The notable link between Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals and his essays is formed by the lectures that reflected his developing views on issues of his time. This second volume of a welcome edition of the early lectures follows the earlier experimental series of lectures and presents the works of Emerson the now professional lecturer who revealed to his audience central ideas and themes which later crystallized into Essays, First Series.
“The Philosophy of History,” a series of 12 lectures, explores the nature of man in his society, past and present, and singles out the individual as the center of society and history. A second series of 10 lectures on “Human Culture” begins with the duty and the right of the individual to cultivate his powers and proceeds to consider various means by which this cultivation can be accomplished. The occasional “Address on Education,” which Emerson delivered between these two series, may be seen as a link between them.
Of the twenty-three lectures in this volume, only three have been previously published. The lectures have been reproduced from Emerson’s manuscripts, approximating as nearly as possible the original version read by the author to his audience.
Famous first as a lecturer, Ralph Waldo Emerson molded his books on the rostrum. Yet relatively few of his hundreds of lectures have ever been published. Now, in a projected series of three volumes of which this is the first, the complete surviving lectures of Emerson’s earlier years are made available. In a readable and critical text, these volumes will establish an important step in Emerson’s creative process—that which lies between the notes jotted down in the journals and the finished text of the essays as prepared for print.
The lectures, more sustained and organized than the journals and fresher and more direct than the essays, represent the vital missing middle panel in the total picture of Emerson’s literary achievement. It is in the early lectures, fruits of those vigorous and formative years, that we find the first ordering of his journal thoughts. To see his mind at its most sustained activity in these crucial few years when he was first exploring his own proper world of thought and growing with a sense of “power and hope,” we need above all to have the complete, original texts of the lectures.
For the years covered by this volume, all passages later published elsewhere by Emerson and others are included together with much new material. The lectures are the immediate source of much in his essays, whose composition cannot be understood without them. As important in their own right as either journals or essays, the lectures also have a coordinate interest and should be studied with the other two forms of his writing.
This volume contains among others the lectures on Science, Biography, and English Literature. The editors have supplied extensive textual and informational notes, invaluable for an intelligent reading of material originally intended for oral communication.
Four-year-old Joshua challenges his father to a game: Can he come downstairs before Joshua writes the word to? Rachel, two and a half, makes a series of wavy lines on a piece of paper and calls it a “thank-you letter to Grandma.” In Early Literacy Joan McLane and Gillian McNamee explore the ways young children like Joshua and Rachel begin to learn about written language. Becoming literate requires mastering a complex set of skills, behaviors, and attitudes that makes it possible to receive and communicate meaning through the written word. McLane and McNamee provide a fresh examination of this process in light of recent research.
The authors look closely at what young children do with writing and reading. As children play with making marks on paper and listen to stories being read aloud, they begin to discover uses and purposes for written language. They learn that they can use writing to communicate with people they care about and that reading story books opens up new ideas and experiences. As children experiment with writing and reading in their talking, drawing, and pretend play, they can build “bridges to literacy.”
The authors emphasize the importance of children's relationships with significant adults and peers for growth in literacy. They also devote chapters to early literacy development at home and in the neighborhood, and in preschool and kindergarten settings. In one daycare center for inner-city children, for example, where a favorite activity is dictating and acting out stories, children become active participants in a community of readers and writers—a literate culture.
Through its clear and concise discussion of young children's growth toward literacy, and its examples of the contexts that encourage and enrich that growth, Early Literacy will serve as a valuable resource for parents, teachers, and others who work or play with young children.
The first book in English on the founder of Arabic linguistic theory, this interdisciplinary collection explores the contributions to Arabic intellectual history of al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, (d. A.H. 175/A.D. 791).
Al-Khalil was distinguished in his own time as a lexicographer, phonologist, grammarian, educator and musicologist. In the Arab world, his stature is almost legendary, although information on his life, his works and his achievements is fragmented. He is remembered principally for two achievements: the creation of the first dictionary of the Arabic language (Kitab al-'ayn, "The Book of 'ayn"), and discovery of the rule-governed metrical systems used in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. His biographers also cite publications on musical theory and have preserved fragments of his poetry. In addition to these achievements, he was also the teacher of the medieval Islamic world's most distinguished authority on Arabic grammar, Sibawayh.
