style protests against Chinese influences on local politics arrive at such strikingly divergent results?
Challenging Beijing’s Mandate of Heaven aims to make sense of the origins, processes, and outcomes of these eventful protests in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ming-sho Ho compares the dynamics of the two movements, from the existing networks of activists that preceded protest, to the perceived threats that ignited the movements, to the government strategies with which they contended, and to the nature of their coordination. Moreover, he contextualizes these protests in a period of global prominence for student, occupy, and anti-globalization protests and situates them within social movement studies.
A wide-ranging examination of how policies, parties, and labor strength affect inequality in post-industrial societies.
Not all countries are unequal in the same ways or to the same degree. In Challenging Inequality, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens analyze different patterns of increasing income inequality in post-industrial societies since the 1980s, assessing the policies and social structures best able to mitigate against the worst effects of market inequality. Combining statistical data analysis from twenty-two countries with a comparative historical analysis of Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United States, Huber and Stephens identify the factors that drive increases in inequality and shape persistent, marked differences between countries. Their statistical analysis confirms generalizable patterns and in-depth country studies help to further elucidate the processes at work.
Challenging Inequality shows how the combination of globalization and skill-biased technological change has led to both labor market dualization and rising unemployment levels, which in turn have had important effects on inequality and poverty. Labor strength—at both the society level and the enterprise level—has helped to counter rising market income inequality, as has a history of strong human capital spending. The generosity of the welfare state remains the most important factor shaping redistribution, while the consistent power of left parties is the common denominator behind both welfare state generosity and human capital investment.
In 2003, in the face of errors and accidents caused by medical and surgical trainees, the American Council of Graduate Medical Education mandated a reduction in resident work hours to eighty per week. Over the course of two and a half years spent observing residents and staff surgeons trying to implement this new regulation, Katherine C. Kellogg discovered that resistance to it was both strong and successful—in fact, two of the three hospitals she studied failed to make the change. Challenging Operations takes up the apparent paradox of medical professionals resisting reforms designed to help them and their patients. Through vivid anecdotes, interviews, and incisive observation and analysis, Kellogg shows the complex ways that institutional reforms spark resistance when they challenge long-standing beliefs, roles, and systems of authority.
At a time when numerous policies have been enacted to address the nation’s soaring medical costs, uneven access to care, and shortage of primary-care physicians, Challenging Operations sheds new light on the difficulty of implementing reforms and offers concrete recommendations for effectively meeting that challenge.
Are sex workers victims, criminals, or just trying to make a living? Over the last five years, public policy and academic discourse have moved from criminalization of sex workers to victim-based understanding, shaped by human trafficking. While most research focuses on macro-level policies and theories, less is known about the on-the-ground perspectives of people whose lives are impacted by sex work, including attorneys, social workers, police officers, probation officers, and sex workers themselves.
Challenging Perspectives on Street-Based Sex Work brings the voices of lower-echelon sex workers and those individuals charged with policy development and enforcement into conversation with one another. Chapters highlight some of the current approaches to sex work, such as diversion courts, trafficking task forces, law enforcement assisted diversion and decriminalization. It also examines how sex workers navigate seldom-discussed social phenomenon like gentrification, pregnancy, imperialism, and being subjects of research. Through dialogue, our authors reveal the complex reality of engaging in and regulating sex work in the United States and through American aid abroad.
Contributors include: Aneesa A. Baboolal, Marie Bailey-Kloch, Mira Baylson, Nachale “Hua” Boonyapisomparn, Belinda Carter, Jennifer Cobbina, Ruby Corado, Eileen Corcoran, Kate D’Adamo, Edith Kinney, Margot Le Neveu, Martin A. Monto, Linda Muraresku, Erin O’Brien, Sharon Oselin. Catherine Paquette, Dan Steele, Chase Strangio, Signy Toquinto, and the editors.
Contributors. José Batista Gonçalves Afonso, Sonia Maria P..P. Bergamasco, Sue Branford, Elena Calvo-González, Miguel Carter, Horacio Martins de Carvalho, Guilherme Costa Delgado, Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, Leonilde Sérvolo de Medeiros, George Mészáros, Luiz Antonio Norder, Gabriel Ondetti, Ivo Poletto, Marcelo Carvalho Rosa, Lygia Maria Sigaud, Emmanuel Wambergue, Wendy Wolford
In this engaging book, David Brion Davis offers an illuminating perspective on American slavery. Starting with a long view across the temporal and spatial boundaries of world slavery, he traces continuities from the ancient world to the era of exploration, with its expanding markets and rise in consumption of such products as sugar, tobacco, spices, and chocolate, to the conditions of the New World settlement that gave rise to a dependence on the forced labor of millions of African slaves. With the American Revolution, slavery crossed another kind of boundary, in a psychological inversion that placed black slaves outside the dream of liberty and equality—and turned them into the Great American Problem.
Davis then delves into a single year, 1819, to explain how an explosive conflict over the expansion and legitimacy of slavery, together with reinterpretations of the Bible and the Constitution, pointed toward revolutionary changes in American culture. Finally, he widens the angle again, in a regional perspective, to discuss the movement to colonize blacks outside the United States, the African-American impact on abolitionism, and the South's response to slave emancipation in the British Caribbean, which led to attempts to morally vindicate slavery and export it into future American states. Challenging the boundaries of slavery ultimately brought on the Civil War and the unexpected, immediate emancipation of slaves long before it could have been achieved in any other way.
This imaginative and fascinating book puts slavery into a brilliant new light and underscores anew the desperate human tragedy lying at the very heart of the American story.
Drawn from a Festschrift honoring George G. Grabowicz, the essays in this collection examine central issues in Ukrainian literature and culture with special attention to the comparative and deconstructive approaches that reflect the honoree’s own work. All major time periods are covered: the onset of literacy in Kyivan Rus´; the cultural intersections of the early modern period; the gradual but persistent articulation of a national discourse in the new imperial reality (culminating with the defining figure of Taras Shevchenko); the vagaries of the long nineteenth century; twentieth-century modernism, ideology, and scholarship; and Ukraine’s intellectual position today.
The essays also variously explore the interface of literature, language, theater, and film, and touch upon the strictures and distortions imposed by censorship and ideology, uncharted currents of reception, and the interpretation of key texts, particularly the light they shed on the “political unconscious.” Special attention is devoted to the transnational functions of Ukrainian literature in the modern period. A full bibliography of Grabowicz’s foundational contribution to the field completes the collection.
"Accountability" is a watchword of our era. Dissatisfaction with a range of public and private institutions is widespread and often expressed in strong critical rhetoric. The reasons for these views are varied and difficult to translate into concrete action, but this hasn't deterred governments and nongovernmental organizations from putting into place formal processes for determining whether their own and others' goals have been achieved and problems with performance have been avoided.
In this thought-provoking book, government and public administration scholar Beryl Radin takes on many of the assumptions of the performance movement, arguing that evaluation relies too often on simplistic, one-size-fits-all solutions that are not always effective for dynamic organizations. Drawing on a wide range of ideas, including theories of intelligence and modes of thought, assumptions about numbers and information, and the nature of professionalism, Radin sheds light on the hidden complexities of creating standards to evaluate performance. She illustrates these problems by discussing a range of program areas, including health efforts as well as the education program, "No Child Left Behind."
Throughout, the author devotes particular attention to concerns about government standards, from accounting for issues of equity to allowing for complicated intergovernmental relationships and fragmentation of powers. She explores in detail how recent performance measurement efforts in the U.S. government have fared, and analyzes efforts by nongovernmental organizations both inside and outside of the United States to impose standards of integrity and equity on their governments. The examination concludes with alternative assumptions and lessons for those embarking on performance measurement activities.