Conceived as a tribute to al-Khalil’s influence on Arabic language sciences, this book provides a new and broader perspective on al-Khalil’s talents, character, and fields of interest. It should be of interest to Arabic linguists, medievalists, historians of linguistics, theoretical linguists, historians of science and scholars of medieval Arab intellectual history.
Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe was first published in 1977. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This is the first study of early medieval Jewish policy in the West which examines the nature of this policy from the perspective and aims of its formulators. As the author points out, most specialists in Jewish history have been dominated by what the historian Salo Baron has called the "lachrymose conception,' a view which emphasized persecution and suffering as a fundamental theme of Jewish history. Professor Bachrach challenges this view and attacks what he calls the myth of Christian church domination of the early medieval world.
Examine the creative, profound dialogue between medieval women and biblical traditions
The latest volume in the Bible and Women series examines the relationship between women and the Bible’s reception during the early Middle Ages (500–1100 CE) in both the Greek East and the Latin West. Essays focus on interactions between women and the Bible through biblical precepts on women and for women, biblical women as the subjects of action or objects of discussion, and writings by women that refer to the Bible as a moral authority. The women discussed in the volume range from the well-known—including the nuns Kassia in Byzantium and Hrosvita in the West; the aristocrat Dhuoda, author of a moral guide for her son; Gisela, the sister of Charlemagne and abbess of Chelles; and her niece Rotrude—to those who remain anonymous. Contributions also explore how the Old and New Testaments exercised influence on emerging Islam.
Features:
One of the minor miracles of art history is the extraordinary flowering of Indian painting that began in the mid-sixteenth century under the early Mughal emperors of Indian, notably Akbar the Great.
Only in recent decades has the consummate artistry of early Mughal painting come to be widely appreciated in the West. Scholars have noted the innovations--departures from both Islamic and native Indian tradition--of the new, highly distinctive school of painting, among them natural history studies, a concern for portraiture, and the documentation of contemporary court events.
Milo Beach traces, with an abundance of captivating illustrations, the evolution of the Mughal style. While acknowledging the influence of Akbar's interests and changing tastes (related in turn to historical and biographical circumstances), he shows that many of the new tendencies were evident during the short reign of Akbar's father, the Emperor Humayun, whose role as patron of the arts is thereby reassessed. Beach also stresses the traditionalism of the individual painters, who only gradually changed their concepts and compositions in response to foreign influences and to imperial taste. Mughal art, he affirms, can no longer be regarded as simply a reflection of its imperial patrons.
The book takes account of recently discovered material and reproduces for the first time important paintings from unpublished manuscripts and albums. It will appeal to the general reader as well as the scholar.
Early Pithouse period villagers played a generative role in the cultural and historical sequence of the Mogollon region, which is best known for the stunning black-on-white pottery of the Classic Mimbres culture. This volume presents a complete report on the archaeology of two important Early Pithouse settlements located along the Rio Mimbres, including detailed accounts of the excavation units, depositional contexts, architectural details, radiocarbon dates, miscellaneous artifacts, and ceramic frequency distributions.
The Thomson and McAnally sites contain architecture, artifacts, and other remains of the earliest relatively sedentary horticulturalists to occupy this part of the Southwest. The authors synthesize the data about charges over time in the villagers’ lifestyle to develop a new chronology for the occupation of the region.
Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of postwar British society.
In this study of Graves's early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his war neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject the essential components of the Western idea of reality—reason and predictability. In particular, Kersnowski traces the emergence in Graves's early poems of a figure he later called "The White Goddess," a being at once terrifying and glorious, who sustains life and inspires poetry. Drawing on interviews with Graves's family, as well as unpublished correspondence and drafts of poems, Kersnowski argues that Graves actually experienced the White Goddess as a real being and that his life as a poet was driven by the purpose of celebrating and explaining this deity and her matriarchy.
Contributors. Barry Alpert, Charles Altieri, David Antin, Harold Bloom, Paul A. Bové, Hélène Cixous, Gerald Gillespie, Ihab Hassan, Joseph N. Riddel, William, V. Spanos, Catharine R. Stimpson, Cornel West
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Among southeastern Indians pottery was an innovation that enhanced the economic value of native foods and the efficiency of food preparation. But even though pottery was available in the Southeast as early as 4,500 years ago, it took nearly two millenia before it was widely used. Why would an innovation of such economic value take so long to be adopted?
The answer lies in the social and political contexts of traditional cooking technology. Sassaman's book questions the value of using technological traits alone to mark temporal and spatial boundaries of prehistoric cultures and shows how social process shapes the prehistoric archaeological record.
A synthesis of research on earthenware technologies of the Late Archaic Period in the southeastern U.S.
Information on social groups and boundaries, and on interaction between groups, burgeons when pottery appears on the social landscape of the Southeast in the Late Archaic period (ca. 5000-3000 years ago). This volume provides a broad, comparative review of current data from "first potteries" of the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and in the lower Mississippi River Valley, and it presents research that expands our understanding of how pottery functioned in its earliest manifestations in this region.
Included are discussions of Orange pottery in peninsular Florida, Stallings pottery in Georgia, Elliot's Point fiber-tempered pottery in the Florida panhandle, and the various pottery types found in excavations over the years at the Poverty Point site in northeastern Louisiana. The data and discussions demonstrate that there was much more interaction, and at an earlier date, than is often credited to Late Archaic societies. Indeed, extensive trade in pottery throughout the region occurs as early as 1500 B.C.
These and other findings make this book indispensable to those involved in research into the origin and development of pottery in general and its unique history in the Southeast in particular.
Why do the paintings and poetry of the Italian Renaissance—a celebration of classical antiquity—also depict the Florentine countryside populated with figures dressed in contemporary silk robes and fleur-de-lys crowns? Upending conventional interpretations of this well-studied period, Charles Dempsey argues that a fusion of classical form with contemporary content, once seen as the paradox of the Renaissance, can be better understood as its defining characteristic.
Dempsey describes how Renaissance artists deftly incorporated secular and popular culture into their creations, just as they interwove classical and religious influences. Inspired by the love lyrics of Parisian troubadours, Simone Martini altered his fresco Maestà in 1321 to reflect a court culture that prized terrestrial beauty. As a result the Maestà scandalously revealed, for the first time in Italian painting, a glimpse of the Madonna’s golden locks. Modeled on an ancient statue, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus went much further, featuring fashionable beauty ideals of long flowing blonde hair, ivory skin, rosy cheeks, and perfectly arched eyebrows. In the only complete reconstruction of Feo Belcari’s twelve Sybilline Octaves, Dempsey shows how this poet, patronized by the Medici family, was also indebted to contemporary dramatic modes. Popularizing biblical scenes by mixing the familiar with the exotic, players took the stage outfitted in taffeta tunics and fanciful hats, and one staging even featured a papier-maché replica of Jonah’s Whale. As Dempsey’s thorough study illuminates, Renaissance poets and artists did not simply reproduce classical aesthetics but reimagined them in vernacular idioms.
Combining the incisive pen of a newspaperman and the compassionate soul of a poet, Mike Royko became a Chicago institution—in Jimmy Breslin’s words, "the best journalist of his time." Early Royko: Up Against It in Chicago will restore to print the legendary columnist’s earliest writings, which chronicle 1960s Chicago with the moral vision, ironic sense, and razor-sharp voice that would remain Royko’s trademark.