The editors and contributors to this volume are not willing to accept what is known as uneven development, where some cities win and some lose. They look at two practical consequences of urban growth: the change in residence patterns as neighborhoods gentrify, and the change in employment patterns, as factory workers lose jobs and white-collar workers gain jobs. The editors' goal is to highlight the alternatives to uneven development and to the growth ideology. They outline and advocate specific policies, including affordable housing, changes in taxation, and direct community participation in planning and zoning decisions.
Challenging Uneven Development begins with a rousing discussion of the pervasiveness of the community redevelopment ideology. The growth machine defines the language of the debate. The next group of chapters examine residence patterns--how communities have organized to fight gentrification, why residential integration is essential for good planning as well as morality, and what strategies can be used to achieve racial diversity. Another chapter emphasizes the role of lenders in regulating the flow of credit within communities. Disinvestment by credit providers causes decline, and opens the way for gentrification, which displaces local residents. The impact of taxes in stimulating the growth machine is also explained.
Later chapters move beyond gentrification issues to examine other problems of economic restructuring. They look at how blacks, Latinos, and women have been affected by the growth of service sector jobs. The final chapter serves as a strategic guide to those who wish to establish a progressive agenda for community-based economic development. The authors call for social change, not unimaginative reform.
The contributors to this volume are leaders or researchers from community organizations, civic groups, government agencies, and universities. In addition to the editors, they are Mel King, Teresa Cordova, Daniel Lauber, Jena Pogge, David Flax-Hatch, Arthur Lyons, Wendy Wintermute, Charles Hicklin, Jeffrey D. Reckinger, David Mosena, Charlotte Chun, Raymndo Flores, Luther Snow, Deborah Bennett, John Betancur, and Patricia Wright. They have presented "state-of-the-art" progressive policy solutions for urban problems.
Grady-Willis describes Black activism within a framework of human rights rather than in terms of civil rights. As he demonstrates, civil rights were only one part of a larger struggle for self-determination, a fight to dismantle a system of inequalities that he conceptualizes as “apartheid structures.” Drawing on archival research and interviews with activists of the 1960s and 1970s, he illuminates a wide range of activities, organizations, and achievements, including the neighborhood-based efforts of Atlanta’s Black working poor, clandestine associations such as the African American women’s group Sojourner South, and the establishment of autonomous Black intellectual institutions such as the Institute of the Black World. Grady-Willis’s chronicle of the politics within the Black freedom movement in Atlanta brings to light overlapping ideologies, gender and class tensions, and conflicts over divergent policies, strategies, and tactics. It also highlights the work of grassroots activists, who take center stage alongside well-known figures in Challenging U.S. Apartheid. Women, who played central roles in the human rights struggle in Atlanta, are at the foreground of this history.
Chamber after Chamber is about what fractures, fixes, and refills the hearts of two girls as they grow into women. A loose narrative in three sections, the poems follow a speaker and her cousin through their hardscrabble, backwoods childhood to their separation—both physical and emotional—as adults. From the make-believe apocalypses and cut-and-paste valentines of elementary school to the stadium-seating classrooms and multiplexes of southern China, our speaker tries to leave the shame and dysfunction of her family behind. In China, she begins to see America—and herself—clearly for the first time, and in doing so discovers that both her cousin and her country are inextricably woven into
[her body] part that never sleeps the blood
and chambered meat that’s like a rock squeezed
in a fist rapping its knuckles
on the sweet door of the body.
In this rich, imaginative survey of variety musical theater, Gillian M. Rodger masterfully chronicles the social history and class dynamics of the robust, nineteenth-century American theatrical phenomenon that gave way to twentieth-century entertainment forms such as vaudeville and comedy on radio and television. Fresh, bawdy, and unabashedly aimed at the working class, variety honed in on its audience's fascinations, emerging in the 1840s as a vehicle to accentuate class divisions and stoke curiosity about gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing acts were a regular feature of these entertainments, and Rodger profiles key male impersonators Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner while examining how both gender and sexuality gave shape to variety. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, variety theater developed into a platform for ideas about race and whiteness.