This collection of early columns from the Chicago Daily News ranges from witty social commentary to politically astute satire. Some of the pieces are falling-down funny and others are tenderly nostalgic, but all display Royko’s unrivaled skill at using humor to tell truth to power. From machine politicians and gangsters to professional athletes, from well-heeled Chicagoans to down-and-out hoodlums, no one escapes Royko’s penetrating gaze—and resounding judgment. Early Royko features a memorable collection of characters, including such well-known figures as Hugh Hefner, Mayor Richard J. Daley, and Dr. Martin Luther King. But these boldfaced names are juxtaposed with Royko’s beloved lesser knowns from the streets of Chicago: Mrs. Peak, Sylvester "Two-Gun Pete" Washington, and Fats Boylermaker, who gained fame for leaning against a corner light pole from 2 a.m. Saturday until noon Sunday, when his neighborhood tavern reopened for business.
Accompanied by a foreword from Rick Kogan, this new edition will delight Royko’s most ardent fans and capture the hearts of a new generation of readers. As Kogan writes, Early Royko "will remind us how a remarkable relationship began—Chicago and Royko, Royko and Chicago—and how it endures."
With its colorful landscape and wonderful diversity of plant and animal communities, the southwestern borderlands have attracted naturalists for centuries. As Col. Thomas Henry noted in 1853, there “are to be found many curious birds, peculiar to the country.” This book identifies more than 100 early ornithologists and explorers who entered the Southwest from 1528 to 1900, all of whom have contributed in significant ways to our understanding of the region’s avian life.
Dan Fischer identifies those individuals who documented the natural history of the Southwest and summarizes their contributions to our knowledge about the region’s birds—particularly through discovering and naming them. He tells why the ornithologists came to the region, what they saw, who described and named the new discoveries, and who were the first to sketch or paint new birds.
Beginning with accounts of the earliest Spanish explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca and Coronado, Fischer considers all who visited the region through the end of the nineteenth century, including such renowned naturalists as William Gambel, John McCown, Adolphus Heermann, Elliott Coues, Charles Bendire, and Henry Henshaw. In between, he recalls English mining speculators, French traders, army explorers, railroad surveyors, and more—all of whom contributed to ornithological knowledge.
Although focusing on ornithologists, Fischer’s text reveals the wonderful variety of avian species in the region and their relationship with human history. Featuring a comprehensive bibliography, illustrations, and maps that portray the westward march of exploration, it is a major sourcebook for southwestern ornithology and an essential volume for anyone interested in birds.
The world discovered Latin American literature in the twentieth century, but the roots of this rich literary tradition reach back beyond Columbus's discovery of the New World. The great pre-Hispanic civilizations composed narrative accounts of the acts of gods and kings. Conquistadors and friars, as well as their Amerindian subjects, recorded the clash of cultures that followed the Spanish conquest. Three hundred years of colonization and the struggle for independence gave rise to a diverse body of literature—including the novel, which flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century.
To give everyone interested in contemporary Spanish American fiction a broad understanding of its literary antecedents, this book offers an authoritative survey of four centuries of Spanish American narrative. Naomi Lindstrom begins with Amerindian narratives and moves forward chronologically through the conquest and colonial eras, the wars for independence, and the nineteenth century. She focuses on the trends and movements that characterized the development of prose narrative in Spanish America, with incisive discussions of representative works from each era. Her inclusion of women and Amerindian authors who have been downplayed in other survey works, as well as her overview of recent critical assessments of early Spanish American narratives, makes this book especially useful for college students and professors.
In the United States, preschool education is characterized by the dominance of a variegated private sector and patchy, uncoordinated oversight of the public sector. Tracing the history of the American debate over preschool education, Andrew Karch argues that the current state of decentralization and fragmentation is the consequence of a chain of reactions and counterreactions to policy decisions dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when preschool advocates did not achieve their vision for a comprehensive national program but did manage to foster initiatives at both the state and national levels. Over time, beneficiaries of these initiatives and officials with jurisdiction over preschool education have become ardent defenders of the status quo. Today, advocates of greater government involvement must take on a diverse and entrenched set of constituencies resistant to policy change.
In his close analysis of the politics of preschool education, Karch demonstrates how to apply the concepts of policy feedback, critical junctures, and venue shopping to the study of social policy.
This monograph is a study of the Rgyal ba'i dben gnas rwa sgreng gi bshad pa nyi ma'i 'od zer (Rays of the Sun: A Statement about Rwa sgreng Monastery, Hermitage of the Victor), which is a newly discovered hand-written manuscript from the Fifth Dalai Lama’s private library at 'Bras spungs monastery, Lhasa. It is the first known work devoted solely to Rwa sgreng monastery, the mother monastery of the Bka' gdams school founded by 'Brom ston Rgyal ba'i 'byung gnas (1005–1064) in 1057 after the death of his master Atiśa (982–1054).
The Bka' gdams school no longer exists, but it has greatly influenced major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, such as Dge lugs, Bka' brgyud, and Sa skya school. Rwa sgreng monastery itself has shifted to the Dge lugs school, but it still has a strong presence as a monastery related to Bka' gdams school. Since this work was written at approximately the end of the thirteenth century, it is a relatively early text in the history of the Bka' gdams school, and it provides valuable historical, political, and sociological data on Rwa sgreng monastery.
This study aids understanding of the history of Rwa sgreng monastery and the early Bka' gdams school—and more broadly illuminates important aspects of Tibetan history.
This volume is a study and edition of Bcom Idan ral gri's (1227-1305) Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi 'od. Likely composed in the last decades of the thirteenth century, this systematic list of Buddhist Sutras, Tantras, Shastras, and related genres translated primarily from Sanskrit and other Indic languages holds an important place in the history of Buddhist literature in Tibet. It affords a glimpse of one Tibetan scholar's efforts to classify more than two thousand titles of Buddhist literature in the decades before the canonical collections known as the Bka' 'gyur and the Bstan 'gyur achieved a relatively stable form. Tibetan historiography traces the origin of the Bka' 'gyur and Bstan 'gyur to Bcom ldan ral gri's efforts, though the unique structure of the Bstan pa rgyas pa rgyan gyi nyi 'od, which differs greatly from available Bka' 'gyur and Bstan 'gyur catalogs, shows that the situation is more complex.
Known to contemporary scholars of Tibetan literature for some time through mention in other works, Bcom ldan ral gri's survey has recently become available for the first time in two manuscripts. The present work contains a detailed historical introduction, an annotated edition of the two manuscripts, as well as concordances and appendices intended to aid the comparative study of early Tibetan collections of Indic Buddhist literature.
Contributors. Jennifer M. Bean, Vicki Callahan, Lucy Fischer, Amelie Hastie, Diane Negra, Gaylyn Studlar, Zhen Zhang
Volume 1 of “The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898” is entitled “Early Essays and Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, 1882–1888.” Included here are all Dewey’s earliest writings, from his first published article through his book on Leibniz.
The materials in this volume provide a chronological record of Dewey’s early development—beginning with the article he sent to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1881 while he was a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and closing with his widely-acclaimed work on Leibniz in the Grigg’s Series of German Philosophical Classics, written when he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. During these years between 1882 and 1888, Dewey’s life course was established: he decided to follow a career in philosophy, completed doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, became an Instructor at the University of Michigan, was promoted to Assistant Professor, and accepted a position as Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. With the publication of Psychology, he became well known among scholars in this country; a series of articles in the British journal Mind brought him prominence in British philosophical circles. His articles were abstracted in the Revue philosophique.
None of the articles collected in this volume was reprinted during the author’s lifetime. For the first time, it is now possible for Dewey scholars to study consecutively in one publication all the essays which originally appeared in many periodicals.
Psychology, John Dewey’s first book, is an appropriate choice for the first volume in the Southern Illinois University series “The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898.” With an original publication date of 1887, Psychology is volume 2 of “The Early Works.” It appears first in the series to introduce scholars and general readers to the use of modern textual criticism in a work outside the literary field. Designed as a scholar’s reading edition, the volume presents the text of Dewey’s work as the author intended, clear of editorial footnotes. All apparatus is conveniently arranged in appendix form. As evidence of its wide adoption and use as a college textbook, Psychology had a publishing history of twenty-six printings. For two of the reprintings, Dewey made extensive revisions in content to incorporate developments in the field of psychology as well as in his own thinking. The textual appendices include a thorough tabulation of these changes.