As some in the working class moved up into the middling classes, they took their affinity for variety with them, transforming and broadening middle-class values. Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima places the saloon keepers, managers, male impersonators, minstrels, acrobats, singers, and dancers of the variety era within economic and social contexts by examining the business models of variety shows and their primarily white, working-class urban audiences. Rodger traces the transformation of variety from sexualized entertainment to more family-friendly fare, a domestication that mirrored efforts to regulate the industry, as well as the adoption of aspects of middle-class culture and values by the shows' performers, managers, and consumers.
In Champion Trees of Arkansas, Linda Williams Palmer explores the state’s largest trees of their species, registered with the Arkansas Forestry Commission as “champions.” Through her beautiful colored-pencil drawings, each magnificent tree is interpreted through the lens of season, location, history, and human connection.
Readers will get to know the cherrybark oak, rendered in fall colors, an avatar for the passing of seasons. The sugar maple, with its bare limbs and weather-beaten trunk, stands sentry over the headstones in a confederate cemetery. The 350-year-old white oak was once dubbed the Council Oak by Native Americans, and the post oak, cared for by generations of the same family, has its own story to tell.
Palmer travelled from Delta swamps to Ozark and Ouachita mountain ridges over a seven-year period to see and document the champions and to talk with property owners and others willing to share the stories of how these trees are beloved and protected by the community, and often entwined with its history. Champion Trees of Arkansas is sure to inspire art and nature lovers everywhere.
Barend A. de Vries, a distinguished international economist, examines the economic roots of poverty, the actions that can be taken to eradicate it, and the ethical case for integrating the poor into the mainstream of society.
De Vries applies Judeo-Christian ethics—in particular, the values of social justice and compassion for the poor—to the problem of poverty in both the United States and in developing countries. Bringing together the insights of economics and ethicists, he considers both the economic feasibility of religious views regarding the eradication of poverty and the ethical aspects of economic programs. He analyzes the poverty of women resulting from discrimination, the impact of environmental degradation on the poor, the allocation of funding to military rather than social programs, and the implications of the enormous debts incurred by poor countries. In addressing these conditions, he demonstrates the pressing need for action on both economic and ethical grounds.
Champions of the Poor offers an unbiased presentation of the ethical positions taken by Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants, and Evangelicals and stresses the need for all social sectors—religious and secular, business, labor and government—to work together to eradicate poverty. By reassessing poverty from these seemingly disparate approaches, it seeks to bring us closer to solving this age-old problem.
Though Europe’s universities are very well represented among the world’s top 200 universities, they are almost entirely absent from the top fifty. In this impassioned book, Jo Ritzen argues that European universities are economically, culturally, and socially underexploited, and he outlines a series of changes necessary to make these institutions more successful. He advocates reorganizing universities to favor innovation over bureaucracy, securing financing from private sources to meet the gaps left by public budget cuts, and matching and selecting students with an eye toward effectively educating for an international labor market. With such reinvention, universities would become instrumental to strengthening the European competitive position through economic innovation, increased social cohesion, and a more vibrant cultural dynamism.
In mid-February 1944 Marian Elizabeth Smith, a young Wisconsin woman, met Marine Corps Lieutenant Eugene T. Petersen on the passenger train, El Capitan, as it made its 42-hour run from Los Angeles to Chicago. After a brief acquaintance, he left the United States to join the Third Marine Division on Guam and eventually to take part in the battle for Iwo Jima in February and March of 1945. The collected letters of their subsequent 18-month correspondence reveal much about wartime life at home and abroad. This correspondence represents a time capsule of current events as Smith and Petersen discuss Franklin Roosevelt, the United Nations, internationalism, popular movies, the French aviator and poet Antoine de St. Exupery, the comic strip Barnaby, and the frustrations of dealing with sometimes less-than- enlightened parents. The loss of Marian's brother during the bombing of Ploesti, Rumania, in June 1944, brought Petersen and Smith closer together, and after hundreds of letters the "chance for love" Marian had suggested early in their correspondence evolved into a marriage that has endured for more than half a century.