In recognition of the high quality and scholarly standards of the textual criticism, this edition of Psychology is the first nonliterary work awarded the Seal of the Modern Language Association Center for Editions of American Authors. By applying to the work of a philosopher the procedures used in modern textual editions of American writers such as Hawthorne, the Southern Illinois University Dewey project is establishing a pattern for future collected writing of philosophers.
This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey’s early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris’s death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey’s returning to fill that post after a year’s stay at Minnesota.
Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey’s earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on ethics. Dewey’s marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article “The Present Position of Logical Theory,” recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections.
The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, “A Note on Applied Psychology,” documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey’s and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey’s conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing.
Volume 4 of’ “The Early Works” series covers the period of Dewey’s last year and one-half at the University of Michigan and his first half-year at the University of Chicago. In addition to sixteen articles the present volume contains Dewey’s reviews of six books and three articles, verbatim reports of three oral statements made by Dewey, and a full-length book, The Study of Ethics.
Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and Wayne A. R. Leys, Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, has written an Introduction discussing the relationship between Dewey’s writings of this period and his later work. That Dewey’s scholarship and writing was at an especially high level during 1893 and 1894 may be considered an index to the significance of this two-year period.
This fifth and concluding volume of “The Early Works of John Dewey” is the only one of the series made up entirely of essays. The appearance during the four-year period, 1895–98, of thirty-eight items amply indicates that Dewey continued to maintain a high level of published output. These were the years of Dewey’s most extensive work and involvement at the University of Chicago.
Like its predecessors in this series, this volume presents a “clear text,” free of interpretive or reference material. Apparatus, including references, corrections, and emendations, is confined to appendix material. Fredson Bowers, the Consulting Textual Editor, has provided an essay on the textual principles and procedures, and William P. McKenzie, Professor of Philosophy and Education at Southern Illinois University, has written an introduction identifying the thread connecting the apparently diffuse material in the many articles of this volume—Dewey’s attempt to unite philosophy with psychology and sociology and with education.
Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds—penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate—have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent thinkers.
Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience.
Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view—a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.
The half-century between 1880 and 1930 saw rampant growth in many American cities and an equally rapid movement of women into the work force. In Los Angeles, the city not only grew from a dusty cow town to a major American metropolis but also offered its residents myriad new opportunities and challenges.Earning Power examines the role that women played in this growth as they attempted to make their financial way in a rapidly changing world. Los Angeles during these years was one of the most ethnically diverse and gender-balanced American cities. Moreover, its accelerated urban growth generated a great deal of economic, social, and political instability. In Earning Power, author Eileen V. Wallis examines how women negotiated issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class to gain access to professions and skilled work in Los Angeles. She also discusses the contributions they made to the region’s history as political and social players, employers and employees, and as members of families. Wallis reveals how the lives of women in the urban West differed in many ways from those of their sisters in more established eastern cities. She finds that the experiences of women workers force us to reconsider many assumptions about the nature of Los Angeles’s economy, as well as about the ways women participated in it. The book also considers how Angelenos responded to the larger national social debate about women’s work and the ways that American society would have to change in order to accommodate working women. Earning Power is a major contribution to our understanding of labor in the urban West during this transformative period and of the crucial role that women played in shaping western cities, economies, society, and politics.
Earth Gods presents the early writings of Taras Prokhasko, one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary writers. Collected here for the first time in one book, these works span various genres yet form a single chronicle. Anna’s Other Days, Prokhasko’s first publication, testifies to the desire to free Ukrainian culture of overt influences of voices, styles, and genres that have dominated it for centuries. FM Galicia collects reflections delivered by the author at a Ukrainian radio show over a five-month period. Emphasizing the relevance of the oral genre as the origin of the text, Prokhasko has created a unique diary that strives to exist outside of literature and invites the reader to meditate on the human condition. The UnSimple—a novel whose action unfolds between the two world wars near Ialivets, in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains—documents the collapse of the grand narratives of the past, embodied here by the Carpathian earth gods who, despite their magical powers, are unable to save the patriarchal community they’ve been entrusted with from being overrun by the forces of modernization.
A master of reflexive, finely nuanced prose, Prokhasko weaves together narrative strands testifying to the sophistication and integration of Ukrainian culture with the world.
Exploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet
Climate scientists point to permafrost as a “ticking time bomb” for the planet, and from the Arctic, apocalyptic narratives proliferate on the devastating effects permafrost thaw poses to human survival. In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity, both material and social, and something that affects not only life on earth but nonlife, too.
Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood approaches the topic of thawing permafrost and the wild new economies and mitigation strategies forming in the far north through a study of the Sakha Republic, Russia’s largest region, and its capital city Yakutsk, which is the coldest city in the world and built on permafrost. Wrigley examines people who are creating commerce out of thawing permafrost, including scientists wishing to recreate the prehistoric “Mammoth steppe” ecosystem by eventually rewilding resurrected woolly mammoths, Indigenous people who forage the tundra for exposed mammoth bodies to sell their tusks, and government officials hoping to keep their city standing as the ground collapses under it. Warming begets thawing begets economic activity— and as a result, permafrost becomes discontinuous, both as land and as a social category, in ways that have implications for the entire planet. Discontinuity, Wrigley shows, eventually evolves into extinction.
Offering a new way of defining extinction through the concept of “discontinuity,” Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood presents a meditative and story-focused engagement with permafrost as more than just frozen ground.
In Earth in Mind, noted environmental educator David W. Orr focuses not on problems in education, but on the problem of education. Much of what has gone wrong with the world, he argues, is the result of inadequate and misdirected education that:
The author begins by establishing the grounds for a debate about education and knowledge. He describes the problems of education from an ecological perspective, and challenges the "terrible simplifiers" who wish to substitute numbers for values. He follows with a presentation of principles for re-creating education in the broadest way possible, discussing topics such as biophilia, the disciplinary structure of knowledge, the architecture of educational buildings, and the idea of ecological intelligence. Orr concludes by presenting concrete proposals for reorganizing the curriculum to draw out our affinity for life.
So writes Chris Maser in this compelling study of three interactive spheres of the ecosystem: atmosphere (air), litho-hydrosphere (rock that comprises the restless continents and the water that surrounds them), and biosphere (all life sandwiched in between).
Rich in detail and insightful analogies, Earth in Our Care addresses key issues including land-use policies, ecological restoration, forest management, local living, and sustainability thinking. Exploring our interconnectedness with the Earth, Maser examines today's problems and, more importantly, provides solutions for the future.
The increase in our knowledge of the solar system during the five years since the author last revised this book (1963) greatly exceeds that in the previous two decades. The program of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the space program of the U.S.S.R. have been prime contributors to this rapid progress, but the impetus has carried over to groundbased studies of the Moon and planets as well. The advances in radio and radar astronomy alone are striking, and are continuing at an accelerating pace.
This third edition of Mr. Whipple's popular and authoritative book is thoroughly revised in light of this new knowledge. The most extensive revisions are in the chapters on the Moon, Mars, and Venus--the members of the solar system on which the various space programs have concentrated. The author has included many new and dramatic illustrations in this third edition, among them photographs taken from U.S. and Russian space craft. There are striking photographs of the Moon, with close-up views of its surface texture, pictures of Mars taken from Mariner IV, and radar pictures of Venus that "see through" that planet's obscuring cloud layer.
The book is written in nontechnical language and with a lucid, witty style that is readily understandable to the interested layman. Mathematics has been avoided, and scientific methods and processes are described in simple terms. In presenting the latest information about the planets and their moons, Mr. Whipple discusses their origin and evolution, motions, atmospheres, temperatures, surface conditions, the environment essential for life as we know it, and the possibilities of life outside the Earth. He concludes with a discussion of current theories about the origin of the solar system.
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