The United States has a long history of religious pluralism, and yet Americans have often thought that people’s faith determines their eternal destinies. The result is that Americans switch religions more often than any other nation. The Chance of Salvation traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion is a matter of individual choice.
Lincoln Mullen shows how the willingness of Americans to change faiths, recorded in narratives that describe a wide variety of conversion experiences, created a shared assumption that religious identity is a decision. In the nineteenth century, as Americans confronted a growing array of religious options, pressures to convert altered the basis of American religion. Evangelical Protestants emphasized conversion as a personal choice, while Protestant missionaries brought Christianity to Native American nations such as the Cherokee, who adopted Christianity on their own terms. Enslaved and freed African Americans similarly created a distinctive form of Christian conversion based on ideas of divine justice and redemption. Mormons proselytized for a new tradition that stressed individual free will. American Jews largely resisted evangelism while at the same time winning converts to Judaism. Converts to Catholicism chose to opt out of the system of religious choice by turning to the authority of the Church.
By the early twentieth century, religion in the United States was a system of competing options that created an obligation for more and more Americans to choose their own faith. Religion had changed from a family inheritance to a consciously adopted identity.
Chance or Dance provides an overview of design and clarification of the controversial Intelligent Design (ID) movement and ultimately concludes there is no scientific proof behind Intelligent Design. As the controversy over Intelligent Design has grown over the past few years, there is a tendency to confuse all statements about design with the Intelligent Design movement and to confuse any affirmation of creation with Scientific Creationism. Davis and Poe begin with a brief historical perspective of the design argument and then examine the significant breakthroughs in cosmology, math, physics, chemistry, and biology that have provided renewed speculation in design.
The authors discuss that the idea of design is far more expansive than the ID movement’s version of it, evaluate Dawkins’ interpretation of genetic determinism, include a chapter that explores the tendency since Darwin to assume that the presence of an observable cause excludes the possibility of divine involvement; and introduce further reflections on wonder and awe that take into account the recent surge of interest in this area. The book concludes with an argument for the correlation between faith and sensory experience and suggests that science has successfully described processes but failed to explain origins.
Chance or Dance is ideal for students and general readers interested in understanding how modern science gives evidence for nature’s creation by the Bible’s God.
Drawing on a newly developed theoretical definition of “missed opportunity,” Chances for Peace uses extensive sources in English, Hebrew, and Arabic to systematically measure the potentiality levels of opportunity across some ninety years of attempted negotiations in the Arab-Israeli conflict. With enlightening revelations that defy conventional wisdom, this study provides a balanced account of the most significant attempts to forge peace, initiated by the world’s superpowers, the Arabs (including the Palestinians), and Israel. From Arab-Zionist negotiations at the end of World War I to the subsequent partition, the aftermath of the 1967 War and the Sadat Initiative, and numerous agreements throughout the 1980s and 1990s, concluding with the Annapolis Conference in 2007 and the Abu Mazen-Olmert talks in 2008, pioneering scholar Elie Podeh uses empirical criteria and diverse secondary sources to assess the protagonists’ roles at more than two dozen key junctures.
A resource that brings together historiography, political science, and the practice of peace negotiation, Podeh’s insightful exploration also showcases opportunities that were not missed. Three agreements in particular (Israeli-Egyptian, 1979; Israeli-Lebanese, 1983; and Israeli-Jordanian, 1994) illuminate important variables for forging new paths to successful negotiation. By applying his framework to a broad range of power brokers and time periods, Podeh also sheds light on numerous incidents that contradict official narratives. This unique approach is poised to reshape the realm of conflict resolution.
Conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker have fascinated the world since the nineteenth century. In her captivating book, Chang and Eng Reconnected, Cynthia Wu traces the “Original Siamese Twins” through the terrain of American culture, showing how their inseparability underscored tensions between individuality and collectivity in the American popular imagination.
Using letters, medical documents and exhibits, literature, art, film, and family lore, Wu provides a trans-historical analysis that presents the Bunkers as both a material presence and as metaphor. She also shows how the twins figure in representations of race, disability, and science in fictional narratives about nation building.
As astute entrepreneurs, the twins managed their own lives; nonetheless, as Chang and Eng Reconnected shows, American culture has always viewed them through the multiple lenses of difference.
In Change, Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in this novella disguised as autobiography—or vice-versa. Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, Change is a representative of “people’s history,” a bottom-up rather than top-down view of a country in flux. By moving back and forth in time and focusing on small events and everyday people, Mo Yan breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen.
“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”— Nobel Committee for Literature
The 2008 election was an extraordinary event that represented change at many levels. The candidates’ innovative campaigns changed how funds were raised, how voters were mobilized, and how messages were communicated through advertising and the internet. Parties and interest groups played their own important role in this historic election. In The Change Election, David Magleby assembles a team of accomplished political scientists to provide an in-depth analysis of this groundbreaking presidential election. These scholars through a set of compelling case studies examine the competition for votes in a dozen competitive House and Senate contests and for the White House in five states: Ohio, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Colorado, and New Mexico.
Backed by a wealth of data, and extensive interviews, the contributors offer an up-close look at the interactions of candidates' individual skills and personalities with the larger political forces at work in the election year. The book offers insights into the rapidly evolving organizational and technical aspects of campaigning. The dramatic success Obama and other candidates had in raising money—especially from small donors—is addressed along with how money was raised and spent by the candidates, party committees, and interest groups competing for votes.
Building on a tested methodology, The Change Election explores the interplay of money and electioneering. Magleby builds on more than a decade of prior studies to show the ways participants in our electoral process have adapted to statutory and judicial decisions and how the 2008 election has the potential to transform American electoral politics.
Simon Pirani investigates the interaction of power, money and people in Russia during the presidencies of Vladimir Putin and his successor Dmitry Medvedev.
Profiling the Putin team, including contingents from the security services and pro-market economic "reformers", Pirani argues that the economic growth it presided over during the oil boom was one-sided. The gap between rich and poor widened. Now the boom is over, inequalities will multiply further. As well as explaining Russia's economic trajectory, the book provides a unique account of the social movements that are working against an increasingly authoritarian government to change Russia for the better.
This is the perfect introduction for undergraduates approaching Russia for the first time and those who wish to know how Russia will change during the economic crisis.
The first comprehensive collection of legal history documents from the Civil War and Reconstruction, this volume shows the profound legal changes that occurred during the Civil War era and highlights how law, society, and politics inextricably mixed and set American legal development on particular paths that were not predetermined. Editor Christian G. Samito has carefully selected excerpts from legislation, public and legislative debates, court cases, investigations of white supremacist violence in the South, and rare court-martial records, added his expert analysis, and illustrated the selections with telling period artwork to create an outstanding resource that demonstrates the rich and important legal history of the era.
Have Americans become more or less tolerant of racial discrimination? More or less supportive of abortion? Is a new tax revolt underway? Did a "new conservative mood" dominate elections and policy discussions in the early 1980s?
Popular and academic discussions about the past and future of American politics often turn on the question of whether and how public opinion has changed. Yet for all the talk about such matters, observes political scientist William G. Mayer, there is surprisingly little hard evidence on many of these questions. The Changing American Mind is designed to fill that gap, by presenting a comprehensive history of American public opinion over the last three decades: how it changed, why it changed, and what difference that makes for American politics.
The Changing American Mind is important reading for all who are interested in American politics and public opinion. Its appendixes, which include the results of more than 250 survey questions that have been asked regularly of national samples over the last three decades, make it an indispensable reference source for everyone who studies or participates in American politics.
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